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European journal of American studies

14-2 | 2019 Summer 2019

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14551 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.14551 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 14-2 | 2019, “Summer 2019” [Online], Online since 06 July 2019, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/14551; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.14551

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

“A More Permanent Familiarity”: Value and the Paternal Image on Currency Heinz Tschachler

Papa’s Baby, Mama’s Maybe: Reading the Black Paternal Palimpsest and White Maternal Present Absence in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand Yolanda M. Manora

“His cramped and claustrophobic brain”: Confinement and Freedom in John Wray’s Lowboy Pascale Antolin

Remembering, History, and Identity: The Sculpted Life of Mert Deniz

Truth, -telling and Gender in : The ”Hillary” C. Akça Ataç

US Conservative and Libertarian Experts and Solar Geoengineering: An Assessment Jean-Daniel Collomb

Close to Home, One at a Time, Not in My Backyard: and the Mantras of Depoliticization in US Reform Discourses Olga Thierbach-McLean

The Conspiracist Strategy: Lessons from American Alternative Health Promotions Gad Yair

Black Elitism and Cultural in 1920’s Boston, Massachusetts: The League of Women for Community Service Craig Doughty

American Studies Against Itself Michael Barton

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“A More Permanent Familiarity”: Value and the Paternal Image on United States Currency

Heinz Tschachler

1. Introduction

1 When in 2014 an group by the name of “Women on 20s” began to lobby the administration for a redesign of the current $20 bill to bear the portrait of a woman, many Americans were hopeful. The suggested redesign provided that the portrait of an “exemplary American woman” would replace Andrew Jackson’s. The woman who was finally selected as the face for the new $20 bill is (c.1822-1913). Born into , Harriet Tubman escaped to the North and became a conductor in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves to escape to freedom. During the Civil War, she was active in the Union cause, serving as a nurse, a cook, and a scout, gathering intelligence (cf. Women on 20s). Design changes are at the sole discretion of the Treasury Secretary. There is, however, no evidence that then Secretary Jacob L. Lew had taken any action by the time he handed the keys over to his successor, Steven T. Mnuchin, in January 2017. At the time it also was not yet known how the Trump administration would approach the currency redesign, though there was considerable concern about a rollback. More than two years into the Trump presidency, no details about the new designs have been released, and Women on 20s are concerned that the Treasury Department may not hit the target of the actual bill designs in time to honor the centennial of women’s suffrage, with rollout of the bills into circulation later by years (cf. Women on 20s).

2 The last word in the matter has not been spoken, though it may not even come from Secretary Mnuchin but from President Donald J. Trump. Given President Trump’s notorious unpredictability, there is no about the “Tubmans” (or any other redesigns); all we know with a measure of certainty is that is not one of President Trump’s priorities. Additionally, Trump is on record as expressing great

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admiration for Andrew Jackson, calling him, through a spokesman, “an amazing figure in American history—very unique in many ways,” and, on the occasion of a visit to Jackson’s plantation home, “the people’s president,” whose victory “shook the establishment like an earthquake” (“Trump’s Remarks”; Greenwood). It is also a matter of record that right after his inauguration President Trump hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, as “inspiration” (Haberman). And when the planned redesign of the $20 bill was officially announced in April 2016, Donald Trump said in response that bumping Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill was “pure political correctness,” suggesting that Harriet Tubman be put on the $2 bill instead, to replace Jefferson. For Trump, Jackson “had a great history” and so, he added, it would be “very rough” to take him off the bill (qtd. in Frizell). Given Trump’s preferences, it is no surprise that nothing has happened so far. And considering Trump’s willful ignorance and his sly efforts to insidiously sabotage and discredit, if not altogether destroy government, we should not expect any action soon. Instead, we should look at the failure to redesign the currency as part of an utterly dystopic endgame.

3 A portrait of a woman on the currency no doubt would instill in Americans a better understanding of the impact women have made in the country’s history. In this respect, the currency redesign would be a chance to teach the citizenry, and this may well have been the motivation of the previous administration. Moreover, a currency redesign is a chance to respond to the spirit of the time and, by way of an attempt to seek legitimacy with its citizens, to make the government produce a design that strengthens identification between the and the people. There is, however, a more fundamental question: Would a portrait of a woman on the currency make any substantive ? Would it help undermine or terminate the real power of men in society? The presidential election of 2016 is a point in case here. It is “not customary to have women lead or even to engage in the rough-and-tumble of politics,” writes in her memoir of her unsuccessful campaign. “It’s not normal—not yet. So when it happens, it often doesn’t feel quite right. That may sound vague, but it’s potent. People cast their votes based on feelings like that all the time” (224-25). The statement shows that Hillary Clinton was well aware of a basic problem, one that Uri Friedman formulated in The Atlantic right after election day—that “to win in a presidential system, women must contend more directly, and on a larger scale, with sexism and stereotypes.” What this means is nothing less that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton not so much because she stood for the establishment, intellectualism, or an exaggerated concern for questions of , gender, and diversity, all of which would have made her the “wrong” woman. Hillary Clinton lost the election because of her a woman.

4 The point is that not just Hillary Clinton but “any woman who had been the first to run for president with the backing of a major party would have encountered some of the gender-based scrutiny Clinton faced” (Gordon-Reed 13). They would have encountered that scrutiny for at least two reasons. One is that many Americans, especially white men, felt that women had upended their world and that they now had a chance to vent their anger and frustration. The other reason is that Americans’ expectations for their political leaders have been by generations of male politicians and shaped by generations of male pundits. Unable to escape the gender trap, Hillary Clinton was always perceived first and foremost as a woman, and only secondarily as a serious politician. In the televised debates with Donald Trump, for instance, Trump presented himself as the one to bring back “jobs,” at the same time as he insinuated that Hillary

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Clinton “only talks,” is “all talk” (Second Presidential Debate). Altogether, as a woman running for the presidency Hillary Clinton lacked the freedom to nonchalantly ride over social ideals of male power. Instead, she kept tapping into prevailing attitudes towards women, especially about the role of women in a matrix of feelings and the unconscious of a large part of the American electorate.1

5 The story of the nation’s currency too is a gendered narrative as well as a narrative of gender. Nor is Andrew Jackson the only prospective casualty in efforts to tinker with the currency. America’s lawmakers for the past thirty years or so have repeatedly attempted to replace the one-dollar bill with ’s image on it with a coin. In the 1990s, for instance, their endeavors found encouragement from a special interest group called “The Coin Coalition.” At the other end were the Ladies’ Association and, more vociferously, “Save the Greenback,” an organization of Bureau of Engraving and Printing employees and paper and ink suppliers opposed to phasing out the one-dollar bill and replacing it with a coin. More recently, another dollar bill phase- out was contested by a group that called itself “Americans for George.” In opposition to the COINS Act (the acronym stands for “Currency Optimization, Innovation, and National Savings Act”), which was introduced in the House of Representatives in September 2011, web postings and tweets habitually pointed to the one-dollar bill’s “national symbolism, much of which dates to the founding of the nation,” trumpeted the bill as a “uniquely American icon,” or wanted Washington’s “memory live on via the #dollarbill!” (cf. Americans for George). Following the COINS Act’s introduction, it was immediately referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and, later, to the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary and Technology ( H.R.2977). No further action has been recorded, though this is not the end of the story. In July 2013 the late Senator John McCain took upon himself the task of keeping the matter alive when he addressed a meeting hosted by the CAGW (Council for Citizens Against Government Waste) and the Dollar Coin Alliance; two years later, McCain (together with Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi) proposed the USA Act (for “Unified Savings and Accountability”), which to date is the latest proposal to eliminate one- dollar bills from circulation (United States Congress S.1888).

2. Iconic Space, Public Space, and Women’s Otherness

6 Much has been written about the current one-dollar bill, and justifiably so. The note is truly unique. No other piece of currency, American or non-American, communicates such abundant about the nation’s history, the structure of the nation, and its highest goals and aspirations. The note’s ceremonial load is of a rare visual opulence that at the same time preserves and protects its status as an iconic sign. The most prominent element in the bill’s ritual freight no doubt is Gilbert Stuart’s “Athenaeum” portrait of . Together with other visual and verbal signs and symbols, the 1796 portrait (in Gideon Fairman’s version of it) serves to re-finance the one-dollar bill from realms outside the economy, politics, , and the arts. We might even say that the bill’s seconding notions confer upon a lowly piece of paper a certain depth, a certain verticality, its ever-diminishing value notwithstanding. “Somewhere, a treasure is present, a reserve, a fund, upon which this bill is staked,” the French scholar Jean-Joseph Goux suggested. “There exists an underlying, protected value, which the State holds, preserves, and guarantees by its , and which

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this bill represents” (“Cash, Check, or Charge?” 117). “Treasure” is only one possible translation of the French word trésor, which can also mean “treasury” and “thesaurus,” a treasury of words. Still, the primary sense intended by Goux is a repository or reserve of wealth in the form of money or precious metal. The pertinence of “treasure” is owed to the shift, so central to Goux’s extensive reading of André Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters (Les faux-monnayeurs, 1925), “from a society founded on legitimation by representation to a society dominated by the inconvertibility of signifiers, that refer to one another like tokens in infinite slippage, with no standard or treasury to offer the guarantee of a transcendental signifier or referent” (The Coiners of Language 4).

7 In Gide’s novel the monetary metaphor registers the fact that language, especially literary language, can no longer be compared to gold money, or even to paper money that is representative of gold. Reading the metaphor to itself registers the shift from representative paper money, which can be converted to precious metal, to fiat money, which is inconvertible and circulates only as forced currency (cf. Goux, The Coiners of Language 16 and chap.13, esp. 124-28). Thus, the treasure represented by the one-dollar note, its protected value, is gold, the “Lord of commodities,” in Marx’s words (166). Gold is, then, the general equivalent of all products, an idealized element against which all other elements measure their value. In the word “Lord,” however, the two realms of Christian doctrine come together, the secular one of economic exchange (in which the dollar bill is merely a monetary token), and the divine one of the exchange of gifts (in which the bill is an infinitely large and archaic gift, which obligates the recipient to give back something, or at least to be grateful). The term “Lord of commodities” thus not only highlights the theological character of the monetary system but also, importantly, points to the accession of the father to the rank of privileged subject, the “general equivalent of subjects” against which all other elements (family members and, by extension, other people) measure their value against (Goux, Symbolic Economies 3-4, 12-21).

8 The “Lord of Commodities” is the economic equivalent of the Lord God, whose worship develops into an end in itself. His representative on earth is George Washington, the Father (founder), whose worship likewise developed into an end in itself, transforming him into “the sole reflecting image of all subjects seeking their worth” (Goux, Symbolic Economies 3). Goux’s summary of the one-dollar bill’s symbolic force is pertinent: The State (and its Treasury), the Father (founder), God (and our faith in him), the dead and sacralized Language (Latin): all these powerful, central signifiers converge, combine, and intensify each other so as to provide the one-dollar note with its force. It is the State in all of its foundational stability that guarantees the value of the bill, under the authority of the Treasury. (“Cash, Check, or Charge?” 117)

9 What Goux does not mention is that the foundational stability provided by the masculine profile never left any place for women on the currency. A rare exception is the one-dollar Silver Certificate from 1896, which offered “an excellent picture of , the wife of the Father of His Country” (“Martha on $1”).

10 Charles Burt’s head of Martha Washington made her the first and only named woman to appear on the primary portrait of United States currency. But the portrait, on the back of the Silver Certificate, also presents Martha Washington as adornment, George Washington’s wife, the avatar of domesticity. In contrast, George Washington confronts the viewer as president, whose awe-inspiring air identifies him as the Father of His Country.

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11 (Courtesy of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum)

12 On the bill, the two portraits are rigidly separated by the central numeral—“1,” also spelled out as an embellished “ONE”—, which hints at the gendered classification of separate spheres for men and women. Thus, the ensemble presents a seamless fit in a pictorial tradition that accepted real women only as the wives of their better-known husbands and that applied the opprobrium “masculine” to politically or intellectually active women. “I do not wonder,” Abigail Adams had written in 1814, that “learned [women] are considered as black swans” (qtd. in Ferguson 182).

13 Abigail Adams’s words reveal that the pattern of excluding women from the public sphere and reducing them to silence plagued the fledgling republic from its inception. “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems,” had responded to his wife’s express desire, in March 1776, that the revolutionaries “would remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” So sure was Abigail Adams’s husband of the viability of the patriarchal system and so convinced was he of the necessity to keep all kinds of marginalized groups in place that he added: As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent— that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented. (qtd. in Ferguson 152)

14 Among the revolutionary leaders, only Thomas Paine addressed women’s rights in a different fashion. “Man with regard to [women], in all climates, and in all ages,” he wrote in 1775, “has been either an insensible husband or an oppressor.” Paine’s contribution for the Pennsylvania Magazine also details the exclusion of women from public life: “[M]an, while he imposes duties upon women, would deprive them of the sweets of public esteem, and in exacting from them, would make it a to aspire at honor.” Still, women do not seize their rights in Paine’s writings. They remain the supplicants of a masculine world of patriarchs. “‘Be not our tyrants in all,’” runs Paine’s imagined version of this supplicating voice. “‘Permit our names to be sometimes pronounced beyond the narrow circles in which we live’” (qtd. in Ferguson 179). There is hardly a better example of the “narrow circles” in which women lived then than the English legal scholar William Blackstone’s commentary on marriage: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal of the woman is suspended during the marriage... incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she

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performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french, a feme-covert. (qtd. in Ferguson 160)

15 The “incorporation” of the woman’s existence into that of the husband cannot be separated from the economic order that based value on property. It is important to point out here that by the time of the founders, property had come to mean not merely facto possessions but de jure possessions over which owners had documented claims on the basis of which possessions could be sold, mortgaged, or loaned with a view of appropriate returns. The system of private property, specified and quantified in legally binding contracts, goes back a long way, to the beginning of the Greek polis and, later, to the Roman civitas. In each instance, feudal relations based on de facto possession gave way to economic contracts. In tandem with the ascent of private ownership, women lost their former status and became reduced to mere wards of their fathers, their husbands, even their brothers (cf. Harris 120). There was another, even more dire consequence, of private ownership. Property can be passed on undisputedly to the following generation (of sons) only if there is no doubt whatsoever about paternity. As Mary Poovey argues, a woman’s sexual infidelity challenged not only the security of the paternal relation and the man’s exclusive right to property, but also the illusion that women were ‘fixed’ as reproductive (not sexually autonomous) , as dependent (not socially autonomous) subjects, and as uniformly ‘other’ to man[.] (80)

16 Women’s otherness constitutes one term in the structural opposition in which the exchange between men and women is usually cast. Based as this exchange is on de jure possession and desire, women are mere objects to be exchanged, functionally equivalent to commodities and money, which likewise circulate among men. Their worth is not intrinsic but derives from their valuation by the male subject, his “imprint,” which becomes the standard or étalonnage, in relation to a third. The French word étalon, as used by the feminist and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray, designates a stallion, a standard of measure, or a currency (étalon-or), thus pointing to the parallelism between sexual and financial exchanges. If femininity, for Irigaray, is premised on exclusion from control over money, language, and the gaze, masculinity is characterized by their possession. The masculine thus is the standard of value, in relation to which the feminine acquires significance and worth. This standardization, which divides the social order into masculine “producer subjects” and feminine “commodity-objects” makes the grounding of value in the paternal image problematic, much as it makes the proposed removal of the paternal image from the currency a more than ephemeral project (222; Boesenberg 160-61).

17 There is a gendered difference also in what money signifies. As the psychologists Adrian Furnham and Michael Argyle have shown, “women think of money in terms of the things into which it can be converted, while men think of it in terms of the power its possession implies” (40). For men, the two authors claim, money means happiness, excitement, respect, and reverence, its possession adding to their self-esteem, independence, and power. For all these reasons, men are more prepared to take financial risks and to speculate. Women, in contrast, seem rather afraid of money. For them, money often spells fear, depression, anger, panic, helplessness, even shame. And because they think of money as a means of purchasing things or making new relevant , women tend to be more careful spending money. Above all, however, women seem to have difficulties talking about money, about how much they are making or about how much they are spending. Women, Furnham and Argyle contend,

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usually were and often still are kept in the dark about the household’s financial situation. It does not come as a surprise that for many women, money is the currency of power and domination (cf. 24-25, 46-48).

18 Martha Washington on the $1 Silver Certificates of 1896 is quite literally a “femme couverte” who, upon entering marriage, had received a “cover,” to the effect that she was at the same time “protected” and “hidden” (Ferguson 180). Moreover, the word “ONE,” spelled out over her portrait, not only evokes the many dissolving into one—E pluribus Unum—, but also a cruelly ironic reworking of Blackstone’s commentary on marriage. The fragile and highly ambivalent gender idyll on the $1 Silver Certificates of 1896 did not last long, though. $1 Silver Certificates of later series, 1923 and 1928 (one of the first of the new small-size notes), altogether dispensed with Martha Washington. Whereas the wife vanished from the currency (she lived on in the pages of The Woman’s Home Companion or Good Housekeeping, and she made a comeback on a 4 Cents postage stamp in 1922), the husband had been honored in his own right already on earlier issues. George Washington’s portrait was centrally placed on the front of the $2 Silver Certificates, Series 1899, the year of the centennial of his death.

19 On the $2 Silver Certificates, Series 1899, Washington’s portrait appears between two allegorical figures, Mechanics (male) and Agriculture (female). The composition reveals a typical pattern in currency design. By and large, historic persons depicted on the currency are all men. And they are depicted through portraits. In contrast, full-size figures are usually allegories, male and female alike. Female allegories most often stand in as figurative symbols of and republican , an iconography that underscores women’s passivity in public forums. Put differently, Liberty as well as republican virtue evoke a purity of status or innocence of experience under masculine protection, categories that preclude independent female activity. Currency notes thus faithfully register the classification of public and active versus private or domestic and passive that framed the traditional gender hierarchy and that also shaped the symbolic constitution of the United States. Male protagonists were coded as image carriers of the vita activa, while females appeared as mere showpieces, passive objects to be looked at (cf. Elshtain).

20 George Washington’s portrait from the $2 Silver Certificates, Series 1899, was used again for $1 Federal Reserve Bank notes, series of 1918. The notes’ backs were graced by a patriotic eagle in flight, grasping a flag—hence the nickname “Green Eagle Notes” (cf. Bowers 133-35). Clearly Washington’s image signified the vita activa, much as it was to inspire patriotism at a time when the United States engaged their “relentless enemy in a life-and-death struggle.” At such a time, a syndicated writer noted, “what Washington did and said, and caused to be done, [was] taking on a new and solemn meaning” (Schwartz 34). Ten years later, new currency notes also were taking on a new and solemn meaning. Earlier notes, the “Green Eagle Notes” included, were of considerable size—7.42 x 3.125 inches. Notes issued after 1928 are much smaller—6.14 x 2.61 inches. The new size was easier to handle and store, and the change also saved the Treasury millions of dollars (cf. Tschachler 181-82). The reduction in size—from “horse blankets” to “pocket change”—was not the only directive issued by Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon. Mellon also acted on a committee recommendation to fundamentally redesign the visual order on existing notes. When the project was accomplished, the former flood of arbitrarily selected pictures had been curbed: Now there were only a few select examples of national architecture, a scene from the nation’s history (the

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signing of the Declaration of Independence), and the portraits of “the Presidents of the United States.”2

3. Presidential Portraits and the Rhetoric of Political Fatherhood

21 Portraits of “the Presidents of the United States,” Secretary Mellon’s special committee decided, “have a more permanent familiarity in the minds of the public than any others” (USBEP).3 One understands the sentiment. “No people,” President Calvin Coolidge said in an address delivered in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on July 6, 1922, “can look forward who do not look backward” (173). President Coolidge’s words provided a model for many Americans to seek, as the literary historian Alfred Kazin put it in 1939, “the comfort of their grandfathers” (qtd. in Marling 365). Indeed, the portraits of “the Presidents of the United States” on the redesigned currency were to offer a firm footing in the midst of social and economic chaos, tendering comfort and solace. The continuity, since 1929, of “Presidents’” portraits should not therefore surprise anyone. Banknote design in general is a complex and sometimes opaque process. Decision- making is often nebulous, and the committees responsible for it are frequently composed on an ad-hoc basis. What is known is that form and content of banknote design are driven by safety concerns, stylistic conventions and and, not to forget, costs. The latter factor is especially true of money that is used worldwide. Globally used paper money like the dollar, Jacques Hymans suggested, “involves much higher transaction costs, including the cost of informing end-users of the changes and the cost of collecting the old bills for replacement. These costs may induce the hegemon to maintain its money’s traditional ‘look’” (29).

22 There is another reason for the visual design of currency notes habitually being more “conservative” than that of stamps and other securities.4 Currency notes are generally considered a “state’s calling cards,” mirroring the values they represent as money— stability, continuity, and resilience to crises.5 This is especially true for U.S. currency. In the years following the currency reform heads of state, generals, and other statesmen gave way to representatives of official culture (composers like Verdi or Strauss, for instance). Internationally, that is, while U.S. currency remained unaffected by these changes. Although the practice of commemorating “Presidents” and other statesmen stopped when Woodrow Wilson’s portrait was put on the $100,000 bill in 1934, the reason was not ideological so much as practical, as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing simply ran out of denominations; moreover, the bills bearing all those prominent males still circulate (some bills have been discontinued, though, while the $100,000 bill never circulated). On U.S. currency, therefore, the state as actor prevails, conveying to citizens the value of federal, that is, state-produced money and programs.

23 The “dead presidents,” as dollar bills are colloquially called, provide a frequent reminder to people that they are to be members of what nationalists from all social strata consider an ethnically united community. Ever since the beginning of modern nation-states, authorities have relied on the mass immersion in the nationalistic iconography on the currency to mold people’s identity and their perceived destiny, to teach what is expected from them, and, not to forget, to connect to the spirit of the age in an attempt to increase the state’s legitimacy with its citizenry.6 In the United States, the currency reform of the 1920s transformed the nation’s currency into “a

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reassuringly familiar quantity from coast to coast, a brand like the other brands already beginning to conquer and even define aspects of the nation. The dollar helped this happen. Uniformity drove down price: a clear price fostered uniformity” (Goodwin 287-88). One consequence of “uniformity” is that any change be perceived as an intervention into an objectively existent world of things, with quite unsettling effects on note-holders. Resistance to change holds true especially of nations whose cultural- political constitution is based on popular sovereignty. In such nations, there also seems to exist a general aversion to currency designs that are contemporary or even avant- garde. In their stead, atavistic mythologies, metaphysical notions and iconographies are in great demand. The United States is no exception in this regard. Hence the perpetual reminder, on the currency, of the nation’s grand old men—its “fathers,” as it were—, which at one and the same time provides retrospective assurance and moves the source of power back to the state (cf. Pointon 229-54).

24 Among the nation’s grand old men—its metaphorical “fathers”—one man stands out, George Washington. “The history of America is the history of Washington,” the art historian Mark Thistlethwaite wrote (The Image of George Washington 3). Washington no doubt is at the core of America’s national imaginary in which the nation has come, and continues to come, to an understanding of itself. Pictures of the nation’s founder and savior testify to this—Gilbert Stuart’s iconic “Athenaeum” portrait; also his “Lansdowne,” which visualizes the legitimacy of a postrevolutionary, democratically elected president; the elder Peale’s rendering of General Washington at Princeton; the younger Peale’s Patriae Pater; or Emanuel Leutze’s grandiose canvas of the crossing of the Delaware. Americans are familiar with these artworks from visits to the nation’s museums, from prints, and other forms of reproduction.

25 Americans are also familiar with other paintings and engravings, plaster statuary and other art objects, the poetry, fiction, and drama written about Washington, the political discourses and inaugural addresses referring to him, as well as the medals and medallions, coins and currency, postage stamps, editorial cartoons, advertisements, calendars, book and magazine covers depicting him. In addition, Americans have acquired goods of all kinds with Washington’s likeness on them, paperweights, dishes, crockery and other household goods and furnishings, handkerchiefs and other textiles, bottles, belt buckles, hats, hatchet-shaped cookie cutters, ice cream molds, fans, and other objects bearing his likeness. While the cultural historian Karal Ann Marling has dismissed these outpourings as simply junk (cf. 20-24), the values embedded in such traditions and practices are not without their force. They foster a sense of community. They offer a firm footing in the midst of social turmoil and economic chaos. They tender comfort and solace to those who feel orphaned, and they strengthen the bonds of union to the national community.

26 George Washington is alive also in Americans’ everyday lives—on city landscapes, especially in the nation’s capital, in the places named for him, in streets and businesses, in the hundreds of thousands of people that still carry his name, in the minds of people who leave “Happy Birthday” posts on the George Washington site, who bake George Washington meatloaves, or who around Father’s Day 2018 disseminated on a Lansdownesque image of the nation’s first president inscribed with “America, I am your father.” The post drew any number of likes and comments, such as “Happy almost Father’s Day to the Father of our Country,” “I wish he could come back,” “if you could only see your country today,” or “we NEED him instead of this guy we got

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now” (Mount Vernon). And there is Washington’s iconic portrait, which endures not just on the currency, but also has become the schoolroom Washington, the TV Washington, and a staple in popular print and media imagery. Businesses too love George Washington, who sells everything from coffee to soap to baking powder to soft drinks to cigars to travels to the most unlikely places. The face on the dollar bill advertises big February sales in department stores and used-car lots and it graces all kinds of objects, including T-shirts (worn, for instance, by students at George Washington University). Altogether, then, Washington’s image not only has been internalized as an object but also has been transformed into a potent visual synecdoche for the nation, its economy, and its consumerist culture (cf. Thistlethwaite, “‘Where Am I?’”).

27 (Source: Heinz Tschachler)

28 On the one-dollar bill, Washington’s iconic portrait represents a secular Lord, corresponding to the image or mark of the “prince,” the familiar portrait of the ruler in the European tradition (cf. Foucault 175-76). In contrast, the Lord God is represented by a verbal image on the bill’s back (“In God We Trust”). Each Lord can lay claim to a superior status, though Washington’s status has the imprimatur of history and myth. Thus, the lyre-shaped frame surrounding his portrait can also be read symbolically, as OMEGA, the final letter in the Greek alphabet. The “Ω” represents the end of things or the glorious future the United States is looking forward to and working towards—in contrast to ALPHA, “A,” which represents the beginning of things, hence God. Within this framework, Washington’s portrait is symbolically linked with the past, beginning with God, and with the future, suggesting that the metaphorical father’s spirit will continue to guide the nation’s destiny. Whereas God the Father is the abstract deity of Christianity, George Washington is the metaphorical Father of His Country, the male link between citizens or subjects and the rest of the community, without whom the community is but “a formless mass” (Goux, “Numismatics” 11).

29 In England from the early seventeenth century, the role of the metaphorical father had fallen to the king. James I believed that he had to care for his subjects “like a father, for a King is truly Parens patriae, the politique father of his people.” But what kind of father? In James’s eyes, the king was “divine power on earth,” authorized by God, and himself the ultimate authority over all earthly beings (Burrows and Wallace 170). The royalist doctrine of political absolutism changed with the Settlement of 1688-1689, under which the king of Great Britain became a limited monarch who reigned under a constitutional framework commonly defined as a mixed government. The arrangement only cemented the patriarchal and familial political ideas and

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attitudes voiced in the North American colonists’ eagerness to acclaim their sovereign as the “Father of His Country” (cf. Liddle 952-53). Yet fathers can fail, such as George III, who for many colonists was a “tyrant” neglecting his “children.” This was the rage of unfulfilled expectations, a willful denial and suppression of a much-valued family connection: The “expected father of his people,” Mason Weems wrote in his biography of Washington, “had looked on “the violation of American rights… with a most unfatherly calmness” (80).

30 While the “destroyed all the earlier talk of paternal… government” (Wood 149-50), patriarchal language as such persisted. Nowhere is this clearer than in the eventual transfer, by an act a symbolic regicide and patricide, of the exalted title of “Father of His Country” from George III to George Washington. By this act of communal incorporation Washington became America’s “living ‘tribal’ totem,” hailed as the political father and head of a great people or, on the cover of an almanac published in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1778, as “Des Landes Vater” (cf. Baker 6; Albanese 144). A dictum common during the early years of the nation even said that “Providence” had left Washington childless so that the nation might call him “Father” (cf. Schwartz 173). The father trope, which readily salved the feelings of orphanhood among the revolutionaries, also became a staple of poems, speeches, portraits, name- giving and, not to forget, hagiographic biographies such as “Parson” Weems’s Life. The ubiquity of the father trope indicates that from the beginning of the republic, Americans have understood the nation metaphorically in family terms, with the president seen at one and the same time as an older male authority figure and a privileged bearer of value. George Washington was called “the father of his country” partly because he was the metaphorical progenitor who brought it into being and partly because he was seen as the legitimate head of state, which in terms of the metaphor is the head of the family, the father. Americans still talk about their founding fathers, and it is not at all unreasonable for them to deploy them when in doubt about political matters. Additionally, to all presidents since Washington, and to all Americans, the presidency has been the office of national “fatherhood.” When the United States goes to war, it sends its sons (and now also its daughters) into battle. A patriot (from the Latin pater, for “father”) is not just a sophisticated guided missile but also someone who loves his or her fatherland.

31 All these terms suggest “family.” This is not coincidental. As the linguist George Lakoff has argued, we are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing in terms of the governing systems of families (cf. 153-61). Significantly, the “nation-as-family” metaphor provides the symbolic stage on which feelings of not belonging to or even being excluded from the national family, hence of fear, are acted out. “Fearful people,” the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes in her most recent book, “want protection and care. They turn to a strong and absolute ruler” (7). Thus to see even Donald Trump as “the father I always wanted” (qtd. in Geraghty) makes perfect sense. In psychological terms, such outpourings point to a desire for a paternal leader, one who, as Robin Lakoff stated in a political memorandum, is at one and the same time “a daddy, a king, a god, a hero… a champion who will carry that lance and that sword into the field and fight for us” (qtd. in Dowd). It’s the rhetoric of political fatherhood, not motherhood, that ameliorates, if not elides, all kinds of fears, of change, of the future, of social decline, of other people. By the same token, the portraits on the currency of “the Presidents of the United States” serve as symbols of national consensus, continuity, and stability to which citizens are called upon to defer.

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Altogether, the metaphorical Fathers’ “more permanent familiarity in the minds of the public” is to provide at least a semblance of stability in periods of domestic turmoil, and of continuity and comfort in times of international crisis and decline. They are the foundation of an aesthetic-theological-mythological scheme to strengthen the dollar from the outside, constituting an authority that guarantees permanence and stability.

32 No one will be fooled all the time, though. The “dead presidents” on modern dollar bills, together with the obligatory cultural memory they tap into and activate, are also symptoms of a profound crisis of patriarchy.7 Consider: Women have been entering the labor market in ever-larger numbers; they possess and use dollar bills on which they are not represented. True, there are monetary tokens on which women are depicted— $1 coins like the Anthony or the Sacagawea dollar—but these tokens have never been popular. Coins that do not circulate contribute nothing to stability and continuity. Nor are paper notes whose value is no longer backed by anything substantive and whose aesthetic design openly belies the economic of money. The metaphorical fathers on the currency therefore function as protective spirits—to maintain the that money as well as the acquisition of it, is a male prerogative. Patriarchy and ownership economy are, then, two sides of a coin (cf. Heinsohn and Steiger, chaps. 3 and 4). The “portraits of the Presidents” communicate a quasi-universal picture of patriarchal authority, based on private property over which owners have documented claims, and the state’s welfare; at the same time, they conceal the fact that from the Constitutional onward, America’s “national subjectivity” has always been construed as “white” and “male” (cf. ; Babb). From the beginning, the power of white males derived from the difference between one’s own citizenship and that denied to other constituencies (women, African Americans, Native Americans). Today, this difference has become fragile. With the of separate spheres as well as traditional constructions of masculinity eroding, fears and perceptions have come to the fore among white males that affirmative action, quotas, and preferences might bring gains for racial and ethnic groups and women, but only at their expense.

4. Conclusion

33 The portraits of “the Presidents of the United States” on the currency unambiguously emanate character and strength, at least as long as there is trust or confidence in the nation’s currency and, importantly, as long as cash is not being replaced by “plastic money” or “electronic money.” Though there are voices that consider a phase-out scenario as likely or even desirable (cf. Rogoff), all the evidence suggests that cash will continue to be the key medium for payment and the storage of value. According to the Federal Reserve, by December 31, 2015, a total of 38.1 billion dollar notes were in circulation, of which 11.4 billion were $1 notes; in FY 2015 alone, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered approximately 7.5 billion notes to the Federal Reserve, of which 2.425 billion were one-dollar notes (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “How much U.S. currency is in circulation?”).8 A major reason for the continuance of cash no doubt is that the bills carrying portraits of “the Presidents of the United States” tap into deeply felt needs and desires. How else can we explain the one-dollar bill’s resilience against attempts to replace it with a coin? Economic reason—as John McCain noted, the switch from paper bills to coins would save some $4.4 billion in currency production costs over the next 30 years—apparently

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is no match against people’s emotions. To date, attempts to enact such legislation have not made it past committee review. And opinion polls have shown consistently that few Americans are prepared to give up their beloved “Georges.” All this only confirms the sociologist Michael Schudson’s belief that “the past is constantly being retold in order to legitimate present interests” and to elaborate present ideals and (qtd. in Schwartz 137).

34 As regards the past, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin in 1807 worried about a shortage of individuals qualified to hold office during the second Jefferson administration. When he suggested that the president consider hiring women, Jefferson replied by spilling out all the cultural understandings that have kept women from the public sphere to this very day: “The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.” And George Washington? It’s a moot point to say that he also would not have been prepared to appoint a woman to office. There is no record that he ever was in a situation similar to President Jefferson’s. What we can safely say is that the exalted title of Father of His Country at one and the same time immunized Washington against criticism and subverted ideological impetuses for further change, locking them into a “worthier” past. In that past, patriarchal language served to legitimize political authority. Americans or, rather, American males were accustomed to paternal authority. They honored their own fathers and expected their sons to honor them. Accordingly, political leaders who successfully donned the mantle of fatherhood not only elicited considerable citizen respect and deference; they could also rest assured that for most people dissent was too daunting. As Reid Mitchell put it, “[t]he parental metaphor made rebellion a primal sin” (116).

35 Another consequence of the parental metaphor has been more far-reaching. Since patriarchal leadership was associated with “benign authority,” a man could obey a biological or political father without feeling that he forfeited his manly independence or citizenship. This seems true even today. For, the hopes and anxieties associated with Washington’s successors unambiguously demonstrate a desire for a paternal leader. As sobering as it may sound, therefore, all the evidence suggests that “a woman leading the United States is not, as many young voters predicted this election cycle, simply a matter of time” (Friedman). Nor is the appearance of a portrait of a woman on the currency simply a matter of time. The currency, I have tried to show in these pages, is one of the many ways in which the state tells its stories to its citizens. “Monetary space is sovereign space,” the British sociologist and political scientist Geoffrey Ingham stated (57). Unsurprisingly, the pictures on America’s coins and currency have been routinely used by the United States government to disseminate stories of national heroes (and villains). While these repetitive images contribute towards building a national identity, none of the stories springs up spontaneously or “naturally.” On the contrary, they are always constructed, propagated, and passed on with a view to the maintenance of power. As George Gerbner noted, “[t]hose who tell stories hold the power in society” (9). For the state, this power consists in manufacturing , that is, in conveying beliefs, convictions, or moral values that will be broadly shared. It is the manufacturing of consent, the ingraining in the popular unconscious of a set of values and beliefs, that allows the state to imagine the people under its dominance, the geographic territory under control, and the of historical legitimacy.

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NOTES

1. As Hillary Clinton writes in her memoir, historically, “women haven’t been the ones writing the laws or leading the armies and navies… It’s the men who lead. It’s the men who speak… That’s been the case for so long it has infiltrated our deepest thoughts” (223). 2. The figures are impressive: Between 1861 and 1900 more than 160 different types, classes, and varieties of bank notes were put in circulation. By 1929, the number was cut in half; as of 1930, only 15 were left (cf. Lauer 121-24). 3. The word “presidents” is, strictly speaking, a misnomer. The committee’s decision was somewhat altered by the Secretary of the Treasury, the USBEP explains, to include Hamilton (on the new $10 bill), the fledgling nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury; Salmon P. Chase (on the new $10,000 bill), Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln and credited with promoting the National Banking System; Benjamin Franklin (on the new $100 notes, the “Benjamins”), one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and, together with John Adams and John Jay, of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783. “All three of these statesmen,” the USBEP concludes, “were well known to the American public.” 4. The “” of currency design is a major reason that the presence of women on U.S. stamps is much more satisfactory than on bank notes (cf. Skaggs). 5. Not simply “ein Gegenstand des täglichen Gebrauchs für jedermann … als Werbeträger sollte sie ein Spiegelbild der Werte sein, die sie repräsentiert, wie Stabilität, Kontinuität und Krisenfestigkeit... Daher wird die Banknote gelegentlich auch als Visitenkarte eines Staates bezeichnet” (Deutsche Bundesbank). 6. For a good example of the state-as-teacher approach to currency iconography, see Helleiner; for an elaboration of the state-as-legitimacy-seeker approach, see Hymans. Emily Gilbert, too, explores the connection between currency iconography and the ideological purposes it serves. 7. “Dead presidents” is a well-known and often-used colloquialism, though it’s well worth revealing it to itself. “Fathers,” Jean-Joseph Goux notes, can fulfill their privileged roles only as long as they are separated, kept at a distance from the “family,” that is, the larger whole. Phrased differently, “fathers” can ascend to symbolic heights and assume transcendence only as “dead fathers,” their place reduced to the “Name-of- the-Father” (“Numismatics” 18, 49).

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8. Worldwide some 180 to 190 billion notes of all kinds are in circulation, at an estimated value of $4.3 trillion (about 8.3 per cent of the money in the world). Global annual production of notes is estimated at 85 to 95 billion notes, at an estimated market value of $11.5 billion, and rising at an annual rate of 5.5 per cent; by 2026, therefore some 943 billion bank notes (as well as 179 billion coins) will be circulating worldwide (cf. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Currency in Circulation: Volume”; Smithers Pira, “Fit for Circulation: The Future Lifecycles of Currency to 2026,” and “The Future of Banknotes to 2021”).

ABSTRACTS

When in April 2016, the United States Department of the Treasury officially announced the redesign of the $20 bill, the plan provided that the portrait of an “exemplary American woman” would replace Andrew Jackson’s. This article explores whether such a portrait would make any substantive difference to women’s marginalization in public life. It interprets the exclusive presence of portraits of “Presidents” on the nation’s currency as tantamount to the real power of men in society and, as well, to a metaphorical understanding of the nation in family terms. Indeed, from the beginning of the republic the president has been seen at one and the same time as an older male authority figure and a privileged bearer of value. All the evidence suggests, therefore, that the appearance of a portrait of a woman on the currency is more than simply a matter of time, just as there is little evidence that a woman leading the United States is simply a matter of time.

INDEX

Keywords: U.S. currency, graphic design, ideological purposes of currency iconography, absence of women on currency, marginalization of women in public, rhetoric of political fatherhood, persistence of patriarchy

AUTHOR

HEINZ TSCHACHLER Heinz Tschachler is a former Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Alpen- Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. His academic interests are relations between representation, ideology, and material conditions as well as, more recently, cultural aspects of America’s money. He that coins and currency not merely encourage trade and investment but are at the same time cultural products that speak to the identity of a group of people, a place, and a time. He has written numerous articles on America’s money, edited a conference volume (Almighty Dollar, 2008), and published four monographs, including The Greenback (2010) and Americans for George (2015).

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Papa’s Baby, Mama’s Maybe1: Reading the Black Paternal Palimpsest and White Maternal Present Absence in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Yolanda M. Manora

“Who is it, Ida?” A woman’s soft voice sounded from within. “Someone for Mr. Nilssen, m’am.” The girl looked embarrassed. “She says she’s his niece, m’am.” [The woman] came forward murmuring in a puzzled voice: “His niece, did you say?” “Yes, Helga Crane. My mother was his sister, Karen Nilssen.” “Oh, yes! I remember about you now. I’d forgotten for a moment. Well, he isn’t exactly your uncle is he? Your mother wasn’t married, was she? I mean, to your father?” “I—I don’t know,” stammered the girl, feeling pushed down to the uttermost depths of ignominy. (Quicksand 28)

1. Introduction

1 In his 2006 award winning monograph In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, George Hutchinson illuminates the life of a writer long considered the “mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,” shedding new light not only on the biographical facts of Nella Larsen’s life as a biracial individual coming of age during an “era when ‘race’ trumped” all relationships, even those of family, but also on the effects these experiences had on her psychologically, especially on her ability to forge a relational life. He contends that “tangled feelings of love and abandonment, anger and self loathing, empathy, shame and powerlessness stamped Larsen’s emotional development in childhood and shaped the attachment problems that would affect her until she died” (25). Given her socially and psychically untenable subject position as the “too dark to pass” child in a white family and the sense of isolation and, ultimately, abandonment,

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that attended it, it’s little wonder that Larsen’s autobiographically-informed fictional narratives can be read as sites of relational failure.

2 In this article, I locate the narrative absences at the center of Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, and examine the manner in which they source the relational failures that render the protagonist, Helga Crane, incapable of fulfilling her promise as, in Deborah McDowell’s words, a “daring and unconventional heroine” (xi). Not only does the palimpsestic presence of the black paternal impede Helga’s quest for social legitimacy and place, the present absence of the white maternal, arguably a more critical lacuna, serves as the experiential and psychological source of Helga’s fundamental “lack somewhere”: her failure to develop a relational subjectivity.

2. The Name of the Father: Reading the Black Paternal Palimpsest in Quicksand

3 When Claudia Tate wrote “Desire and Death in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” (1995), she offered arguably the earliest expressly psychoanalytic reading of the text, taking as her points of departure not concepts of race and gender as had critics before her, but theories of subject formation. In her reading, Tate used Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explore issues of identity in the text, specifically those related to Quicksand’s protagonist, Helga Crane. Rather than positing black identity as a strictly social construction, Tate read it within the matrix of psychic processes, the site and/or product of individual subject formation. While conceding that Helga’s identity is undeniably shaped by the impositions of social definition and, especially, by the oppositional constructions of race, Tate asserted that Helga’s more fundamental subjectivity is ultimately defined and later thwarted by her father’s abandonment and the attendant, albeit subconscious, psychological trauma, “My father was a gambler, who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were married” (Quicksand, 20).

4 Tate’s reading is a provocative one, and the text certainly supports it. In Tate’s reading, Helga’s capricious journey and her disappointing romantic encounters serve both as metaphors for and the consequences of her search for the elusive father in whose eyes, according to those psychoanalytic theories that locate the mirror stage as a critical process in identity formation, she would be reflected back to herself and, thereby, finally become a fully realized subject.2

5 While not discounting the Lacanian lack at the heart of Tate’s reading, I contend that beyond the literal absence of the Black Father there is the figurative presence and incomplete erasure of the black paternal. Helga’s unnamed black father, given America’s One Drop Rule, bequeaths to the mixed-race Helga a social identity that is unequivocally black, and his abandonment brands her socially as being quite likely illegitimate. Helga’s black paternity, then, can be read as the palimpsest for the text, determining as it does the communities through which Helga can freely move and the relationships to which she might lay claim.

6 In the first chapter of the novel, as Helga plots her escape from Naxos, the school where she teaches, she reflects upon her relationship with fiancé, James Vayle, and his family’s likely response to her breaking their engagement: “The family of James Vayle, in nearby Atlanta, would be glad. They had never liked the engagement, had never

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liked Helga Crane. Her own lack of family had disconcerted them. No family. That was the crux of the matter. For Helga it accounted for everything” (8). Larsen uses Helga’s ruminations to offer a critique of African Americans of a particular social class:

7 Negro society, [Helga] had learned, was as complicated and rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn’t ‘belong.’ You could be queer, or even attractive, or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and such nonsense if you were a Rankin, or a Leslie, or a Scoville; in other words, if you had a family. But if you were just plain Helga Crane, of whom nobody had ever heard, it was presumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicuous and conformable. (8)

8 As the text “names” the families in the highest strata of black society, it becomes clear that when Helga refers to her lack of family, she means she has no family name, more specifically, no socially recognizable or respectable paternal name. Her father is never named in the text, but, presumably, as Helga does not carry her mother’s family name, Nillssen, his last name is “Crane,” but it is not a name that signifies in a meaningful way socially. Rather, her father’s name can only be recovered through Helga’s name, serving as another marker of his palimpsestic presence; his name is legible only through hers, and it doesn’t serve to make her more socially legible or legitimate. Helga moves toward, but not into the upper echelon of black society, the name of the father does not gain her entry, but rather consigns her to the margins.

9 In the scene with her uncle’s new wife, the black paternal bars, then negates Helga altogether. Her father’s racial identity and her parents’ marital status converge, fusing in such a fashion that Helga’s illegitimacy becomes incontrovertible. Having abruptly left her teaching post at Naxos, Helga arrives on the doorstep of her Uncle Peter’s house in Chicago in desperate financial straits to find that the only relative who has ever been kind to her, albeit condescendingly, has married. For this new wife, who had “momentarily forgotten” about her husband’s black niece, Helga’s appearance is tantamount to the return of the repressed. When confronted with this niece, standing in the flesh before her, the woman must resolve this psychologically and socially untenable state of affairs by denying Helga any relational claim to her husband. To do so, Mrs. Nilssen applies what is, on the face, desperate and absurd logic: despite the fact that Helga’s mother was indeed Peter Nilssen’s sister, Helga cannot claim him as her uncle because “you mother wasn’t married, was she? I mean to your father?” (28).

10 In the woman’s alternative genealogy, Helga line of descent can only be traced from the black father; she is strictly “Papa’s Baby.” In nullifying Helga’s claim to her husband, the woman denies Helga her mother, essentially delegitimizing the kinship bonds between mother and daughter. In this moment, Helga not only “loses” her uncle, the palimpsestic black paternal is used to subsume the white maternal, rendering Helga, who has always been fatherless, figuratively motherless.

11 Ultimately, the palimpsestic black paternal sources a great deal of the unease that characterizes Helga Crane and the text. The black father is not simply absent; he is a text, and that text, the black paternal is incompletely erased. In a most immediate and material sense, he can be read on Helga herself; it is clear from the text that she is too dark to pass, so her very body is a text that bears unmistakable traces of the black paternal. The black paternal sources and often thwarts Helga’s journey to find a place where she belongs among people to whom she belongs; she is turned away from some relational spaces, notably by her uncle’s wife, and admitted into certain communal

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spaces, especially Harlem, because of her black paternity. Rather than being an absence, the black father is the spectral presence that accompanies Helga on each leg of her journey and that arguably portends each relational and communal failure.

12 Compelling in and of itself, Tate’s psychoanalytic reading of Quicksand, reflecting critical shifts in African American literary scholarship in the late 1980s and 1990s, moves away from a social constructionist reading wherein African American characters and their real life counterparts are situated as objects, sites of intersecting, oppressive social forces, namely racism, discrimination, privation, and situates Helga Crane as the subject within her own narrative. In this way, Tate’s reading was liberatory.

13 It is also critically provocative in another way. With “Desire and Death,” a female centered, arguably proto-feminist text, one with a “daring and unconventional heroine” whose narrative begins an exploration of black female sexuality that later African American women writers would continue, becomes a male-centered narrative, a text written around a decidedly male Lacanian present-absence. Quicksand becomes a text invested in the power of the patriarchy, and Helga’s quest becomes not a journey toward self definition, but rather for patriarchal validation.

3. Papa’s Baby: Reading the Return of the Prodigal Father, Recasting the Return of the Prodigal Daughter

“Pa is not our Pa!” (The Color Purple, Letter 67) “My Pa loves me! My Pa still loves me! Except he don’t know it.” (The Color Purple, film, 56:15)

14 African American women novelists of the last decades of the 20th century, most immediately those of the Renaissance of Black Women Writers, would indeed, to use Rachel DuPlessis’s axiom, write beyond the ending of Larsen’s Quicksand. But their inheritance of Larsen’s black female-centered narratives and her daring and unconventional heroines came with another legacy; these later writers also inherited the texts beneath the texts, including the black paternal palimpsest.

15 In McDowell’s introduction to Quicksand and Passing, she identifies Larsen as a “pioneer, a trailblazer in the Afro-American female literary tradition,” beginning the narrative explorations of black female subjectivity that black women novelists of the 1970s and 1980s would bring to “franker and fuller expression” (xxxi). In tracing Larsen’s literary genealogy, McDowell names several of the writers who take up Larsen’s narratives and locates particular novels that belong to a line of descent that begins with Larsen’s Quicksand. One of those writers is Alice Walker, and one of those texts is her most lauded work, The Color Purple.

16 While most literary genealogies quite rightly locate Alice Walker in the lineage of Zora Neale Hurston, whom Walker herself lays claim to as literary foremother, legendarily recovering and restoring Hurston to the American literary landscape, Walker’s The Color Purple does indeed draw upon the imaginative stream that McDowell locates as Larsen’s legacy to later writers. In many ways, The Color Purple picks up where Quicksand rather tragically leaves off, in the rural South with a black female protagonist mired in the quicksand that collects at the material and metaphysical site where racism, sexism, and economic privation converge. But, in keeping with the charge to write beyond the ending, Walker’s central character, Celie, supported by other women and nurtured and

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sustained by their love and examples, demonstrates her own unexpectedly indomitable will, emerging from this state of suspension by novel’s end.

17 Walker inherits Larsen’s narratives and, at least in The Color Purple, writes the black female protagonists beyond the conventional endings to which they are in McDowell’s words, “sacrificed” in Larsen’s novels. But in the process, Walker also reveals the manner in which black women’s stories, as portrayed by fictional black female protagonists, were often narratives written on top of other narratives, some enriching and affirming, others, not. In the case black paternal palimpsests, the texts underneath the texts, often, but not always, serve to fortify the patriarchal strictures that circumscribe black women’s lives.

18 With the very first words of The Color Purple, “you better not never tell nobody but God,” spoken by “Pa,” the novel’s first father, Walker signals the presence and oppression of the black paternal in the text. Celie is sexually abused and silenced by “Pa,” Alphonso, the man whom she believes to be her father and, later, verbally and physically by Mr. ____, the man to whom Alphonso gives her when the former seeks the hand of Nettie, Celie’s sister, in marriage. Nettie then becomes the object of Pa’s predation, coming to live with Celie and Mr. ___ until she’s forced to leave because he, too, attempts to take advantage of her sexually.

19 Both sisters, then, are subjected to the will of the father. But, later, in one of the most startling moments in the novel, Nettie writes to Celie from Africa with a critical, life altering revelation: “Pa is not our Pa!” (Letter 67).

20 Like Helga, Celie and Nettie’s story is written over a paternal palimpsest. The text beneath their text is more thoroughly erased, however; Alphonso, the black paternal imposter, erases the rightful black father, writing his own story over the original text, usurping the other man’s place, laying claim to his progeny and their legacy, an inheritance that he denies them until his death. Learning their true paternity and the story of their biological father, a successful business owner who was lynched by white men because of his burgeoning economic success, is revelatory and transformative for the sisters. Knowing that they are not related by blood to the man they call “Pa,” that Celie’s children by him are not products of incest, frees them. Ultimately, after Alphonso’s death, the paternal palimpsest becomes recovered text, allowing Celie to claim her inheritance from her biological father and to use it to fund her creative enterprise; she builds her own business and achieves economic autonomy, a rare boon for an early 20th century black woman, one that frees her from patriarchal rule.

21 Unlike Helga for whom the paternal palimpsest proves socially debilitating, Celie and Nettie’s recovery of the paternal palimpsestic text is restorative; in both the novel and the filmic adaptation, the sisters’ newfound status as “Papa’s Babies” allows them to lay claim to a liberatory legacy. However, in the film, Shug Avery, the most daring and unconventional of the novel’s female protagonists, is, in a sense, sacrificed to a conventional ending as her redemption, her salvation, rather than taking place within the womanist woman centered healing and redemptive spaces that Walker creates for the female characters in the novel, can only be granted by the Father.

22 In the white male scripted film adaptation, Shug Avery, a blues woman and certainly the most transgressively noncompliant female character in The Color Purple, is not only estranged from her father, who, in an interesting departure from the film has been recast as the pastor of the local church, she is shunned by him. In her first scene in the film, Shug proudly declares to Celie, her lover’s wife who is nursing her back to health,

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“my Pa loves me! My Pa still loves me!” before sinking into tearful rumination, “except he don’t know it” (56:15-56:25). It is only upon her return as the Prodigal Daughter in one of the two climatic reconciliation scenes at the end of the film, when the preacher father recognizes and opens his arms to receive the blues woman who is his daughter, that Shug is restored, once again “Papa’s Baby.” But the reconciliation requires one last thing of her. As the blues song shapeshifts into a rousing gospel song, the Black Pastor and the Blues Woman, the Black Father and his Prodigal Daughter stare into one another’s eyes; as a tear runs down his cheek, Shug runs to him, flings her arms around her his neck, and, both confessing and seeking absolution, whispers: “see Daddy, even sinners got soul” (2:22:24). And with that the penitent Prodigal Daughter is forgiven for her sins. Her father raises his arms, for a moment captured in the Messianic posture of the Good Shepherd, and embraces her, and she is thereby tearfully restored to wholeness, redeemed; she is saved.

23 The thematic axis, reconciliation and redemption within the relational, is certainly compelling. But it’s not unproblematic. For while women-centered relationships, often emerging from a sisterly-maternal ethos, serve as both the source of and the relational matrix for redemption, reconciliation, and reunion in Walker’s novel, in the filmic adaptation by a white male filmmaker, Steven Spielberg, it is the recognition and embrace of The Father that redeems the transgressive, then prodigal daughter, bringing her fully into the communal. In the signifying system of the film, the Logos that the Preacher embodies and expresses through his sermon drawn from Biblical scripture is further enacted by the film’s antagonist, Mr. ____, when he goes to Immigration and Naturalization to arrange for the return of Celie’s sister and her family from Africa; he must affirm that they are Americans, and in effect, it is his money and word, the word of the Father, that opens the relational space for the film’s final climactic reunion between Celie and Nettie.

24 The filmic adaptation of Walker’s The Color Purple makes transparent the manner in which, no matter whether the late 20th century’s “daring, unconventional heroines” were sacrificed to “conventional endings,” as were Larsen’s, or not, they were often cast or recast, read or reread into narratives that were invested in patriarchal recognition and validation. In ways that mirror the journey of Larsen’s Helga Crane, for the black daughters in The Color Purple, specifically for Celie and her sister, Nettie, who do not know their true paternity, their restoration to their rightful place, personally, socially, and socioeconomically, depends upon recovering the name of their father. But in the film, for Shug Avery social legitimacy is predicated not upon the name, but upon the (gestural) word of, the Father.

25 Nearly thirty-five years after the film’s release, the question that begs to be asked is this: in these narratives about women’s lives, where are the mothers? In a way that serves as a legend for the remainder of this article, in the filmic adaptation of The Color Purple, a woman-centered and woman-authored text becomes one that’s invested in the patriarchy, turning upon the absence, presence, power and word of The Father. In both the novel and the film, the mothers are absences. Celie’s mother descends into madness after her first husband is lynched, marries the predatory Alphonso, bearing him a number of children while failing to protect Celie from him (in fact, Alphonso implicitly blames the mother for his raping Celie: “you gonna do what your mother won’t”) and then dies, “cursing and screaming.” Shug’s mother, referenced in the novel, is seemingly disappeared from the film. Shug’s father, fathers in general, are

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foregrounded. Even Shug herself, a character who is often read as an arguably quasi- feminist figure or leastways, in Walker’s overview of the developmental stages of black women (see: interview with Mary Helen Washington), beginning with suspension, a self-actualizing emergent woman, in her first moments of dialogue says, “Never knew a child to come out right unless there’s a man around; children got to have a Pa” (55:53-56:10) portending the subsequent the erasure of the mother.3

26 Likewise, both Tate’s location of the Black Father as a site of a Lacanian lack and my contention that the black paternal is the palimpsestic text underwriting the narrative in Quicksand make of Helga Crane’s journey a quest in the name of the father, giving rise, of course, to the question: what about the name of the mother?

4. Mama’s Maybe: The Name of the Mother and White Maternal Present Absence in Quicksand

Helga Crane sat alone in her room.... She visualized her [mother] now, sad, cold, and —yes, remote. The tragic cruelties of the years had left her a little pathetic, a little hard, and a little unapproachable. (Quicksand 1, 23)

27 Her name was Karen Nilssen, [A] fair Scandanavian girl in love with life, with love, with passion, dreaming and risking all in one blind surrender. A cruel sacrifice. In forgetting all but love she had forgotten, or perhaps never known, that some things the world never forgives. But as Helga knew she had remembered, or had learned in suffering and longing all the rest of her life. (23)

28 Karen Nilssen is Helga’s mother. Her name, inscribed but once in the novel and then immediately “erased,” makes a palimpsest of the text, both of Helga Crane’s story and of Helga herself.

29 In a critical scene early in the novel, the only scene in which the name “Karen Nilssen” is spoken, Helga meets her Uncle Peter’s new wife for the first time. Helga speaks her mother’s name both to identify herself and to affirm her relationship to her uncle. In an absurd, yet wrenchingly cruel exchange, the name of the mother fails her: [Peter Nilssen’s wife] came forward murmuring in a puzzled voice: “[You’re] his niece, did you say?” “Yes, Helga Crane. My mother was his sister, Karen Nilssen.” “Oh, yes, I remember about you now. I’d forgotten for a moment. Well, he isn’t exactly your uncle, is he? Your mother wasn’t married, was she? I mean to your father?” “I—I don’t know,” stammered the girl, feeling pushed down to the uttermost depths of ignominy. “Of course she wasn’t.” The clear, low voice held a positive note. (28)

30 The moment is evocative. The mother’s name—“Karen Nilssen”—is spoken, but not only does it fail Helga, rather than rendering her “legitimate,” the name points to her possible illegitimacy and denies her claim not only to her uncle, but in a significant sense, to her mother as well. In this scene, Larsen underscores the tenuousness of Helga’s quest for a relational subjectivity, as the maternal, the first relational site and the supposed source of the feminine’s power and generative potential, is negated. For with the “aunt’s” utterance, the name “Karen Nilssen,” is arguably erased from the daughter’s text. With this erasure of the name of the mother, the daughter’s text

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becomes a narrative written upon and around a present absence, that absence of the maternal feminine.

31 Indeed, by allowing Karen Nilssen only a shadow presence, the text itself seems to obey the injunction imposed upon Helga when she arrives at the next point in her journey, Harlem. Mrs. Hayes-Rore, her benefactress, cautions her: And, by the by, I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand.... what others don’t know can’t hurt you. I’ll just tell Anne that you’re a friend of mine whose mother’s dead. That’ll place you well enough and it’s all true.... She can fill in the gaps to suit herself and anyone curious enough to ask. (41)

32 With this, Mrs. Hayes Rore makes Helga an accomplice in the disappearing of her mother, and the most curious textual “gaps” develop around the enigmatic present absence of Karen Nilssen, both as Helga’s mother and as the signifier for the maternal feminine.

33 Certainly Karen Nilssen’s virtual absence from her daughter’s narrative holds significance in and of itself, paralleling as it does her absence from Helga’s life in a way that must serve as the critical point of departure for an examination of the failure of the relational in the novel. Karen Nilssen’s name appears but once in the novel whereupon it is immediately erased; her story, however, appears twice, but in both cases, she is less the subject in her own narrative than a figure in the stories others tell. There is the “tragic” tale of the “fair Scandinavian girl,” a romantic, even melodramatic, Martyred Madonna tragedy, refracted through the lens of Helga’s memory, revealing the daughter creating a narrative in an effort to understand and, thus, lay claim to an otherwise unfathomable, “unapproachable” mother. Later, when Helga leaves Harlem for Copenhagen, her aunt Katrina, Karen’s sister, casts her into another story, that of the Devouring Mother. Your mother was a fool. Yes, she was! If she’d come home after she married, or after you were born, or even after your father—er—went off like that, it would have been different. If she’d left you when she was here... [But] she wanted to keep you, she insisted on it... she loved you so much, she said.—And so she made you unhappy. Mothers, I suppose, are like that. Selfish. (78)

34 In both narratives, the Martyred Madonna and the Devouring Mother, the maternal feminine emerges as a force of negation, turned inward to create an emotionally and relationally damning despair or expressed outwardly in “selfish,” all consuming mothering, rather than as a source of powerful, generative potential. Indeed the enigmatic present absence of Karen Nillsen in her daughter’s narrative and of the maternal principle for the greater part of the novel serves as a critical point of departure for an examination of the maternal as a force in the failed formation of a fully realized relational female subjectivity.

35 But before Helga Crane, there is Nella Larsen. In his 2006 award winning monograph In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, George Hutchinson illuminates the life of a writer long considered the “mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,” shedding new light not only on the biographical facts of Nella Larsen’s life as a biracial individual coming of age during an “era when ‘race’ trumped” all relationships, even those of family, but also on the effects these experiences had on her psychologically, especially on her ability to forge a relational life.4 He contends that “tangled feelings of love and abandonment, anger and self loathing, empathy, shame and powerlessness stamped Larsen’s emotional development in childhood and shaped the attachment problems

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that would affect her until she died.”5 Given her socially and psychically untenable subject position as the “too dark to pass” child in a white family and the sense of isolation and, ultimately, abandonment, that attended it, it’s little wonder that Larsen’s autobiographically-informed fictional narratives can be read as sites of relational failure.6 (Manora 1)

36 Indeed, relational failure is at the center of Quicksand, creating the critical textual lacuna and sourcing the narrative’s centripetal force. Larsen situates a present absence at the center of the novel, using it as the space in which to conduct a gendered exploration of the modernist failure of the relational, specifically in the formation of black/biracial female subjectivity.7 This space, this present-absence, is the literal and figurative maternal feminine. “Larsen was always on the cusp of the modernist transformation... just as she always was positioned or deliberately positioned herself on the precarious racial boundary that recent studies suggest was crucial to literary ” (Hutchinson 11-12). As Hutchinson notes, Larsen and her work engaged the boundaries of race, but her work actually serves to disrupt those racial boundaries; her two novellas feature mixed race protagonists whose very existences are transgressive, representing the permeability of all such boundaries. Helga Crane, like Clare Kendry in Passing, is the product of an interracial union. But, unlike the mixed race characters most frequently depicted in Harlem Renaissance literature, including the speaker in the Langston Hughes poem that Larsen uses as Quicksand’s epigraph, products of unions between white men and black women, unions that were not infrequently in fact sexual assault/rapes, Helga’s mother is white and her father, black. The physical site of racial transgression, psychically racked by seemingly irreducible binary of “black” and “white,” Larsen’s mixed race characters, in keeping with the critical project of the Harlem Renaissance’s vanguard, served to question, if not upend, the racial categories, deconstructing them so as to renegotiate the place of African Americans in America’s social order.

37 To read Quicksand simply as a tragic mulatto tale is critically shortsighted, however. Such a reading neglects the intricate interplay of race and gender in the text and in Larsen’s treatment of female subjectivity. It is this interplay that makes the novel both a canonical work of the Harlem Renaissance and a quintessentially modernist text.

38 In Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, Marianne DeKoven argues for a gendered reading of modernist texts, a reading that explores the sharply divergent manners in which male and female modernist writers encountered what Richard Elman and Charles Feidelson described as Modernism’s “ of contradictions, its apocalyptic sense of crisis and belief in a new beginning” (8). DeKoven’s study proves an elaboration upon Elman and Feidelson’s pronouncement, as she asserts that even as modernist writers were engaged in the project of interrogating social orders and political systems, moving toward the “wholesale revision of culture,” they experienced an anxiety, an “irreducible self contradiction” that she terms “sous rature” (DeKoven 25). But, according to DeKoven, male modernists and female modernists experienced this moment of cultural upheaval in markedly different ways. “[M]ale modernists generally feared the loss of their own hegemony implicit in such wholesale revision of culture, while female modernists generally feared punishment for their dangerous desire for such revision” (DeKoven 20).

39 DeKoven’s analysis of the manner in which modernist writers work out the gendered dialectic of Modernism in their narratives turns upon her location of the feminine-

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maternal/maternal-feminine as the recurring site for the negotiation of this dialectic. She posits that this principle, which she imagines as the force of fluidity and the rush of water, serves as the source of the feminine’s power and generative potential; the maternal feminine is, then, a creative force, one to be reckoned with or, as she argues, subjugated and appropriated. For it is the maternal feminine, with its capacity to create or to engender life, which serves as both the threat to the “patriarchal hegemony of reason” and as the means through which the feminine is controlled, “subdued into an icy reflection of masculine self-representation if it is to maintain itself” (DeKoven 32).8 DeKoven’s (en)gendered modernism offers a lens for a critical reading of the curious present absence of the maternal feminine in Larsen’s Quicksand.

40 Nella Larsen’s presence and place within the cultural and literary milieu emerging with the convergence of American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance is clear; she was very much a part of the black elite during the Renaissance, partly because of her marriage to noted physicist Elmer Imes, but also socially and professionally through her association with such luminaries of the period as Walter White and Jessie Fauset. Her friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a white writer and an important figure on the Harlem Renaissance scene, led to the publication of her first novel, Quicksand. That novel gained her the attention and praise of the cultural leaders and critics of the day. As Deborah McDowell notes in her introduction to Quicksand, W.E.B. DuBois called it the “best piece of fiction that Negro American has produced since the heyday of Chesnut” and Alaine Locke regarded it as a critically important social document that took black fiction into theretofore uncharted territory. Larsen went on to write a well-received second novel, Passing, and to win a Guggenheim for her work in 1930, assuring her place as a member of the Harlem Renaissance black intelligentsia and literati.

41 Larsen’s recreation of the milieu and manners of the New Negro, her depiction of distinctly middle class protagonists whose life stories seem to be determined primarily by their bourgeois affiliations and aspirations, clearly situates Quicksand and Passing in the Harlem Renaissance canon. The broader cultural moment and literary movement that was American Modernism also serves as a rich context for reading Larsen’s work. Quicksand’s Helga Crane becomes more and more a Prufrockian character as the novel progresses, the quintessential alienated figure traveling across a fragmented modern landscape in search of place, incapable of relationship. As an unapologetic striver making her way on enigmatic beauty and a willingness to transgress the rules of society, Clare Kendry in Passing has much in common with Willa Cather’s Lost Lady, Marian Forrester. The characters in both Larsen novels would not be out of place in the dark, psychological landscape of Djuana Barnes’ Nightwood. In her treatment of female subjectivity and outlaw female sexuality, Larsen is clearly in the company of these modern women writers. And like the female protagonists in Cather’s and Barnes’ novels, who move from city to frontier and across various city’s nightscapes respectively, Helga’s modernity is marked by her near constant motion. But Helga’s travels are of a different sort than Marian’s and Robin’s. As Larsen relates early on in the novel: “When possible, [Helga Crane] preferred to flee. That was all.” Helga’s tendency to flee defines the entirety of the novel. Tate posits this flight as being towards paternal identification, but Marianne Hirsch lays the groundwork for a compelling alternative reading in The Mother/Daughter Plot: “[In] conventional nineteenth-century plots of the European and American tradition the fantasy that controls the female family romance is the desire for the heroine’s singularity based on a disidentification from the fate of women, especially women” (10). But this process of

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maternal denial moves inexorably towards affirmation. “In modernist plots, this wish is supplemented by the heroine’s artistic ambitions and the desire for distinction which now, however, needs to include affiliation with both male and female models” (10).

42 Quicksand, an early twentieth-century text, serves as an intermediary work, one that incorporates the transition from the conventional nineteenth-century romance to the modernist narrative. Helga Crane, the transitional daughter-artist figure, moves through disidentification to affiliation with and, finally, tragic consumption by the maternal feminine.

43 In Larsen’s text, the maternal feminine comes to serve as the quicksand for which the novel is named. The principle is prefigured by Karen Nilssen who is simultaneously a site of maternal absence and presence in her daughter’s narrative. Through Karen’s paradoxical present absence, Larsen reveals the way in which maternity negates female subjectivity in women’s narratives. Karen is voiceless, nearly nameless, represented only in relation to others, alternately cast as the abandoned lover or the distant, selfish mother. She serves as a marker for that space around which Helga must negotiate in her movement toward her own subjectivity. That movement is both away from the subject positions that damned her mother, the conventional constructions of femininity and female sexuality, and toward a subject position that her mother failed to embody, a liberatory, yet relational subjectivity.

44 While modernist women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century crafted narratives that centered on the nature of women’s lives, feminist psychoanalytic theorists of the second half of the century began to examine the nature of women’s . Recognizing that drive models of human development and subject formation were based almost exclusively on studies of the psychological development of males, especially in relation to the father, they began to formulate new models and for the study of the development of women. Working with object relations, closely associated with relational models, their work explored the gendered, specifically relational nature of women’s becoming. Feminist psychoanalytic theorist Nancy Chodorow, one of the leading figures in the crafting and articulation of these female- centered models of development, posited that elementally different relationships with and to the mother create developmental processes for males and females that are so distinct as to ultimately yield altogether different psychological beings. “The selves of women and men tend to be constructed differently—women’s self more in relation and involved with boundary negotiations, separation and connection, men’s self more distanced and based on defensively firm boundaries and denials of self-other connection” (Chodorow 2). Chodorow anchors the female child’s developmental process in the identification of the child with the mother. In focusing on the mother, feminist object relations breaks in a profound way from traditional male-centered models of development which are invested in the power of the father. In these traditional models, notably Freud’s monolithic mythology-psychology, the Oedipal Complex, the mother is allowed but one critical moment in the developmental lives of her offspring, and, then, only her male offspring. In the resolution of the Oedipal Complex, the male child not only confronts and resolves his desire for the mother, he separates from her, not only to identify with the father, but to become an autonomous being. He achieves in this process, the desired outcome of the identity formation process according to traditional Western ideals; he forms an individuated self. In the process, the relational complex itself is, as Chodorow puts it, “smashed to pieces” (156).

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45 Object relations theory, on the other hand, posits that it is the relationship with the mother that creates this individuated male person. The male child experiences himself as “different from” rather than the “same as” the first other, the mother, and thus develops a sense of self that is defined by separation and autonomy. The female child, however, experiences herself as the same as the mother, continuous with her and, through her, with the objective world. Unlike the individualized subject that emerges from drive theory oriented models and even from object relations theory models when the subject is male, for the female subject the processes of attachment, identification, and affiliation lead to a relational self. In a way that is in direct contrast with drive theories’ individuated self, created through and the negation of identification, for the female subject, a relational subject, the very experience of connection and relationship with others creates and defines subjectivity.

46 In the case of Quicksand, however, the theory does not hold. Nothing if not an alienated, detached individual, Helga Crane embarks upon a quest that is arguably defined by her desire for and inability to experience a sense of relatedness with others. Such a seemingly damaged subjectivity suggests that the process of attachment, identification, and affiliation with the mother was at best a flawed and at worst, a failed one for Helga Crane.

47 “Helga Crane sat alone in her room” (Quicksand 1). The novel opens on Helga at Naxos, a school for African Americans in the New South, and follows her on her journey to Chicago and, soon thereafter, to Harlem where she lives for a while before proceeding on to Copenhagen for a time then back to Harlem and finally to rural Alabama. Helga’s quest might well be read as a liberatory one. From the novel’s opening chapter, Larsen seemingly appropriates the male-biased quest script that allows men to experience the process of defining themselves as both a guiding principle in their lives and as a physical journey. Men are allowed physical mobility during their psychic quest toward self-awareness and self-definition. Women, on the other hand, are expected to experience their quests in a strictly psychic sense; any quest they would undertake must first take other people’s needs and expectations as the primary consideration. Larsen wrote during a period when any other depiction of black women was, in Trudier Harris’s words, literary taboo. “Portraits of black women in the early to mid-twentieth century depict them as generally long suffering, bound by the structures of the church or the men in their lives, and not overly concerned about any urges to self-realization and self-fulfillment.... Sacrifice was the key trait for black women” (Harris 495). Women, according to their quest script, are to define themselves in relation to others, discovering their sources of strength, acceptance, and redemption in their families, in their communities, and in their faith.

48 These scripted expectations are not met in Larsen’s novel. In Quicksand, Helga Crane defies the personal quest script first and foremost by taking her search for fulfillment as the central motivating factor in her life. For most of the novel, she does not allow anyone or anything to keep her from defining and redefining herself in different cities, in different countries. This is the second way that Helga defies the female quest script; she makes her quest a mobile one. By moving from Naxos, to Chicago, to New York, she experiences her spiritual search as a physical journey. Larsen, then, infiltrates a decidedly-male domain by situating her female protagonist in the picaresque quest narrative. Such a reading may be somewhat misguided, however. Helga’s quest is shaped by a certain autonomy, but that autonomy is defined by her aloneness, and her

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quest is, albeit unconsciously, a quest for community, a quest toward a relational subjectivity.

49 Helga defies the implicit edict in women’s quest narratives that requires women to experience their quest psychically, rather than physically, within the contexts of the families and communities to which they belong, not necessarily by choice, but by virtue of origin. Helga’s journey takes her across psychic and material landscapes, yes, but while it’s tempting to read this mobility as liberating, in defiance of social and cultural scripts and an assertion of , that freedom, paradoxically, signals a lack. Helga has neither family nor community to call her own, so she simply does not have the option of engaging in her quest within such spaces. Her denial of the female quest script, then, is not a matter of choice, but a symptom of her lack of place.

50 For Helga, this lack of place is an unfortunate birthright, a consequence of illegitimacy and abandonment. Like the author who created her, Helga is the daughter of a Scandinavian and a black father. Helga is obviously uncertain about the facts of her birth. She rejects another character’s praise of her dignity and breeding with a seemingly self-loathing remark: “The joke is on you.... my father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were married” (21). While Helga later regrets the “insidious implications” of her statement, others are only interested in the implications of illegitimacy. In the critical scene wherein Helga encounters her uncle’s new wife who, in a desire to deny any ties to her husband has to his black niece, his sister’s daughter, applies a rather hysterical and absurd bit of reasoning—if her mother wasn’t married to her father, then her mother’s brother isn’t really her uncle—to negate a socially untenable relationship, severing the ties between her husband and his niece, thus repudiating and dismissing Helga by alluding to Helga’s possible illegitimacy.

51 Helga feels deeply this uncertainty about the nature of her birth. The issue of abandonment is much more clear. As she herself says, her father deserted her mother. Later her aunt, her mother’s sister, mentions, with obvious embarrassment, her father “er—[going] off like that.” Once her mother, emotionally absent in life, dies, Helga is abandoned by her white relations, with the exception of Uncle Peter, who sends her to a school for blacks and, for all intents and purposes, forgets her. For Helga, her possible illegitimacy and resounding lack of familial ties account for everything: “No family.... If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections you were tolerated but you didn’t ‘belong” (8). This profound lack of family, of “belonging,” drives Helga’s quest for a relational subjectivity.

52 Because of her lack of legitimacy, Helga is not only socially displaced, but culturally disconnected, as well. Helga has no relationship with or connection to a black community for much of her life. She is raised, albeit as an outcast, in a white family. Not until her mother’s death when she is fifteen does Helga come into real contact with other black people when her uncle sends her to a “school for Negroes, where for the first time she could breathe freely, where she discovered that because one was dark, one was not necessarily loathsome, and could therefore, consider oneself without repulsion” (23). But, as is the case for Helga throughout her life, happiness “[eclipses] always into painful isolation.” As she grew older, she became gradually aware of a difference between herself and the girls about her. They had mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters.... They went home for vacations.... They visited each other.... She was glad almost when these

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most peaceful years which she had known came to an end. She had been happier, but still horribly lonely. (24)

53 Helga is ever and always aware of this difference between herself and others. It is her awareness of being different, more than the difference itself, that so thoroughly sets her apart. This difference, what Helga is so aware of, between herself and the girls about her, the source of Helga’s sense of herself, and her failure to psychologically or socially develop a relational or communal self, comes down to a single fact: “they had mothers.”; Helga does not, and it’s the absence of the mother around which the daughter’s narrative turns.

54 As Karen Nilssen emerges as a present absence, by turns an erasure, a gap, and a dark maternal archetype in Helga’s narrative, Larsen seemingly decries the maternal feminine as the source of potential and power for women, instead rendering motherhood a text which holds the potential to negate female subjectivity. Voiceless, nearly nameless, represented only in relation to others, cast as abandoned lover and distant, selfish mother, Karen Nilssen becomes a cipher, a signifier, a marker for that space, the space of the maternal, that Helga herself must negotiate in the process of becoming a self defining subject and, too, in her quest toward a relational subjectivity.

55 Helga’s subconscious search for a subject position which encompasses the relational moves her through many communities, each one seemingly disallowing difference and requiring conformity, especially conformity to gender imperatives, in exchange for the communal. Her constant changing of milieu might well be read as a series of movements away from the conventional scripts which so failed her mother, a quest, then, not in search of the father, nor in the name of the mother, but a journey away from the space of the maternal feminine.

56 In the final section of Quicksand, however, Helga does become a mother, three times over, in the course of twenty months. Her hasty marriage and move to the rural South having propelled her into what Kimberly Monda refers to as “a nightmare of domestic self-sacrifice” (Monda 23). Helga finds herself spiritually and psychically spent, exhausted from a continuous series of pregnancies and childbirths and, too, from her role as mother; “the children use her up” (Larsen 123). In labor with her fourth child, she suffers a physical, emotional, and mental collapse. “While she had gone down into that appalling blackness of , the ballast of her brain had got loose and she hovered for a long time somewhere in that delightful borderland on the edge of unconsciousness, an enchanted and blissful place where peace and incredible quiet encompassed her” (128). When she returns from this borderland, she looks at her life and sees it as a “quagmire,” a “bog” into which she has allowed herself to slip. The text’s final tableau suggests that she has indeed slipped, falling into a literal and figurative space from which she will not escape: “And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child” (135).

57 Hortense Thornton writes, “[Helga’s] womb entraps her so much that through childbearing she is left a tragic, lifeless shell” (300). As the novel concludes, along with Helga Crane’s quest, the womb becomes synonymous with the “quagmire,” the “bog,” the titular quicksand, and it becomes clear that they are all merely ways of naming the space of the maternal feminine.

58 And, as the novel closes, after having given birth to “two great healthy boys,” Helga, herself, becomes the mother of a girl child, a “delicate” daughter, “not so healthy,” nor,

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more significantly, “so loved” (Larsen 123). With this, the maternal feminine fails for a new generation, falling away to reveal the present absence that has been bequeathed by Karen Niilsen to her daughter, who passes it on. Like her mother before her, this girl child will have to negotiate a relational female subjectivity in the absence of the mother whose presence would serve as the Urtext for her becoming, for, as Quicksand concludes, Helga Crane is subsumed by the space of the maternal feminine and succumbs to her own erasure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chodorow, Nancy. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Press, 1989. Print.

The Color Purple. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf Whoopie Goldberg, Danny Glover, Margaret Avery, Oprah Winfrey. Amblin Entertainment, 1985. Film.

Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: State University Press, 1994. Print.

DeKoven, Marianne. Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism. Princeton: Press, 1991. Print.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth- Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Print.

Ellman, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr. The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Print.

Harris, Trudier. “Taboo.” Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Print.

Hostetler, Ann E. “The of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” PMLA 105.1 (1990): 35-46. Print.

Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Print.

Johnson, Barbara. “The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut.” The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 37-60. Print.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Print.

Larson, Charles R. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand and The Stories. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. Print.

---. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. Print.

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Manora, Yolanda. “The Name of the Mother: Modernity and Maternity and the (Bi)Racialized Failure of Relational Female Subjectivity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 8.4 (October 2008). Web.

Marks, Carole and Diana Edkins. The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rulebreakers of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Crown Publishers, 1999. Print.

McDowell, Deborah. “Introduction.” Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. ix-xxxi. Print.

Monda, Kimberly. “Self-Delusion and Self Sacrifice in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” African American Review 31.1 (Spring1997): 23-39. Print.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64-81. Print.

Tate, Claudia. “Desire and Death in Quicksand, by Nella Larsen.” American Literary History 7.2 (1995): 234-60. Print.

Thornton, Hortense. “Sexism as Quagmire: Nella Larsen’s.” CLA Journal 16 (March 1973): 285-301. Print.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Modern Novel, 1914-1945. Boston: Twayne Publisher, 1990. Print.

Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Print.

Washington, Mary Helen. “Teaching ‘Black Eyed Susans’: An Approach to Teaching Black Women Writers. Black American Literature Forum 11.1 (Spring 1977): 20-24. Print.

White, Evelyn C. “Passing Glory: The Re-Examined Life of a Harlem Renaissance Luminary.” Washington Post 21 May 2006: BW14. Print.

NOTES

1. Famously used as the title and point of departure for Hortense Spiller’s landmark 1987 essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Baby” is an American proverb or adage used, in part, to express or cast doubt upon the paternity and thus legitimacy of a child. 2. While the mother-child dyad is understood to be the fulcrum for the mirror stage, arguably, for the mixed race child, specifically one of African descent, this developmental process cannot be fully realized with the white parent, regardless of whether that parent is the mother, because s/he cannot serve as a true mirror for a person of color; the black parent, then, be it the mother or the father, is the necessary mirror, one who can reflect and therefore validate the child, allowing for the formation of a subjectivity informed by their shared racial identity. 3. Walker outlines this historical overview of black women’s progression from suspension through assimilation to emergence in an interview with Mary Helen Washington for the latter’s article “Teaching ‘Black Eyed Susans’: An Approache to the Study of Black Women Writers” which appears in the landmark collection All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982). 4. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line was named 2006 Booklist Editor’s Choice, received the 2007 Christian Gauss Award for literary scholarship or criticism from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was recognized in both the 2006 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award Competition (Honorable Mention, Biography/Autobiography) and the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Finalist, Biography).

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5. Quoted in Evelyn C. White’s “Passing Glory: The Re-Examined Life of a Harlem Renaissance Luminary.” 6. Before Hutchinson’s treatise, Thadious Davis’s Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Revealed was the literary biography of record on Larsen. Her monograph, the first of its kind upon its publication in 1994, was long held to be the authoritative source along with, to a lesser extent, the work of Larsen editor and biographer, Charles Larson. Hutchinson, writing in the “Introduction” to In Search of Nella Larsen, noted that, despite the critical reception their biographical works, especially Davis’s, received, “at critical junctures the evidence seemed lacking and the conclusions unwarranted,” especially as related to Larsen’s autobiographical accounts and her racial self-positioning (3); his project is both a literal search—his location of and use of archival records is remarkable—and a figurative one, as he attempts to locate a figure who “like her most important fictional characters, nearly always occupied a space between black and white, by necessity and by choice.... That space, her fiction itself testifies, is hidden” (9). 7. Helga’s individual relational failure may also be read as a cultural analogue for the broader communal failure that Larsen locates in the black elite’s inability to forge authentic relational and communal ties with the Folk, the black masses for whom they were notionally responsible, and their mannered and moribund approach to renegotiating African American identity and social place. 8. In DeKoven’s study, she pairs modernist texts, one male authored with one female authored, beginning with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” to examine the manner in which modernist writers work out the (en)gendered dialectic of modernism in their narratives. Despite her attention to race in readings of such texts as Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” and Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus, her study does not include a consideration of a comparable pair of African American modernist texts. The coupling strategy is, however, an effective and engaging one for exploring the gender dialectic at work in African American modernist texts, and the “companion piece” to this study of modernity and maternity in Larsen’s Quicksand is my 2008 essay, published in Obsidian III, “‘She was in the family way’: The of Modernity and Maternity in Jean Toomer’s Cane.”

ABSTRACTS

In his 2006 award winning monograph In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, George Hutchinson shed new light not only on the biographical facts of Nella Larsen’s life as a biracial individual coming of age during an “era when ‘race’ trumped” all relationships, even those of family, but also on the effects these experiences had on her psychologically, especially on her ability to forge a relational life. Given her socially and psychically untenable subject position as the “too dark to pass” child in a white family and the sense of isolation and, ultimately, abandonment, that attended it, it’s little wonder that Larsen’s autobiographically-informed fictional narratives can be read as sites of relational failure. In this article, I locate the narrative absences at the center of Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, and examine the manner in which they source the relational failures that render the protagonist, Helga Crane, incapable of fulfilling her promise as, in Deborah McDowell’s words, a “daring and unconventional heroine” (xi). Not only does the palimpsestic presence of the black paternal impede Helga’s quest for social legitimacy and place, the present absence of the white maternal, arguably a more critical lacuna, serves as

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the experiential and psychological source of Helga’s fundamental “lack somewhere”: her failure to develop a relational subjectivity.

INDEX

Keywords: Nella Larsen, Quicksand, race, gender, paternity, fathers, maternity, mothers, Harlem Renaissance, American Modernism, Claudia Tate, Alice Walker, The Color Purple

AUTHOR

YOLANDA M. MANORA Yolanda M. Manora, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at The University of Alabama where she is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Gender and Race Studies and a Senior Fellow in the Blount Scholars Program. An Americanist, she focuses on issues related to race, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity in the works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century women writers of color.

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“His cramped and claustrophobic brain”: Confinement and Freedom in John Wray’s Lowboy

Pascale Antolin

In a famous 2009 article entitled “The Rise of the Neuronovel,” American critic Marco Roth writes that in contemporary Anglo-American fiction “the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain.” To illustrate his statement, he then quotes a long list of examples making it clear how widespread the phenomenon is: Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). (Roth) While Roth is said to have coined the word “neuronovel,” he decries its development by way of comparison with the genre’s predecessors, particularly the stream of consciousness writers of the Modernist period like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In an earlier essay, “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction” (2008), Gary Johnson makes a somewhat similar, albeit less negative, statement: While my focus in this essay will be on the works of Lodge and Powers, a growing list of narrative works […] follows suit in foregrounding the emerging fields of neuroscience and neurobiology. These works, I propose, constitute an emerging subgenre of literature that can provide us with a glimpse of how authors are responding to scientific advances concerning the nature of human consciousness. (Johnson 170-171) Whether they are called “neuronovels” (Roth), “neuronarratives” (Johnson), “cognitive fiction” (Tabbi), “neurological realism” (Harris) or “syndrome novels”1 (Lustig and

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Peacock), the defining feature of these works is that “they place neuroscientific discourse center stage and use it as a means of expression consubstantial to the narrative rather than as an element of the storyworld” (Ortega and Vidal 328). For British scholar Jason Tougaw in his 2015 essay “Touching Brains,” these works “revisit the representation of consciousness in response to developments in brain research” (Tougaw 339). While “neuronovels come in many forms,” Tougaw adds, [they] reflect and challenge cultural assumptions about neurological difference; experiment with literary conventions to foreground the bewildering complexity of relations between brain, body and world; and challenge the equation of consciousness and interiority, suggesting that conscious experience is dynamic and relational, emerging through interactions between an organism (or protagonist) and its environment […]. (Tougaw 339-340) In their 2013 article, “Brains in Literature/Literature in the Brain,” Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal express a similar view and point out what they call the “ambivalence” of neuronovels: “The ambivalence resides in the fact that the apparent assertion of cerebral solipsism2 coexists with a more contextual and phenomenological view about the essence of the human.” In other words, they “challenge the accepted view that neuronovels inevitably convey cerebral ” (Ortega and Vidal 332). For them, neuronovels “stage and […] question cerebral solipsism” (Ortega and Vidal 343) as they focus on characters’ interactions with their environment and social relations. John Wray’s third novel,3 Lowboy (2009) is a case in point. Wray gives a voice to a sixteen-year old paranoid schizophrenic protagonist with a fascination, even an obsession, with the New York subway, which is described in detail4 throughout the book, and every description seemingly emerges as a mirror image of the boy’s mental condition. Not only is the ambivalence mentioned by Ortega and Vidal at the heart of the novel, but ambivalence in the broadest sense of the word is a major characteristic of the book. Will Heller, alias Lowboy, has just escaped from a psychiatric hospital and is pursued through subway tunnels and city streets both by a black detective, “Ali Lateef—born Rufus Lamarck White” (22), and by the boy’s mother, Yda Heller, nicknamed Violet by her son after her favorite color (31). All three major protagonists are equally characterized by a seemingly uncertain, if not ambivalent, identity.5 Wray tried to use a first person singular narrative6—as he said in an interview, “I began the book in the first person and then realized that would make it a very difficult book to follow.”7 Instead, he employed an omniscient third person narrator and internal focalization, resulting in a form of interior monologue that gives the reader access to Lowboy’s train of thought. The boy’s viewpoint, however, only prevails in thirteen out of the book’s twenty-two sections.8 The other nine sections are focalized either by the police detective or by the adolescent’s mother, alternately. The ambivalence perceptible in the characters’ identities and the narrative structure of the book also characterizes its genre. While Lowboy borrows from conventions of the coming of age novel and the initiatory journey, it also revises them. Similarly, the book is “wrapped in conventions of detective fiction but revising these conventions in fundamental ways” (Tougaw 336). Ambivalence turns out to affect all the major aspects of the book. In The Language of Psychoanalysis, French psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define ambivalence as “the simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings in the relation to a single object—especially the coexistence of love and hate.” They also explain that “the term of ambivalence was borrowed by Freud from Bleuler,

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who introduced it” because he considered ambivalence “a major symptom of schizophrenia” (Laplanche and Pontalis 26). For Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist and Freud’s contemporary, the term “schizophrenia” (from the Greek skhizein, to split, and phren, mind) represented “what for him constituted the fundamental symptom of these psychoses:9 Spaltung (dissociation, splitting)” (Laplanche and Pontalis 408). It is as if to reinforce the coherence of the book threatened by an increasingly delusional hero- focalizer—whose mother-focalizer turns out to be schizophrenic as well in section twenty-one (246)—Wray used a major characteristic of schizophrenia, ambivalence, as a fundamental symbolic pattern in the book. However, the choice of a psychoanalytic concept may seem to be debatable in a so-called neuronovel, privileging a neurological over a psychological approach. Thereby, the ambivalence that prevails throughout the “meticulously constructed novel” (Bock) may also be interpreted as a symbolic representation of “the split-hemisphere structure of the brain, and as the brain seeks complementary relationships between the opposed capabilities in each hemisphere,” the novel’s opposites “might be seen to seek a similar symbiotic relationship” (Burn 41) —hence a questioning of opposed pairings such as black and white, male and female, healthy and unhealthy, confinement and freedom. “A critique on established medical practices for treating mental illness,” according to Tougaw (342), Lowboy particularly challenges confinement to institutions and the medication that goes with it, that is, mostly tranquilizers—a certain number of which are named in the novel (28, 30, 42, 69, 174, 193), thus confirming its verisimilitude. Instead, Wray introduces escape and freedom by subverting the major diegetic references, space and time, manipulating the genre or rather genres of the book, and even narrative representation through Lowboy’s descriptions of his environment and the people around him. Wray thus turns the main characteristic of the protagonist’s mental illness, ambivalence, into a unifying, centripetal device in the fiction. In order to analyze the role of ambivalence in the novel, I shall focus, therefore, on time and space, genres, and eventually representation.

Time and space

At first sight, not only is the novel confined within a very short timespan—twenty-four hours in the life of William Heller—but this confinement is underlined by an anaphoric echo between the opening sentence of the novel (“On November 11 Lowboy ran to catch a train” [3]) and the concluding sentence (“On November 12 the world ended by fire” [258]). While the first sentence is merely descriptive, the narrator describing Lowboy’s action as he is entering the diegesis, the last sentence is far more ambiguous: it refers to Lowboy’s conviction that “the air is getting hotter every day” (47) and “the world’s going to die in ten hours” (17). But Lowboy seems to die in the previous, that is, penultimate sentence of the book—“He made a face and took a slow step backward” (258). The ultimate sentence, therefore, suggests a narrative metalepsis,10 that is, a paradoxical contamination between the world of the telling and the world of the told. Only a narrator suddenly turning as delusional as the eponymous hero can make the final statement. The book is also meant to represent a special parenthesis in William’s short life, a limited period of freedom when he is on the run after escaping from his institution, the ironically named “Bellavista Clinic” (27)—“the establishment whose name means Pretty

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View in Spanish” (172). This short timespan plays a key dramatic role: it creates a sense of suspense and emergency, or rather a double sense of emergency. First, the police detective is afraid Lowboy might hurt someone: “[…] time is very tight. His medication is at a negligible level, he’s in a hazardous environment, and his psychoses tend to be violent” (77). Second, Lowboy believes the world is doomed to disappear if he does not save it.11 Both, ironically, expect the same violent, destructive outcome. Nevertheless, an occasional prolepsis or analepsis can cause time to expand forward or backward and, thereby, undermine diegetic time. In the first section, for instance, paragraph five stands apart: the narrative turns prophetic as suggested by the use of the conditional—“Everyone in the car would later agree that the boy seemed in very high spirits” (4). In other words, the internal focalization implemented in the opening paragraph of the section (“He was careful not to touch them” [3]) is interrupted— paragraph five refers to a future that Lowboy does not belong to. In the same section, an analepsis refers to Will’s period of confinement in Bellavista—hence the use of the pluperfect—but the focalization is not affected: “He’d been a cosmonaut for eighteen months, a castaway, an amnesiac, the veteran of an arbitrary war. The world had gotten older while he’d been away. Away at school, regressing” (18). Analepses are generally more common in the sections focalized by the mother since she is the only one in the book who knows, and can talk about, Lowboy’s past and the beginning of his illness—section four is a case in point. Section thirteen, however, is also a long analepsis—Lowboy’s first person narrative of his experience in the Bellavista Clinic. As for section seventeen, it consists of a phone conversation between Will and his mother in the present of the diegesis. As far as time is concerned, therefore, Wray creates and underlines a very strict time frame for the sake of speed and suspense, but undermines it repeatedly. Space is no less ambivalent than time in the novel, if only because it consists in two major sites: aboveground (the police station, the streets, the mother’s flat) and underground (the tunnels where Lowboy spends much of the day, and much of the novel). Instead of confinement and exposition to dirt, darkness and noise, the tunnels by contrast represent a space of freedom—“I can make jokes again, Lowboy thought […]. I never could have made jokes yesterday” (5)—and a safe heaven for the boy: “He was hidden again, as safe as he’d ever be, down in the lightless, airless bowels of the world. The hum all around was a sweet thing to hear, gathering as the wind gathered, and it seemed as though it had something to tell him” (75). No matter how unpleasant (“lightless, airless bowels of the world”), the tunnels are described as protective, organic, nearly womblike, by Lowboy—in other words, they suggest a living creature, hence the interpretation of the noise as a “hum” and a message. From this point of view, the first section is programmatic: no sooner does the novel begin than the hero appears to be confined within a subway car. Yet his confinement actually turns out to be a successful escape from “Skull and Bones, his state-appointed enemies” (3), actually members of the clinic staff who end up locked out of the car. The ambivalence of the tunnels is underlined by Lowboy himself very early in the book: There was only one tunnel in the city but it was wound and snarled together like telephone wire, threaded back on itself so it seemed to have no beginning and no end. Ouroboros was the name of the dragon that ate its own tail and the tunnel was Ouroboros also. He called it that. It seemed self-contained, a closed system, but in fact it was the opposite of closed. There were openings spaced out along its length like gills along the body of an eel, just big enough for a person to slip through. (11, my emphasis)

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Lowboy’s description of the subway tunnels as “wound and snarled together,” both closed and open, referential space and mythical creature—also suggests a labyrinth,12 which is ambivalent by definition. In his 2008 book, Fundamental Trends in City Development, Italian scholar Giovanni Maciocco writes that the labyrinth “must simultaneously allow access to the center by a sort of initiatory journey and forbid it for those not qualified” (Maciocco 50). American researcher Carl Teichrib suggests a more symbolic approach in his 2005 article “The Labyrinth Journey: Walking the Path to Fulfillment.” He writes that the maze also takes one to the center of one’s self, to some hidden, inner shrine, occupied by the most mysterious portion of the human personality. This conjures up the mens, the temple of the Holy Spirit in the soul at a state of grace; or again, the depths of the unconscious. Both can only be reached by consciousness after making many detours or by intense concentration, when that ultimate intuition is attained and everything becomes plain through some kind of enlightenment. Here in this crypt the lost oneness of being, scattered in a multiplicity of desires, is rediscovered. (Teichrib) Except that in the case of Lowboy, neither “consciousness” nor “oneness,” let alone “enlightenment,” can be reached at the end of the tunnel—or journey—because of paranoid schizophrenia. In the last lines of the book the young protagonist only meets his (supposed)13 death. As Wray never describes Will’s symptoms as symptoms, the evocations of the subway seemingly turn into metaphoric representations of Will’s mental condition. The descriptions of the maze-like tunnels, of the tunnels as both open and closed, may figure the adolescent’s split personality and the solitary confinement of his mind. According to Tougaw, interiority in neuronovels “is recast with a range of narrative techniques for representing felt states produced through the dynamic interaction of an organism (or character) and environment” (my emphasis). In other words, it is through Lowboy’s evocations of his environment that the reader is given access to his consciousness, the brain representing “one component in a dynamic and elusive system through which consciousness and selfhood emerge” (Tougaw 340). While evocations of physical brains are pervasive in some neuronovels—Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), for instance—they are more scattered in Lowboy. The most significant passage is to be found in the first section: “Even his cramped and claustrophobic brain felt a measure of affection for the tunnel. It was his skull that held him captive, after all, not the tunnel or the passengers or the train” (5, my emphasis)—hence the title of this essay. Lowboy’s perception of his brain or skull as alien, that is, possessing a will of its own, is evidence of his alienation—and it is confirmed throughout the novel by recurrent allusions to Will’s unstable face and identity: “he gave him his bankteller’s smile” (12); “he stopped and made his presidential face” (232), to quote a couple of examples taken from the incipit and the concluding pages. The boy’s journey, therefore, cannot lead to self- but only to a dead-end. Wray may well borrow conventions from the initiatory journey and coming of age novel, but he also revises them. Wray revisits the mystery novel as well, so that even the genre of the book turns out to be ambivalent.

Genres: bildungsroman and mystery novel

Many reviewers have cited The Catcher in the Rye as point of reference for John Wray’s Lowboy. In his review of the book for The Guardian, James Purdon, for instance, begins

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with a quotation from J. D. Salinger’s novel before adding: “At the start of John Wray’s third novel, you could imagine yourself in the company of a 21st-century Holden. Will Heller, too, is a runaway” (Purdon). Will is also young and inexperienced. But he ran away from a medical institution, not a school—even though he keeps calling it a school, another instance of ambivalence and referential instability at the heart of the book. For another reviewer, Shigekuni,14 “the anger and directness of Salinger’s protagonist, and his disdain for the ‘phoneys’ does have many parallels to Will’s behavior […]. But Will is like the light, open version of Caulfield. There is no hate, no real disdain in him, he’s wondering, trying to cope, and understand” (Shigekuni). Not only is there no hate in Will, but he is convinced that he is on a mission to save the world: “He’d been given a calling: that was what it was called. It was a matter of consequence, a matter of urgency, a matter possibly of life and death” (11). When reviewers draw a parallel between the two books, they suggest that both belong in the same generic category, that is, bildungsroman or coming of age novel. As British scholar Kenneth Millard writes in his 2007 Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction, the word bildungsroman was coined in Germany in 1819, and it means a novel recounting the early emotional development and moral education of its protagonist (bildung: formation; roman: novel). […] Bildungsroman has been widely adopted as a term in literary criticism to characterize the generic conventions of any novel of youthful development. (Millard 2) As for the expression “coming of age,” Millard explains, it is “used to mean ‘to reach full legal adult status’” (Millard 4). Despite the semantic difficulties raised both by the word bildungsroman and the expression “coming of age,” for the sake of simplicity, they will be used as mere synonyms in this essay so as to emphasize their common characteristic, that is, mobility. This type of narrative is often concerned with a young hero’s journey leading to chance meetings with adults, who are supposed to teach him or her lessons about life. This basic pattern is present in famous American standards of the genre such as Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, for instance. In the end, the journey brings about a process of moral development leading the young protagonist from innocence to experience. The theme of the journey is definitely present in Lowboy, even if it is mostly limited to the New York subway and a few streets aboveground. Will also has a couple of chance meetings but what is specific to the novel is that these hardly result in any personal development: communication mostly fails and misunderstanding prevails. The meeting with the old Sikh in section one is a good example. Initially the man cannot hear Lowboy’s words: “‘I can’t hear you,’ said the man […] ‘what did you say’” (8). And when the Sikh can hear, Lowboy does not answer his question: “‘You aren’t coming out of prison?’ ‘You’re a Sikh,’ Lowboy said” (8). The Sikh’s question falls on deaf ears and the two characters appear at cross purposes during the whole section—with one notable exception: when the Sikh asks Lowboy about his reason for running away, Lowboy tells him the truth: “‘I’ll tell you why,’ Lowboy said. ‘Since you ask.’ He leaned over. ‘The world won’t make it past the afternoon’” (16). The Sikh does not respond and “[t]he look on the Sikh’s face [i]s impossible to make sense of” (17). When the Sikh eventually answers two pages further down, his response significantly consists of two questions —“‘The world will end?’ the Sikh said. ‘Why is that?’” (19)—that Lowboy does not answer. At the very end of the section, especially, Lowboy is mistaken about the Sikh’s

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identity and calls him “Doctor” (21), thus confirming the communication gap between the two characters. The second protagonist Lowboy meets on his so-called mission may suggest some progress15 since she is a female tramp, Heather Covington alias Rafa, living in the subway tunnels. They start talking together, but after a while misunderstanding prevails again: “The fact that he couldn’t understand her didn’t bother him at all” (47). When he starts talking about the world and the air “getting hotter everyday” (47), it is her turn not to understand, and she only answers: “stop it” (48) three times (one of them emphasized in italics). This exchange is longer: it starts in section three and continues in section five where they reach the woman’s den. Once there, she seems eager to play her role and teach Lowboy: “Let’s give him some of the knowledge of the world” (67). But immediately afterward, the roles are reversed. While Lowboy is sexually inexperienced, he takes command and gives her orders: “‘You lie back.’ […] ‘Get down on the quilt,’ he told her” (67); “‘No,’ he said, pushing her hand away. ‘Don’t touch it’” (69). Ironically, it is not the older woman who refuses to have sex with the adolescent but the opposite. After a while they stop talking: “He rocked himself gently and watched Heather Covington fussing. She was mumbling to herself, hunched over the suitcase […]. She seemed to have forgotten that he was waiting” (72). Lowboy eventually runs away when a policeman starts talking to the woman from the street above. Like the first meeting, therefore, the second is a failure; it does not lead to any increase in knowledge or experience for the young protagonist. Heather Covington, too, appears to be mentally unstable—as evidenced by the passage where they talk about medication (69) and Dr. Zizmor16 (74), the only moment ironically when some communication can develop between them. Section seven stages another, albeit different, kind of meeting: Lowboy goes to Crowley Academy to meet his old friend, Emily. The relationship between the two adolescents is extremely ambivalent: it seems somewhat hostile to begin with and only improves at the very end of section seven; it turns rather friendly in sections nine and twelve, but at the end of section fifteen, when Lowboy wants to have sex with Emily, she reacts brutally and runs away: “She sat up at once without saying a word and raked a copper key across his chest” (195)—hence another more painful failure. The meeting that changes Lowboy’s life—and, to his mind, the fate of the world—only takes place in section eighteen: it is another chance meeting, with a prostitute nicknamed Secretary. While “the world [wa]s inside [him] and [he wa]s inside the world” (63), after his sex initiation, “the world was outside his body now, which meant he was alone. His body was on the outside of the world” (221). It is only then that the adolescent has accomplished his mission, and the novel could stop if it were merely concerned with the young protagonist’s sexual initiation or psychological development. But it is not— Lowboy revisits some conventions of the coming of age novel but it also subverts them: the young protagonist suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, the meetings are mostly characterized by misunderstanding, and the so-called initiatory journey is actually a crazy mission coming from the deranged mind of a young mental patient. At the end of the novel he returns to the subway, that is, the staring point of his journey—and a series of repetitions from section one17 confirms the absence of any real and the boy’s pathological confinement. However, the book cannot be confined to one genre and one interpretation. While Lowboy has accomplished his mission and been initiated to sex, the novel continues and so does the pursuit, because the book also borrows from the mystery novel.

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“Lowboy is a mystery novel, employing many tropes and tools of the genre, and it’s an addictively readable mystery at that. From the first to the last page, the reader hurries through the book following the hints Wray has scattered throughout, exploring the dark landscapes below and above NY City,” Shigekuni writes in his review of Wray’s book. The reviewer is right: the sense of mystery mostly relies on the breathless pace of the novel—the hints may be important, too, but Lowboy’s condition is disclosed in section two. Thus the race between pursuers and escapee turns into a race against time as soon as the time gap between them is revealed, and proves to be very short: “thirty eight minutes” (88). According to French scholar Yves Reuter in his book Le Roman policier, the sense of speed is a major characteristic of the mystery novel. Equally important are the danger facing a nice character and the use of dramatic irony—it is essential that the readers should know more than the characters (Reuter 75-76, 81). French filmmaker François Truffaut confirms this analysis: “the art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film […]” (Truffaut, “Introduction” 16). Truffaut is concerned here with Hitchcock’s cinema, hence the words “audience” and “viewer,” but his analysis does apply to literature as well. In Lowboy, precisely, as the three major characters are used as focalizers alternately, the reader turns out to be both omniscient, like the omniscient narrator somehow, since he can know and see everything, and powerless: he cannot do anything. In his interview with Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock mentions what he calls another “essential ingredient of suspense,” that is, “emotion” (Truffaut 73). Choosing a schizophrenic adolescent and his mother, a caregiver, as heroes and focalizers is crucial. However, suspense reaches an emotional climax in the passage dealing with Emily, as she is young and innocent, and Lowboy nearly killed her once. But Lowboy’s role is ambivalent, and this is where Wray revises the conventions of the genre to serve his own purposes. The adolescent is both a victim of the American system of institutionalization and medication for disabled people, and potentially the victimizer—he could hurt people especially since he has stopped taking his medication (26). This is what the detective is afraid of. As Charles Bock writes in his review of the book for The New York Times, “you are legitimately concerned for Lowboy’s safety, and at the same time worried he might achieve his aims; rooting for the detective to stop him while, again, feeling protective of the boy” (Bock). Thereby, the reader cannot but experience mixed, even ambivalent, feelings.18 As for the detective, Shigekuni writes, instead of playing a key role, “Wray has sidelined [him] in his book, more than that: he has given him a bit part, made him second to the narrative and theoretical structure of the book.” Elsewhere Shigekuni adds: “Wray tells his story through his protagonist and robs the detective of the power to read and explain the world. Things have to be explained to him although the whole story, ultimately, is beyond him, and beyond a simple explanation, actually” (Shigekuni). As far as genre is concerned, therefore, Wray uses a double strategy: first, he combines conventions of the neuronovel with conventions of the mystery novel and the coming of age novel, as if to escape confinement to one specific genre. Hence, generically, too, the novel proves to be ambivalent since it brings together the old and the new—the new genre of the neuronovel and two more traditional literary genres. Next, his neuronovel includes far less neuroscientific discourse and, therefore, proves less “neuro-,” so to speak, than most. In addition, while he borrows from the coming of age novel and the mystery novel, he also revises and subverts some of their conventions. Thereby, Wray asserts the specificity of his book and his own freedom as a writer.

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However, both the specificity of the book and the freedom of the writer are also perceptible at another level: Lowboy’s representation of the environment and the people about him.

Representation

As early as the first section, where Lowboy is the focal character, the reader’s attention is drawn to some strange, if not enigmatic, remarks made by the adolescent—as many hints, and symptoms, of his illness. But these remarks only make full sense in the following section, when his paranoid schizophrenia is revealed: “people were in his way but he was careful not to touch them”; “signs and tells were all around him” (3); “I’m a prisoner of my own brainpan, he thought. Hostage of my limbic system. There’s no way out for me but through my nose” (5), to quote only a few. Later in the book, other passages prove to be similarly perplexing for the reader—section five, for example, ends on: “He laid his head against the tunnel wall and listened” (75), and section seven begins with: “[…] his head was alive with what the wall had told him” (90). Lowboy’s interior monologue, therefore, creates and conveys a strong sense of strangeness, defamiliarizing even derealizing the environment, the character and language itself. This defamiliarization is enhanced by the presence of numerous incongruous images in the sections where Lowboy is the focal character—to describe trains and tunnels, for example: “The train fit into the tunnel perfectly. It slipped into the tunnel like a hand into a pocket and closed over Lowboy’s body and held him still” (4, 233). Not only is the passage repeated twice in the novel, but what is striking is the ambivalence of the images—first a comparison then a couple of metaphors: they suggest both adequateness, possibly protection (“like a hand into a pocket”), and deadly imprisonment (“closed over […] and held him still”); especially, they connect Lowboy directly with the train tunnels. In section three, while the adolescent is sitting on a bench in a subway station, he describes the neon lights using a challenging comparison: “The argon lights were stuttering like pigeons. There was some kind of intelligence behind them” (38). Not only is “stuttering” completely unexpected to refer to birds—it is usually used to describe human speech that is not fluent and involuntarily disrupted —but “intelligence,” by contrast, suggests a capacity for learning or understanding that birds do not possess. In the second passage, therefore, ambivalence prevails as well, even if a special connection seems to be established between things, animals and humans. According to French psychiatrist Jean Oury in his 1989 book, Création et schizophrénie, “there is a sort of homeomorphy between what is created and the personality of the creator” (18, my translation)—hence the ambivalence of Lowboy’s images, a sign of his split personality. Incongruous images, however, are not only used for trains and tunnels, they are recurrent throughout the book—whenever Lowboy is used as focal character, hence a notable contrast with the sections focalized either by his mother or by the policeman. In section five, for instance, after meeting Heather Covington, Lowboy describes her suitcase: “The suitcase jangled as she set it down, as though it were filled with champagne flutes or Christmas lights, or possibly empty bottles of perfume” (44). Not only are the comparisons very improbable, the woman being a tramp, but the ternary rhythm and the sound effects suggest that Lowboy is not so much concerned about meaning as about music or rhythm, that is, the signifier more than the signified.

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This process of defamiliarization through representation and language gets increasingly noticeable as Lowboy’s condition deteriorates, and he starts hearing voices, and experiencing hallucinations. A significant passage describing his hallucinations is to be found in section seven, for instance: […] but today he was seeing the world with different eyes. The walls of the car, for example, which had always seemed so solid, were actually as hollow as an egg. A hole had been cut into the bottom of his seat and behind it was a dusky fibrous vacuum. The pencaps and candywrappers stuffed into the opening only made the hole seem emptier […]. Unreality broke over him again, stronger and more emphatic than before, but this time he was able to endure it. It’s a wave, that’s all, he told himself. […]. In the furrows between crests of the wave he saw things very sharply, the way the air comes clear after a rain. (93-94 my emphasis) The passage is all the more remarkable since it is followed by a drawing, or visual representation, of a traditional train car on the page (94), probably the referent for Lowboy’s delirious description, which emphasizes the boy’s distorted perception. Gradually, therefore, Wray bursts the confines of conventional representation to introduce “unreality,” the distortion and strangeness of madness into the narrative, thus freeing his descriptions from any concern about verisimilitude. No less significant is the presence of a synesthesia not far from the passage: “The little whitehaired woman next to him was wearing a mink pillbox hat” (93)—“mink pillbox hat” combines touch and sight and color and taste, thus further illustrating the adolescent’s mental confusion. As for voices, they are mentioned in section three (42, 46) but only become increasingly obsessive from section twelve onward: But he was not alone. The train was full of light and heat and noise. And behind the noise and under it were the voices. They began as a rustling but soon he heard three of them clearly. The hum of the turbines was in them and the draw of his breathing and the clatter of the undulating train. His name was not spoken. Each time was different of course, like turning on a radio, but there was no trace of the old familiarity. Instead there was sadness and also a kind of impatience. The end of the world was not discussed, never once made mention of. And yet the voices had no other subject. (167, my emphasis) The passage gathers a number of recurrent characteristics of Lowboy’s interior monologues such as sound effects and ternary rhythms, for instance, that are emphasized here by the use of polysyndetons (“the train was full of light and heat and noise;” “the hum […] and the draw […] and the clatter […]). Throughout the novel, polysyndetons are increasingly recurrent in the sections focalized by Lowboy, possibly because, as Oury explains: “One of the essential characteristics of schizophrenic creativity is that schizophrenics cannot cope with a void. All the more so since voids are open after all” (Oury 35, my translation)—hence the repetition of the coordinating conjunction “and” that creates a cumulative effect and fills the void commas might have left. Eventually, Oury writes, “for schizophrenics, there is no logic of the same and the other. Often, when they talk about someone else they mean themselves. […] there is not other, there is no one else. And, if there is no one else, everything is closed” (Oury 34, my translation). This is exemplified in the passage by the sentence: “The hum of the turbines was in them and the draw of his breathing and the clatter of the undulating train.” The ternary rhythm here emphasizes Lowboy’s suggestion that he is the voices— hence their physical presence “behind and under the noise”—and the noise and the train as well, so that “indistinctness” (Oury 19, my translation) prevails.19 In other words, the descriptions of the subway trains and tunnels throughout the book do not

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offer a mirror image of the adolescent’s deteriorating condition, as initially suggested; they turn out to represent the adolescent himself, or rather his perception of himself. Eventually, another striking characteristic of the passage is the concluding paradox: conventional logic, too, has disappeared. And yet meaning never disappears, it is preserved and prevails throughout because the protagonist’s mental condition justifies his most bewildering statements—his baffling images, for instance. While in History of Madness,20 Michel Foucault claimed that madness was, primarily, a lack of language, the silence of a stifled, repressed language (Felman 14), Wray both gives a voice and a central role to a paranoid schizophrenic adolescent—traditionally a marginal figure in fiction—and takes advantage of the major characteristics of his mental condition to introduce highly innovative formal experimentation into the novel. From this point of view, Lowboy can be compared to Jonatham Lethem’s 1999 Motherless Brooklyn with its Tourettic narrator. Far from hampering or limiting Wray’s creative process, therefore, the mental condition of the main protagonist turns out to be a means of liberation from traditional patterns of representation and a powerful source of stylistic innovation. According to Tougaw, Lowboy is a neuronovel “link[ing] mysteries of plot to mysteries about brains […] dramatiz[ing an] impossible quest for interiority” (336)—and his analysis is certainly true considering the main protagonist’s mental condition. The book can also be considered a highly subversive novel: it distorts the referential framework by manipulating the major diegetic references, that is, time and space; it also distorts generic frameworks by coupling the neuronovel with two major traditional genres (bildungsroman and mystery novel) and manipulating their conventions. Thus, despite the mental confinement experienced by the main protagonist, Lowboy cannot be confined to a single generic framework either. Eventually, the novel is an “experiment in narrative representation” (Tougaw 342) and, contrary to what Roth contends, it does to its modernist predecessors—did not William Faulkner give a voice to Benjy, a mentally handicapped character, in The Sound and The Fury? All of Wray’s strategies, therefore, suggest an effort not to merely reproduce literary traditions but to transcend them and, thereby, free fiction from traditional patterns, and expand the novel’s—and the neuronovel’s—purview.21 However, one aspect seems to have been neglected by most reviewers, maybe because they were reluctant to turn to psychoanalysis in order to analyze a so-called neuronovel. Indeed, Freud can shed some valuable light on Lowboy. In “The Case of Schreber,” he writes: “The delusional formation, which we take to be the pathological product, is in an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction” (Freud 71, italics in original). In other words, and to quote Oury now, the schizophrenics’ “delirium is their means of survival” (Oury 19, my translation). In Wray’s novel, the more delusional and delirious the young protagonist, the more intense his efforts to recover and reconstruct himself. Under such conditions, the novel would be definitely tragic if it were not for the concluding metalepsis. By crossing the diegetic line and pretending to be delusional, too, the omniscient narrator closes the gap between himself or herself and the schizophrenic hero, and powerfully asserts the power of fiction. He also invites the readers to free themselves from the confinement of logic, reason and reality, in order to enter a world of fiction where freedom and possibility reign supreme.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bock, Charles. “Off His Meds, on the Uptown B.” The New York Times. February 24, 2009. Web. June 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Bock-t.html

Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction. The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock. London: Routledge, 2013. 35-52.

Felman, Soshana. Writing and Madness (Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis). Trans. Martha Noel Evans and Brian Massumi. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Case of Schreber.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud. Vol. XII (1911-1913). London: Hogarth, 1958. 9-82. Web. August 30, 2018. https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/The_Case_of_Schreber.pdf

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Harris, Charles B. “The Story of the Self: The Echo Maker and Neurological Realism.” Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. 230-259.

Johnson, Gary. “Consciousness as Content: Neuronarratives and the Redemption of Fiction.” Mosaic 41: 169-184.

Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.

Lustig T. J. and James Peacock, eds. Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction. The Syndrome Syndrome. 2013. London: Routledge, 2018.

Maciocco, Giovanni. Fundamental Trends in City Development. New York: Springer, 2008.

Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007.

Ortega, Francisco and Fernando Vidal. “Brains in Literature/Literature in the Brain.” Poetics Today, Vol. 34, n° 3, Fall 2013: 327-359.

Oury, Jean. Création et schizophrénie. Paris: Galilée, 1989.

Purdon, James. “On a One-Man Mission to Save the Planet.” The Guardian. June 14, 2009. Web. August 17, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/14/lowboy-by-john-wray

Reuter, Yves. Le Roman policier. Paris: Armand Colin, 2009.

Roth, Marco. “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” n + 1. Issue 8: Recessional. Fall 2009. Web. June 29, 2018. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-8/essays/the-rise-of-the-neuronovel/

Shigekuni. “John Wray’s Lowboy.” Web. August 21, 2018. https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/ 2010/03/21/virvil-john-wrays-lowboy-rev-2/

Tabbi, Joseph. Cognitive Fictions. Electronic Mediations, 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Teichrib, Carl. “The Labyrinth Journey: Walking the Path to fulfillment.” Web August 16, 2018. https://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/teichrib/labyrinth.htm

Thomson, Bob. “Author John Wray Talks About Trains & Thrillers.” The Washington Post. Tuesday, May 12, 2009. Web. July 29, 2018. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/ 2009/05/11/AR2009051103060.html

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Tougaw, Jason. “Touching Brains.” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 61, n° 2, Summer 2015: 335-358.

Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

Waugh, Patricia. “The Naturalistic Turn, the Syndrome, and the Rise of the Neo- Phenomenological Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction. The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock. 2013. London: Routledge, 2018. 17-34.

Wray, John. Lowboy. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009.

NOTES

1. “Syndrome novels” refer to “narrative fictions built around a central character with an estranging cognitive condition” (Burn 167). 2. Ortega and Vidal explain that they do not give the expression “cerebral or neurological solipsism” any technical meaning but “use it, instead, as shorthand for the idea that underlies the notion of humans as cerebral subjects: each human, as it were, only needs his or her brain to be the person he or she is. Thus, according to this view, the cultures in which we live are ultimately brain products, and interpersonal communication and relations ultimately happen inside individual brains. Solus ipse: the brain by itself” (Ortega and Vidal 332). 3. His first two novels were The Right Hand of Sleep (2001) and Canaan’s Tongue (2005). In 2016, he published The Lost Time Accidents, and in 2018, Godsend. 4. In a Youtube interview “John Wray about Lowboy,” the novelist explains that he wrote the book almost entirely on subway trains. Web. July 28, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lZduje44nXg 5. Will’s identity is all the more ambiguous since “Lowboy” can have different meanings: spelt “low boy,” it refers to the size of a boy but “a lowboy” is also a piece of furniture (175). Secondary characters are similarly afflicted: “Skull and Bones” (3) are nicknames referring to staff from the Bellavista Clinic. Heather Covington carries a passport issued to a ten-year old white girl (44-45), and is also called Rafa (64); as for the prostitute, she is nicknamed “Secretary” on “account of [her] glasses” (218) but her real name is “Maria Villallegas,” she says (219). 6. “Initially, Wray tried writing the book in the first person. But while that could have made for a fascinating novel, ‘it would have precluded the element of the thriller and the chase and the kind of velocity I wanted,’” he said (Thomson). 7. The quotation comes from the Youtube interview “John Wray about Lowboy.” Web. July 28, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZduje44nXg 8. I prefer “section” to “chapter” because some are very short. Among these thirteen sections, three stand apart: section ten is made up of Lowboy’s letter to his mother in italics; in section thirteen, Lowboy tells Emily “what […] happened at the school” (171), actually a mental institution; and section seventeen consists of Lowboy’s phone conversation with his mother. But in all three cases, Lowboy speaks in the first person singular. 9. “These psychoses” refers to the three varieties of dementia precox identified by Kraepelin and named schizophrenia by Bleuler in 1911: “the hebephrenic, the catatonic and the paranoid types” (Laplanche and Pontalis 408). 10. A metalepsis is defined by Genette as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse […]” (Genette 244, my translation). 11. In “The Case of Schreber,” Freud explains that “a world-catastrophe […] is not infrequent during the agitated stage in other cases of paranoia. […] The patient has withdrawn from the

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people in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed onto them. Thus everything has become indifferent and irrelevant to him […]. The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe” (Freud 69-70). 12. The word originally referred to the maze constructed by Daedalus for Minos, King of Crete, to house the Minotaur. 13. Lowboy’s death is suggested but not clearly stated. 14. To find out about Shigekuni’s identity, see: https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/about/ (Web. September 5, 2018). 15. What Lowboy basically needs to complete his mission is to have his first sexual experience. 16. Dr Jonathan Zizmor is an American dermatologist (born in 1945) in . He is famous for his subway advertisements that started appearing in 1991. 17. “The train fit into the tunnel perfectly. It slipped into the tunnel like a hand into a pocket and closed over Lowboy’s body and held him still” (4, my emphasis): this passage and the unexpected comparison it involves is to be found again at the very end of the book (233). Similarly the problem of “touching” people on the subway platform is mentioned in the opening lines (“he was careful not to touch them” [3]) and returns in the last section: “Once he would have been careful not to touch anyone but now it couldn’t be helped […]” (254). In this case, it is not simply a repetition but a form of regression since Lowboy has turned literally powerless. 18. Roth’s assertion that neuronovels give form to a “neurological privacy without individuality” and preclude the reader’s identification with the characters is, therefore, proved wrong in Lowboy. 19. This is somehow confirmed by the repetition of the Ouroboros image: in section one it refers to the subway tunnel (11), and in section nine, to Lowboy’s green belt (137). 20. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961). (Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard, New York: Vintage Books, 1973). 21. Roth, by contrast, concluded his essay on these words: “So the genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.”

ABSTRACTS

This article shows that ambivalence is a major symbolic pattern in John Wray’s 2009 neuronovel Lowboy, and it affects the major aspects of the novel, including the characters’ identities and the narrative structure of the book. Ambivalence may refer either to the split personality of the schizophrenic hero (psychoanalytic approach) or to the structure of the brain (neurologic approach). Especially, ambivalence allows subversion to prevail and transform the main protagonist’s mental confinement into textual freedom. This is shown, first, by an analysis of the referential framework and its major references, space and time. Then the major genres Lowboy borrows from are analyzed: on the one hand, the neuronovel suggests a bildungsroman, on the other, a mystery novel. While Wray borrows conventions from both, he also revisits and revises them, thus asserting the specificity of his novel and his freedom from generic conventions. Eventually, the manipulation of representation will be examined through an analysis of the language of description, particularly the use of incongruous images in the sections where Lowboy is the focal character.

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INDEX

Keywords: bildungsroman, genre, mystery novel, neuronovel, paranoid schizophrenia, representation

AUTHOR

PASCALE ANTOLIN Pascale Antolin is Professor of American literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University in France. A specialist of American Modernism and —she has published books and articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane—she has now focused her research on illness in literature (autobiography and fiction) for several years and has published articles on the subject in French, European and American journals. More recently, she has developed a special interest in the “neuronovel.”

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Remembering, History, and Identity: The Sculpted Life of Benjamin Franklin

Mert Deniz

1. Introduction

1 Philadelphia was an important city in the life story of Benjamin Franklin, as well as in American art history. It was the first city where sculpture was introduced to America as a form of high-art with Franklin’s bust by Jean-Jacques Caffiéri (Craven 4-7). It was the town where Franklin escaped to actualize himself and build his own life as a Self-Made Man. His representations in the city consist of various statues, which were created by different artists at different times, spanning from the late nineteenth to the twenty- first century. They provide quite diverse portraits of Franklin rather than following a stereotypical model. They focus on different moments of Franklin’s life and foreground his myriad roles as a businessman, statesman, scientist, diplomat, and so forth.

2 Franklin was a man of the Enlightenment, who was drawn to multiple subjects, from civil administration, to music composition, and to scientific experiments. He is generally considered a Self-Made Man, yet there is more than that underlying this superficial definition. He is also referred to as the “First American” who developed an American identity distinguishable from that of a citizen of a British colony. These details turned him into a role model and a polychromatic sociological figure. As a man foregrounded as the prototype of the national identity, Franklin had to meet the expectations of an entire nation as a role model, so his multiple identities and relatively undocumented background as a Self-Made Man metaphorically created a canvas to be redefined with the ideals of his people. As the result, the cult of Franklin was born from his own works as much as from the stories of his peers. John Adams was one of the first observers of this myth of Franklin, which began to be woven by the Pennsylvanian’s admirers as early as 1790, just a year after the end of the Revolutionary War (Mulford 415).

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3 The American nation recreated Franklin, as all nations do for their public figures, as a man of to provide a role model for a country that exalts and secularism; as a diplomat for the country that declares itself as a city upon a hill for the rest of the world; as an engineer and craftsman for the country that praises industry and production; as an eighteenth-century revolutionary for the country that is proud of its independence and sovereignty; and finally as a Self-Made Man for the country that believes it has an exceptional identity from its European origins and writes its own destiny. As this paper will argue, the statues, commemorating Franklin in the City of Philadelphia, were made by the people who were exposed to these ideas, which mutually shaped their own views about Franklin and America. Moreover, these statues, as artifacts of history, represent social values, traditions, ideals, and history of America, because they are the reflections of the very same society, which produced them. Eventually, America remade Franklin as a Socially-Made Man, and this Franklin – or Franklins, as it were—(re)construct and reinforce narratives of American memory and its national identity.

2. Memory and (Re)membering

4 In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault says that “the document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked” (5). Accordingly, what is called history is actually the documentation of memory, and like written texts statues can also be read, namely as visual texts and artifacts of history. Furthermore, history is primarily made of memory which is socially and individually constructed. Hence, the nature of memory is the first one of the decisive components of history, the other two elements of which are remembering and narration.

5 Nonetheless, memory is not a monolithic structure. Instead, it is a cognitive model which has more than one aspect as argued by John Sutton, Celia B. Harris, and Amanda J. Barnier (211). The “declarative memory system,” or the conscious side of memory, has certain functions according to this model. Developed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffren, this model takes remembering as a discursive and subjective process. The human mind creates the subjective narratives, or the “truth” about the past, which is limited by memory’s consciousness. Even if an individual can recall his or her memories “consciously,” it does not mean that s/he is aware of the reflections of his or her personal ideology, feelings, and perspective in the narration of memories. This includes history writing as an artifact of memory.

6 Atkinson and Shiffren assign three tasks to memory, which are “encoding,” “storage” and “retrieval” (211-2). Within the scope of these tasks, it can be argued that human consciousness has a limited nature as an individual encodes data from his or her own perspective, together with ideas, emotions, and other related factors, which comprise one’s subjectivities. The individual can retrieve this data at a future date along with these subjectivities, and this defines the act of remembering. On this matter, Laura Mattoon D’Amore argues that “[r]ather than simply passing along knowledge of history, commemoration passes on the knowledge of our present interpretation of the past... commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of time in which it is re/created” (Meriwether and D’Amore xvi).

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7 Sutton, Harris, and Barnier also posit that “memory is largely constructed” and that it always involves “personal motivations, social motivations, and situational demands” (213). Thus, the storage of memory is not a deposit of actual or accurate images of the past or “truth,” but rather a space for the retrospective collection of data, subjectively interpreted and perceived from a certain perspective at the moment of collection, namely encoding. Consequently, memory, history’s primary component, according to Foucault, is highly subjective, and what an individual does, in the course of remembering, is actually collect pieces of memories together with subjectivities from his or her own repository and to create a patchwork or pastiche, thereby making remembering a discursive activity.

8 If memory is a fragmented cluster of data, then how can an individual remember it in a cohesive manner that makes sense at the present moment? The answer is that human brain comprehends details in the sense of (Martin and Deutscher 164). It reflects in what is named to be the “language of memory,” which functions in a “continuous causal process” (Martin and Deutscher 175). The brain orders memories according to the association of time sequence or causality. Chronology plays an important role in this process as it is a quintessential means to observe and express the relation of causality between two or more fragments of memory.

9 Furthermore, these theories on the nature of memory demonstrate that remembering is a narrative activity, even before it is interpreted into a historical artifact like a history book, a statue of a public figure or anything else that is supposed to provide a resemblance of a historical subject. Examining the nature of memory and remembering with regard to Freud’s clinical studies, Roger Kennedy argues that the distinction between past and history becomes real at the point where an inquisition of memory is performed, which we call remembering (Kennedy 181). Therefore, if we define memory as a pile of retrospective data, gathered whether from “direct” or “indirect” sources through experiencing or learning, respectively, remembering can be metaphorically defined as mining pieces of data (Martin and Deutscher 162).

10 “The raw material” that one obtains as the result of this process is nothing less than the recollection of his fragmented memories with attached emotions and ideas, namely subjectivities (Kennedy 183). Additionally, this process is not indifferent to its environment, so it is a reactive process rather than a static one as the fragments of memory are “rearranged” according to the contemporary events taking place around the subject (Kennedy 185). Briefly, remembering brings out memories together with connected emotions and ideas, and it happens in correspondence with the given environment where they are retrieved, and in a manner that makes sense at the present moment by being mainly chronological and causal.

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11 Fig. 1. Ben the Phan. 1993. University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. Artstor Library.

12 After all, (re)membering is a process of (dis)membering. The artifacts of history are “decoded” as much as they are encoded from direct or indirect sources of memory. This is directly related to the retrieval process of the encoded fragments from the storage of memory as people reconstruct these dismembered raw materials in a manner that is meaningful in their present moment. Consequently, this process provides a constructed portrayal of the past, merging these fragments of memory with the subjectivities of the people. With these two composite elements of memory, an artifact of history comes into being and is given meaning as a narration.

13 Narration through statues is created by an individual on the basis of his or her memories, covering direct and indirect sources of memory along with the subjectivities, and once it is complete, it conveys a resemblance of historical “truth” to its audience. The audience also encodes such narrations together with their own subjectivities and retrieves all of these together at a future moment.

14 As remembering creates the historical resemblances of “truth,” one needs to develop a belief of “reality” in the narrated memories regardless of one’s position whether as a narrator or an addressee (Martin and Deutscher 167). In this matter, remembering is not only a narrative construct, but also a self-deceiving act. In other words, the difference between reality and imagination, or “falsity” to be more specific, is the intensity of the individual’s belief in the “truth” of memories (Martin and Deutscher 187-8). In this matter, Franklin’s statues are not the mere representations of the retrospective “truth,” they are actually the models, made by the people, for what people expect to see in their role model (Fig. 1.).

15 At this point, narration plays its own part as the means of conveying the “truth” as well as convincing the audience of the truthfulness of the artifact to the actual images of the past by creating a kind of authenticity effect. Consequently, it is meaningless to

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attempt to establish any differences between the outcomes of direct and indirect origins of memory fragments. They are both constructed and equally important as historical sources, if they are taken into account as the narrative reflections of the social realities of a given period of time.

16 Hence, the nature of subjectivities inside an individual’s memory storage is even more complicated than it is commonly is thought to be. It contains the fragmented historical data as it also becomes the realm wherein the subjectivities of the narrators of historical artifacts merge with the subjectivities of the individual. This phenomenon provides the formation of individual and collective identities based on the narration of an artifact of history as well as the perceived narration, both of which blend inside an individual’s memory.

17 As well as being made of memory and produced by remembering, historical narratives themselves are also sources of memory as they provide data to be recollected either by their narrators or other individuals, once they are made public. An exemplary case for this situation is one of the first statues of Benjamin Franklin. This statue was sculpted by Italian artist Francesco Lazzarini in 1789 and is located at the Library Company of Philadelphia today (Fig. 2.) This statue was shaped not only by Lazzarini’s Italian background, but also by the Founding Fathers’ well-known romanticism of the Republican Era of Rome with its eminent leaders like Cicero, Cato, Tacitus, Varro, Cincinnatus, and so forth (Richard 9-51). Therefore, it is a good example of how the perception of the narrator, Lazzarini, and self-representation of the audience, the Founders and Americans, and even the artistic subject, Benjamin, merged into a statue that embodies a certain narrative.

18 David Hackett Fisher defines Franklin’s image as “a leader of the Revolution” by referring to French philosopher Turgot’s epigram for Franklin, which is as such: “he seized the lightning from the heavens, and the scepter from tyrants” (Fischer 186). In the words of Turgot, Franklin’s two images, the Cartesian philosopher and the revolutionary leader, are unified to create a single image, the Man of Enlightenment, and this state of enlightenment came with its sociopolitical significance.

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19 Fig. 2. Francesco Lazzarini. Benjamin Franklin. 1789. Photographed by Christopher William Purdom. Philadelphia Public Art.

20 Francesco Lazzarini’s Benjamin Franklin was, thus, the embodiment of this Franklin, the Enlightened and Virtuous Republican. In this image, Franklin is depicted holding a scepter downwards, representing his act of seizing the scepter from tyrants in reference to Turgot’s epigram. Furthermore, Franklin rests his scepter holding elbow onto a pile of books since he takes his power from Reason as a scientist and writer. Therefore, science and politics are assembled as two subjects in which Franklin served as a leader.

21 Lazzarini’s Franklin, additionally, holds a piece of parchment, alluding to those which were used by Romans. One cannot help seeing the connection between his garments and this parchment’s message as it represents the axioms of the Republican Rome, defined by Cicero as res populi, iuris concensus and utilitatis ommunion sociatus—which can be translated into English language as a government for the people, society based on law, and a nation with common values (Kaldellis 25). These axioms provided the fundamentals of the concept of the “Republic” for the Founders.

22 The love of the Founders of the United States for the ancient Republic of Rome clearly reflected on their representations as well as their of ideal society and government. Among them, a common compliment was defining an appreciated person as “well educated in the Classic’s” as James Madison did in one of his letters to indicate the intellectual profundity of a member of the community (Madison). Moreover, the Founders were not alone in this sense within the American society of the Revolutionary Era. Imitating the actions of the prominent Roman leaders was a sign of virtue as was stated by an unknown author in his complimentary statements to George Washington: “You Sir, like Cincinnatus have retired, with the applause of every Good Man” (“To Washington”). Hence, the marble model of Franklin in a toga symbolizes once again in a conscious manner his exaltation as a model Republican and a man of Virtue. Once

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again, the narrator’s subjectivities and social dynamics of a historical society are blended in the model of a public figure, presenting a good example of an artifact of memory and collective identity for scholars.

23 Apparently, an artifact of history conveys a constructed narration, and also provides a set of data for its audience, who believe in learning the “truth” about the past from this artifact, while receiving the subjectivities of the artifact’s narrator in the course of the encoding process. The contemporary audience of Lazzarini’s statue sees Franklin as represented like one of the heroes of the Republican Rome and associated with the values of republicanism, patriotism, and civil-service. Memories of Franklin are now amalgamated with the social values of the past, and these values are, thereby, conveyed to the present in conformance with the ideas of the creator of this artifact, Lazzarini, and his contemporaries, American society of the late nineteenth century.

3. Benjamin Franklin and Identity

24 Maurice Halbwachs argues that societies can also reconstruct their memories in order to create a sense of unity among their members (Apfelbaum, 83-4). What is lying between the lines of Halbwachs’ argument, quoted and analyzed by Erika Apfelbaum, is that identity is also remade by society, which stands for an agency in the narration of memories. To be more specific, the artifacts of history simply generate narrations of the past from fragmented memories, yet they also provide social models for the audience to construct their identities on the basis of such models at the present.

25 Society plays a crucial role in the process of an individual’s developing his or her own identity as well as establishing his own memory storage. Without constructing a meaningful narrative of the past, none can develop a complete identity and give meaning to his or her present. Apfelbaum, again commencing from Halbswachs’ approach to history and , foregrounds the importance of society in the process of identity-making. She writes, [I]nterpersonal proximity, in particular emotional proximity, is a necessary condition at the interpersonal level to make communication possible, to establish meaningful dialogue, one that helps subjects to process their experiences into living memory and facilities the storage and retrieval, rather than the repression and forgetting, of their memories. (Apfelbaum 88)

26 In this matter, Benjamin Franklin’s statues are more than static reinterpretations of the past; instead, they are dynamic constructs which are remade in the minds of their audience in the course of their identity making. They get involved in a dialog with their audience, and the audience develops both collective and individual identities through this process.

27 The artifacts of history are not only the products of memories, but they are also the raw materials of new narrations. Identity making, at this point, is a form of individual narration, and people—the audience—reconstruct their own identities by internalizing these artifacts as their reference points for the past. This is how an individual develops identity within the dialog of external and internal subjectivities. This can be seen in all sources of history, as John Adams has already observed, Benjamin Franklin was one of the objects of this history-making process in America (Mulford 416-7). What one sees in the statues of Franklin is not the original source of these artifacts, but the remade

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models of this source, together with the memory fragments and subjectivities of the narrators, who are also members of the audience, themselves.

28 It is true that everything is historical or memorial as an individual takes over the meanings and identities of objects, public figures, and events regarding their historical background. As already discussed, human brain remembers on the basis of causality and creates meanings by decoding the fragments of past experiences, kept inside his or her memory storage. Recalled in the narrations, organized in a chronological order and the relationship of causality, narrations of history are created by individuals, and this “narrativity” becomes the crossroads of history, memory, primary sources, and secondary sources (Greene 100-2).

29 Therefore, what is argued here is that historical narrative is a concept that is much more comprehensive than the limited definitions of formal narratives, and it is a fundamental component of one’s self-definition. However, every narrative needs a basis to be built upon. Such material must be flexible enough for the narrator to engrave his own depictions and adaptable enough for the audience to embrace it as a part of their identities. R. Trait McKenzie’s Young Benjamin Franklin sets an example for the suitability of Franklin to be the mannequin of the artists who clad him in different identities.

30 Franklin’s flexibility and adaptability as a foundation of various identity models has its roots in his own life story as a Self-Made Man from Boston and his unlimited ambition to realize himself in several paths of life. Walter Isaacson defines Benjamin Franklin’s decision to move from his hometown Boston to Philadelphia with these words: It was a tradition among American pioneers, when their communities became too confining, to strike out for the frontier. But Franklin was a different type of American rebel. The wilderness did not beckon. Instead, he was enticed by the new commercial centers, New York and Philadelphia, that offered the chance to become a self-made success (Isaacson 35).

31 Therefore, the first model of Franklin occurred in Philadelphia was the model of the Self-Made Man, who left his hometown in the pursuit of success in life. Hence, R. Tait McKenzie’s sculpture of Young Benjamin Franklin, erected in 1914, is one which initiates the story of Franklin (McKenzie).

32 It was a project of a group of students from University of Pennsylvania, who thought that there was no monument on the campus to indicate that the school’s founder was Benjamin Franklin (“Young Franklin Statue”). McKenzie was chosen because he was not only an acknowledged sculptor, but he was also the head of the physical studies department. The sculptor and the representatives of the Class of 1904 agreed on “the image of a young man with very little personal property, no job, and certainly no fame... to inspire new Penn students” (“Young Franklin Statue”), so Franklin was depicted as a 17-year-old young man, as in 1723 (Fig. 3).

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33 Fig. 3. R. Trait McKenzie. The Young Franklin. 1914. University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. University Archives & Records Center.

34 Therefore, Franklin in this model is the embodiment of Tabula Rasa. He holds a wooden stick in his hand to show that he was on a journey as he had a long-way ahead and a great potential, lying in his future. In terms of his clothing, he was not in a wretched situation, but he is not clad in anything luxurious, either. Apparently, leaving his hometown and arriving at Philadelphia was the first milestone of Franklin’s journey from “rags to riches.” Moreover, Franklin’s modest depiction enhances another aspect of his representation. He stands for the “everyman” of the early American society as James M. Beck remarked in his speech for the unveiling of the statue on 16 June 1914: Does not this Franklin with his staff in one hand and his meagre possessions in the other, with uplifted eyes, alert, vigorous carriage and smiling, resolute face, nobly symbolize the youth of America, as they end their apprenticeship, and bravely face on the threshold of manhood the rude challenge of the world? (Beck 5)

35 Obviously, the statue was appreciated for providing a visual artifact of mythological history in order to inspire the university students, a young and male-dominated group of society at that time. Hence, Franklin’s representation here stood for the idealized roots of modern America in 1723, which was destined to go through a world-changing journey to actualize itself as an independent state.

36 Benjamin Franklin had become a semi-mythical figure for American society much before the end of the nineteenth century. By the early 1800s, there were already mythologies of Franklin, widely circulated around the country as a model of the ideal citizen, who was expected to be patriotic, pious, self-sufficient, and industrious, and as a proof of the achievability of the American Dream (Mulford 419-20). The ideal citizen had to reflect the newly independent Christian America and its success-oriented culture, causing the paradoxical existence of a half utilitarian, half materialist society. It was a perfect example for the reproduction of history in the hands of narrators, as

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discussed in the previous parts of this study, as well as how a public figure turns into an identity model for the audience of the artifacts of history.

37 Speaking of these specific artifacts, Carla Mulford says “[p]erhaps the best evidence that Franklin’s had become a traditional figure by the end of the nineteenth century lies in the public orations delivered at the unveilings of various statues erected to honor him” (436). As it can be understood, these statues became the pulpits for the expression of the social values, role models, and public discourses that defined American society. For this reason, these statues, carrying all the features of such artifacts including the subjectivities of their creators, are to be studied as the conveyors of the values that American society had already begun developing before the date when these statues were erected.

38 Based on the aforementioned traditional values, the identity models, reflected on these artifacts, are, respectively, the models of the Self-Made Man, already discussed regarding R. Trait McKenzie’s Young Benjamin Franklin, Heroic Artisan, Revolutionary, Printer-Journalist, Scientist, Diplomat, Virtuous Republican, also already discussed regarding Francesco Lazzarini’s Benjamin Franklin, and finally as Founding Father. For this reason, the statues of Franklin are not given in a chronological order, regarding the dates when they were opened to the public, covering a gigantic span of time from 1789 to 2017, but in a contextual order with regard to the dominant themes in the history of the United States.

39 The actual matter of concern in this study is that Franklin was not necessarily an ideal person for all of these models, which would require an inhuman energy to meet the exaggerated necessities of all of them. On the contrary, Franklin was a jack-of-all- trades, as remarked by Verner W. Crane “[w]hat has puzzled men most about Franklin is that he turned so often and so easily from one career to another” (Crane 205). However, Franklin provided a reachable model, which the narrators could reshape according to their discourses, rather than a colossal and almost dogmatic figure, which would be impossible to add or omit any details from its original. In this respect, he was suitable for becoming a social figure, recognized and appraised as a model citizen, and this turned him into an almost mythological figure in the hands of people like , Robert Thomas, Amos Taylor and Silas Felton alongside with their many successors in this myth-making process. These people were criticized by John Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge as the former witnessed the beginning of this process and the latter faced the results it had reached by the end of the nineteenth century (Mulford 415-21 and 438). Nonetheless, whether they were to be criticized or not, what these narrators made is what is called “memory-making.”

40 However, they were not necessarily false or, even more seriously, malign propagators, they were just human beings who were remembering Franklin in a certain way from their points of views and for the satisfaction of their audience, who expected to see Franklin in a certain way in accordance with their own social ideals. Descartes tried to define the differences between perspectives with the nature of light that reflects from objects and projects on the eyes of spectators, and in their eyes, visual imitations of these objects occur, and the difference between these imitations provide different perspectives about the object. This is how light turns into meaningful images before coming into being and everyone has their own perception of the reflecting object regarding where they stand (Descartes 60-4).

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41 Eventually, memory, just like light, is transformed into material in memory and the narrations of people without being limited only to their eyes. Historians, artists, family members, teachers, and basically every single member of the society are the narrators of memories as they all remember. They reshape memories in their reconstructions of the past, namely the act of remembering; meanwhile, they redefine their world according to what they remember. Hence the audience and the material become the objects of a narrative as artifacts of history and memory. This is how collective and individual memory occurs and works, and this is how people develop role models and identities for themselves. Therefore, Franklin’s statues are just some of the examples of these artifacts of memory, and it is futile for the scholar to undertake a Sisyphean attempt to separate myth from “truth” like Henry Cabot Lodge did more than a century ago.

4. Miscellaneous Franklins and American Identities

42 Fig. 4. Hiram Powers. Benjamin Franklin. 1862. Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress.

43 Another model of young Franklin is that of Hiram Powers. It is not located in the City of Philadelphia but at the Senate in Washington D.C.; however, it is strongly coherent with its counterparts in this study (Fig. 4). Powers was a witness to the Italian Independence War of 1848 and the French Revolution of 1848. These were two separate but related conflicts of which broke out between Nationalist-Socialist political groups in these countries and the sovereign empires as the former sought national unity and independence from monarchs as new republics. Powers vocally stated his belief in the United States’ position as a role model for these young nations of the Old World (Fryd 65). Additionally, Powers was a Unionist during the turbulent years of the American

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Civil War, and he advocated that the only way to prevent the sufferings and wars of the European separatist movements, which eventually led to the Great War, was to promote the traditional ideals of unity and republicanism of the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary Era (Fryd 66). Hence, it was believed that the solution for the crises of these turbulent years lay in the elevation of the fundamental ideals present at the foundation of the United States.

44 By these reasons, Benjamin Franklin, the architect of the American unionism with his Albany Plan of Union during the French and Indian War of 1754, the symbol of American freedom and unity, was chosen together with a statue of Thomas Jefferson (Fryd 67). Powers remakes Franklin as a young individual who is leaning on a column, given the look of a tree trunk, in his sculpture, opened to the public in 1862, just a year after the Fort Sumter incident in the first year of the Civil War. Powers’ statue was erected at the time when America was questioning its identity and meanings of freedom, equality, and union. This model of Franklin is represented in a thoughtful manner as one of the eminent strategists of American independence and the Revolutionary War by having been involved in the determination of the proper strategy that Americans had to follow even before the French and Indian War (Stourzh 33-65).

45 However, this model is not depicted with a grim-look, instead he gives the impression of a shrewd strategist, planning for his next move against the enemy. Reinforcing the active look of the statue, Franklin wears a long coat, resembling to the uniform of the officers, with open buttons, and displays a casual stance with his legs. He is neither retreating nor paralyzed by fear at his position, but he is carefully observing and devising his next move. His garments and expression contribute to the masculine look of the model. Instead of being a desk-bound strategist, Franklin’s clothes are those that one could wear for a field survey to examine whether his theories could be adopted on the battlefield. Therefore, the revolutionary Franklin was depicted to be as much of a soldier and a commander as he was an enlightened intellectual in the military sciences, as well. This is a common characteristic, attributed to the Founders of the United States, as they were the leaders of the country during the wartime as well as the patriarchs of the post-bellum nation-making period.

4.1 The Craftsman

46 The of the eighteenth century were the results of the dramatic changes in sociopolitical environment. Benjamin Franklin lived in a transitory era, going through a metamorphic stage from agriculturalism to steam-powered industrialism as Morgan states: The fact that Franklin thought doing things better with nothing but hand power tells us something both about him and about his time. He liked doing things himself. He was continually designing experiments and constructing apparatus to carry them out, but mostly they were things he could do by himself or that he could get some craftsman to do his directions. He must have been very good with his hands, and the world he knew was a world in which nearly everything was done by hand. That world was changing, even in his own life time[.] (8)

47 Nevertheless, not every statue of Franklin portrayed him as a manual worker; instead, most of them represent him as an intellectual, patriarch, diplomat, et cetera. What changed before the 1980s was that the United States needed to reaffirm its masculinity before the last run of the Cold War, which was not known to be the last at that time, yet

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it was obvious that both the contenders were tired of a restless contest of almost thirty years in the past. In addition to the negative impacts of the long years of fluctuation between entente and détente, the economic recession of 1973-75, following the oil crisis of 1973, meant the end of the prosperous years after the Second World War, so America needed to remember the importance of industriousness and , once again.

48 Fig. 5. Joseph Brown. Benjamin Franklin, Craftsman. 1981. Photographed by Christopher William Purdom. Philadelphia Public Art.

49 Benjamin Franklin, Craftsman is located near to the Masonic Temple of the Pennsylvania Freemasons, which commissioned Joseph Brown to create a model of Franklin in a manner that recalls his work as a printer and an artist (“Benjamin Franklin, Craftsman”). Eventually, the artist creates a craftsman Franklin in his statue, opened to the public in 1981 (Fig. 5). The statue shows a lean-bodied Franklin fixing the plates of a primitive printing press. The model has enormous feet along with hands holding a tool to adjust a highly complex machine for Franklin’s era, the printing press. The slightly disproportional feet, hands, and strong arms of the model amplify the masculine appearance and physical strength that is required, and thus it establishes an analogy between manhood and industriousness.

50 The depiction of Franklin as an industrial craftsman corresponds to one of the early ideals of American manhood, named as “Heroic Artisan” by Michael Kimmel and defined as “independent, virtuous, and honest... stalwart and loyal... unafraid of hard work, proud of his craftsmanship and self-reliance” (Kimmel 13). Therefore, the Heroic Artisan was the father of the patriotic and industrious workers of America, and Franklin was, of course, a model for this identity, thanks to the stories about how hard- working he had been since his youth. Among the other qualities of Franklin, the embodiment of the masculine strength and the laborer’s perseverance and resilience was what the American audience wanted to see in their favorite role model in these

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hard times. The Heroic Artisan had to be resurrected from his grave, lying where he had died in the middle of the automated factories. He needed to come up with his vigor, bravery, and resilience against pain-staking tasks of the industrial and military races of the Cold War years in order to teach his people the importance of austerity and frugality during economic crises.

4.2 The Printer

51 Benjamin Franklin’s socially acknowledged characteristics were much more numerous. Being one of these features, even as early as his teenage years, Franklin impactfully used written media as a means of spreading his thoughts and ideas on many subjects by writing under various pseudonyms such as Silence Dogood, his first pen-name, Busy Body, Anthony Afterwit, Alice Addertongue and Benevolus as well as others, almost all of which were given metaphorical names and had an impact on the sociopolitical affairs of Franklin’s era (Isaacson 186). George Lundeen’s representation of Benjamin Franklin, opened to the public in 1987, foregrounds Franklin’s identity as a publisher and public informer (Fig. 6).

52 Fig. 6. George Lundeen. Ben on the Bench. 1987. University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. The Penn Art Collection.

53 Representing the second half of the twentieth century’s conception of art, this model of Franklin is depicted in a style that makes it accessible for the audience. More specifically, he is not located on a pedestal, in contrast to the nineteenth century models. Additionally, he is sitting on a bench like one of the residents of the city. He is modeled in his middle-ages while reading a newspaper page with a friendly look, so much different from the traditional stern faces of the sculptures of statesmen. He is given a friendly and inviting facial expression, as though he would get involved in a conversation with any townsfolk who sat next to him on the bench. This difference between those models looking down from the tops of pedestals to one closer to the audience, exhibits the change in society’s attitude toward the historical public figures

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in relation to their views on contemporary politics. It should be also noted that the artist was commissioned to honor the 25th reunion of the alumni of the University of Pennsylvania (“Ben on the Bench”). Obviously, similar to the statue of Young Benjamin Franklin by McKenzie, Lundeen’s model is also expected to be an object of inspiration for the young generations as it was shaped as per the expectations of the youth.

54 Fig. 7. Ernst Plassman. Benjamin Franklin Statue. 1856. New York States Archives, New York City. Digital Collections.

55 In this matter, Franklin’s accessibility and inviting manner represent his eagerness to share information with public as an ideal democrat. Meanwhile, he is accompanied by a bird on the bench. This depiction can also be interpreted as he is telling something to the bird, which is a pigeon, used for carrying messages from one place to another in the past, hence an informant like Franklin, himself. Therefore, it can be argued that the pigeon symbolizes Franklin’s efforts to inform public audience about social and political issues. All in all, Lundeen’s Franklin constitutes an ideal model for a democratic leader.

56 In contrast to this egalitarian representation of Franklin in Lundeen’s work, another model of Franklin, which highlights him as a printer and a writer, is the statue of him in Printing House Square, New York City (Fig. 7). These two different Franklins clearly display the change between the approaches of society after a century. Plassman’s model was gifted to the Press of New York City, and Franklin was praised as an “eminent printer, statesman and philosopher” in the unveiling ceremony of the statue in 1872 (“The Franklin Statue in Printing House Square”).

57 Compared to Lundeen’s statue, Plassman’s Franklin is depicted addressing an audience from the top of a pedestal. It should be remembered that Lundeen’s work was made after the Civil Rights Movements in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas Plassman’s work was made in the Antebellum Era, when depicting a public figure like Franklin as sitting on a

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bench like an ordinary member of society would have contrasted with the generally accepted norms of sculpture. The location of Plassman’s statue in a public gathering area, rather than a university campus like the former’s location, also corresponds to Franklin’s depiction as a public figure on a pedestal in contrast to an ordinary campus resident, inviting his neighbors and colleagues to a conversation in Lundeen’s depiction. Moreover, Franklin’s serious appearance, again in contrast to the smiling and energetic model of Lundeen, displays how the emphasis moved from a wise political leader to a modest and egalitarian social figure in accordance with society’s understandings of ideal political leaders over time.

4.3 The Enlightened Scientist

58 Benjamin Franklin was also recognized by his contributions in science as early as the year of 1753, when he was awarded with the Copley Medal by the Royal Society (Morgan 71). Science was a perfect field for a man like Franklin. With its endless potential, he could chase the new frontiers of progress. His optimism let him imagine very complex and dangerous experiments, such as those involving electricity which were rather ground-breaking for his era. These experiments provided a way of keeping his overactive mind busy enough, so he invested his entire time for science, except for the times when his genius is needed for the public service, mainly as a diplomat during the revolution.

59 Agnes Yarnell’s Benjamin Franklin with Kite, which opened to the public in 1965, reflected all of these features of Franklin as a scientist—or the characteristics that society attributed to him. In this model, Franklin is holding a kite, referring to his famous experiment in which he proved that thunder lights are electrical in 1752 (Fig. 8). As for his facial expressions, he has a hopeful, optimistic and prideful look on his face, referring to his aforementioned personal characteristics that enabled him to pursue his scientific exploits for years.

60 With his posture, holding the kite like a child, waiting for the right wind to play with his toy, and location of the statue next to a playground, Franklin stands as a role model for the future scientists and represents the ideal model of a man of science, from Yarnell’s perspective, of course. It is true that Franklin and his compatriots imagined America to be a country where science could flourish without any limitations, and Cartesian way of thinking ushered the path before the country’s scientific progress without any hindrance caused by the institutions like the Church and the State as had been the case in Europe for centuries.

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61 Fig. 8. Agnes Yarnall. Benjamin Franklin with Kite. 1965. Photographed by Christopher William Purdom. Philadelphia Public Art.

62 Furthermore, at the time when the statue was made, the United States was in the middle of the space race against the Soviets just four years before Apollo 11 space mission completed its task by landing an astronaut on the Moon in 1969. The space race was the scientific side of the competition between these superpowers as they were both trying to prove which one is better in this field to one another as well as the rest of the world. Of course, Franklin, acknowledged as the first American scientist, was one of the most significant reminders of the roots of scientific tradition and achievements of America. Therefore, Yarnell’s highlighting Franklin’s identity as a scientist is once again an example of how the contemporary era of an artifact of history shapes it.

4.4 The Diplomat

63 Nineteenth century diplomacy was shaped by the concept of the Balance of Powers after the Treaties of Paris in 1814-5 and particularly the Congress of Vienna of 1815, concluding the . The dawn of the twentieth century came with the advocacy of Free Trade and Self-Determination, and peaked with the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles, yet both of these developments had their roots in the newly enlightened diplomats of the Age of Reason. Franklin was, once again, a pioneer of this new kind of man as he recognized the importance of deterrence, by the means of military strength, and did not deny the role of power in diplomacy, but he also believed that war was nothing but a means of diplomacy—almost half a century before Clausewitz wrote On War—as he argued that reason would lead humanity to recognize their ultimate common-interest, which is peace and a commonwealth of nations (Stourzh, 245-6).

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64 In this recently made statue, James West depicts Benjamin Franklin and George Washington together as the former is bringing a masonic apron to the latter and inviting him to follow (Fig. 9). It is well-known that Franklin was involved in the masonic circles and other fraternities both in Philadelphia (Isaacson 106) and Paris, he used such connections to promote the cause of the American Revolution (Weisberger 168). Therefore, the statue can be interpreted as Franklin’s invitation of Washington to the social organization that he established as a diplomat in France owing to his connections with the masonic orders and that led the path toward the French- American alliance, which secured their victory in the Revolutionary War. In other words, Franklin shows the path to victory, passing through the achievements in diplomatic relations, to Washington.

65 Fig. 9. James West. The Bond. 2017. Photographed by Christopher William Purdom. Philadelphia Public Art.

66 Hence, the name of this work of art, The Bond, refers to this connection between these fraternity organizations, which counted Washington, Lafayette, Voltaire, and of course Franklin as members. The masonic apron, given by Washington to Franklin in the depiction, represents the bond of fraternity between the Founding Fathers. In this regard, the concept of fraternité is materialized as one of the fundamentals of the sister revolutions of the French and Americans as a cultural concept of the countries.

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67 Fig. 10. John J. Boyle. Benjamin Franklin. 1899. Photographed by Christopher William Purdom. Philadelphia Public Art.

68 From the gender-specific perspective, The Bond is one of such works of art that sublimize brotherhood and homosocial bounds. Eighteenth century politics was the realm of men to prove their manhood, and the masonic lodges provided the physical settings for the reunion of men as they could exchange their opinions on arts, science, politics, and commerce while establishing new bonds.

69 Although the lodges of America did not declare a unified support to the Revolutionary War, some of the leading Freemasons, such as Paul Revere and Joseph Warren, served to the Independence Movement and supported the values of their lodges like freedom, , industriousness, civic-duty, and patriotism in the discourse of the movement (York 323-9). Eventually, the Freemasons, who were among the ranks of the Patriots, found a new opportunity to reinforce their bonds as well as actualize themselves in the defense of the values that they perceived as sublime.

70 After all, the Nine Sisters, a Paris-based masonic lodge, was one of the two centers of Franklin’s activities to establish new contacts with the French elite and to strengthen the already-existing ones (Isaacson 355). All of these are reflected in another statue, again related to Franklin’s endeavors in France to gain much needed support for the Revolutionary America against the British Empire. Sculpted by John Boyle and opened to public in 1899, this statue, a replica of which is located in Paris while the original is in Philadelphia, is a symbol of Franklin’s heroic status in both countries and of the long-established relations between them. Depicting Franklin as sitting on a chair, it is positioned above a pedestal, on which the following quotation from Washington is vertically written: “Benjamin Franklin 1706-1790/ Venerated for Benevolence/Admired for Talents/ Esteemed for Patriotism/ Beloved for Philanthropy – Washington” (Fig. 10).

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71 Henceforth, Washington’s words were originally written in his letter to Franklin on September 23, 1789 in order to convey the former’s good wishes and compliments to the latter, who was suffering from age-related health problems (Washington). These words bring together most of the characteristics, attributed to Franklin by the creators of the statues, having been examined as the narrators of the artifacts of history in this study so far. Washington’s words also reveal how history, memories and narratives are entangled in a monumental artifact in such a manner that it provides new layers of identity to its subject, namely Franklin in this case, and how such memories turn into identity models in the course of this process.

72 Regarding the identity model that is collectively created by these statues, it conveys a message to the audience about the international affairs of the United States. The country was founded in collaboration with its allies, and thanks to its unity, it could survive. Supported by the consolidated power of their country, diplomats like Franklin established bonds with the allies of the United States so as to go through the challenges that their country confronted since its foundation. These bonds of mutual respect and understanding have been the sources of American power in the foreign affairs, rather than crude military power. Considering the recent discussions regarding NATO, French-American relations, and the Trump administration’s attitude toward its country’s oldest ally, the first statue, particularly, becomes more meaningful, while the latter proves that these bonds between the United States and its allies had quite deep roots in the histories of these countries.

4.5 The Founding Father

73 The final statue of Benjamin Franklin to be considered is James Earle Fraser’s model, erected in 1938 (Fig. 11). The Journal News reported the unveiling of the statue by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with these words on Franklin, echoing those of Washington a century and a half later: “the great citizen, printer, scientist, educator, patriot and statesman” (“Franklin Statue to be Unveiled by President” 3). This model provides the last episode of Franklin’s life as a founder and patriarch of American society. Although Fraser’s depiction seems to be lack of any significant references to Franklin and of a socio-historical conception, the plainness of the depiction has also its own message. Simplicity and modesty were among the characteristic principles of Franklin, who did not wear wigs or any luxurious cloths, either, even though it was in fashion for the elite men of his era (Isaacson 327-8). Causing the birth of a new identity model, Franklin avoided extravagance and praised practicality as well as simplicity in manners, thought, and appearance. Therefore, Franklin defined the apparel of the Modern Man, along with the Modern Society.

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74 Fig. 11. James Earle Fraser. Benjamin Franklin. 1938. Photographed by Christopher William Purdom. Philadelphia Public Art.

75 Regarding the date of the statue’s inauguration, it is obvious that the statue’s messages of simplicity and frugality represent the promoted social behaviors of the New Deal government in order to decrease consumption and extravagance in the Great Depression years. It should be also remembered as it is frequently seen in other portraits of Franklin that he is associated with optimism and referred to be the embodiment of the success after hardworking as a Self-Made Man. In the year of 1938, one of the biggest concerns of American society was the loss of social mobility, which had been degrading for years since the Reconstruction Era. It was much more difficult or even impossible to climb up the socioeconomic ladder like Franklin had done.

76 Furthermore, the used-material and details of Franklin’s cloths also indicate another aspect of this model. Apparently, he is clad in more clothes than normal, as though he were wearing a toga or a judge’s robe, so the Romanesque details constitute a part of another Franklin statue, together with Lazzarini’s, as the indicators of virtuousness and Republicanism. On the other hand, he is portrayed as sitting, yet his seat resembles to a throne more than an ordinary chair. Also, regarding the material of the statue, it is made of white marble, again another Romanesque detail.

77 When all of these details come together, it is clear that Franklin is intended to be seen as a patriarchal figure, a Founding Father of the United States. Hence, the statue still presents its subject in a formidable manner with all his impressiveness because he does not look tired despite the difficulties that the United States was facing, but rather he has a decisive look in his visage. In parallel with this, he is still on his throne-like chair as a patriarch, showing that Americans could still remember and pay respect to their patriarchs in spite of being in the middle of the biggest crisis in their history, yet neither his seat nor clothes are made of any precious or gilded metals, making its

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audience remember that Franklin, one of the richest members among the founders—if not the richest—was also one of the most humble ones in his appearance and demeanor.

78 Consequently, the simplicity of Franklin’s look conveyed the message that he was quite different from the aristocrats of his own era as a new type of patriarch, who was as influential and cultivated as his counterparts, who inherited their social statues despite Franklin’s humble beginnings, but Franklin was also more adaptable to the new era at the dawn of the Age of Industry with his exaltation of reason and freedom of expression. His material richness did not reflect on his appearance, but his intellectual depth and righteousness were represented by his commitment to civil-service and patriotism as well as his advocacy of liberty, equality and social solidarity under a democratic republic.

5. Conclusion

79 Memory is reproduced by the nature of remembering; thus, the individual needs to make sense of this fragmented source of history, and in this pursuit, he or she has to create narrations of the past. This process of reconstruction of the past is almost instinctive for human beings as they develop their identities by the means of this very same process. They reflect their subjectivities and memories on an artifact of history. Consequently, they believe to deliver the “truth” about their past, at the present moment. This sense of “truth” is not, however, a static model of the past; instead, it is a basis for defining and giving a meaning to the present as it can be comprehended only as the consequence of the past incidents, perceived to be interrelated with each other within the frame of causality. Therefore, meaning is created out of these artifacts and becomes the subject of the identity making process both for individuals as well as societies collectively.

80 Benjamin Franklin provides a perfect example for this interplay among memory, identity and history. Having lived an adventurous and productive life, Franklin had already become a public figure for his compatriots even before his death, and he began to be the favorite subject of their mythologies of an American hero. Subsequently, his story has not ended with his demise, rather he became the mold of the many faces of American society in the process of America’s remaking of its identity in parallel with the changing world in different eras. The narrators, mainly artists and historians, remade new identities, such as the Self-Made Man, Heroic Artisan, Journalist, Scientist, Diplomat, and Founding Father, in the model of Franklin to find an answer to the deepest ontological question of mankind, “who are we?,” at various moments in their history, ranging from the Early Republican Era’s self-identification efforts, to the emphasis on unity in the Antebellum Era, to the exaltation of freedom after the war, to the redefinition of their country as a global actor at the time of the Great War, to the years of economic austerity in the Great Depression, and to the search for a more egalitarian democracy and society during the Civil-Rights Movements of the Cold War years.

81 Franklin’s own characteristic of being the master of numerous crafts and arts helped this purpose, and the myth of Franklin was, then, born from the fragments of people’s memory of him. America projected itself on its dear Father Franklin, and the American

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identity has been reproduced over the course of this still ongoing process. Franklin became America and America became Franklin.

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ABSTRACTS

History and memory are always in interaction as history is the craft of composing fragments of memory into an understandable narrative, so it serves as a medium of transferring memories between individuals, who thus achieve a form of self-definition. However, due to the specific nature of memory as well as the discipline of history’s own methods of reconstructing memory, the subjects of history are recreated over and over again in each artifact of history. The statues of Benjamin Franklin, honoring one of the most popularly acknowledged individuals in American history and social memory, perfectly exemplify the interrelation between history and memory. Benjamin Franklin, art history, social-cultural history, sculpture, remembering, memory, identity, narration

AUTHOR

MERT DENIZ Mert Deniz holds an MA in History from Bilkent University with a thesis on the foreign relations between the Bolsheviks and the American Progressives before and during the Great War. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University. His research interests include American social, political and diplomatic history and Anglo-American Literature with an emphasis on identity, culture and international relations.

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Truth, Truth-telling and Gender in Politics: The ”Hillary” Experience

C. Akça Ataç

Introduction: Truth, Truth-Telling and Gender

1 The American presidential election of 2016 almost contributed a woman president to the global women’s movement, feminism activists, women’s rights networks and the agents of political feminism all around the world. Hillary Clinton, though her capacity to represent feminism is not unquestionable, came forward as the first woman presidential candidate of a major party and pursued a feminist- and LQBT-friendly campaign. In that sense, she was a great hope for the future of feminist politics in terms of women’s participation in electoral politics –particularly officeholding. A woman president governing one of the hegemonic powers of the international system such as the United States (US) was a historic chance for women’s attempts at claiming politics. To incorporate the neglected experiences and discourses of women into the mainstream practices of high and low politics by a feminist American president would have repercussions not only for the US, but the rest of the world as well. Low politics, which are the issue areas not inevitable for the survival of the state, are more open to the women’s participation. High politics with issue areas such as foreign policy and security are more directly related to the survival of the state and generally exclude women, their discourse and values from the policy-making procedures. A woman president would have integrated both the high and the low politics in the way to make feminism influential even, or especially, in matters of survival.

2 Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton’s rather vague, ironic, implicit and sometimes misleading responses to the questions for which she was urged by the public to tell the truth dominated her presidential campaign and created an air of “mistrust”1 among the voters. Particularly, during the FBI interrogation about her emails as Secretary of State, her negative image reached a peak of historic unpopularity. Her “self-knowledge, steadiness, and composure” -attributes she is famous for- could not prevent her loss of the election, as her opponents’ accusations of her being a liar did not cease until the

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election day. The ‘Hillary’ experience in that sense demonstrates the integral necessity of truth and truth-telling in political feminism in terms of elections, voting and officeholding; and therefore, encourages us to revisit the feminist standpoint theory in our assessment of what happened.

3 This paper seeks to examine Hillary Clinton’s political career, especially the 2016 presidential campaign, from the perspective of her attitude towards truth and her practices of truth-telling. Before doing that, however, it will dwell on the politics of truth-telling within a historical context with particular reference to the feminist standpoint. From time immemorial, women as the first victims of knowledge withheld by the privileged ownership of the patriarchal authority have not ceased their pursuit of truth. To fight against women’s deprivation and exclusion, the feminist standpoint theory, in the 1980s, advocated for “a conceptual trinity of experience, reality and truth” through which knowledge with transformative power could be produced. Despite the later essentialist criticisms that it has received, the standpoint theory’s early version provides us today with the opportunity to empower women against patriarchal mendacity, maybe even more than before. Although the anti-essentialist approach has opposed to the use of ‘women’ as a category of analysis on the grounds that it was dismissive and inadequate, it might be the time to reconstruct this term once again to create a common ground for the fight against patriarchy.

4 Historically, politically, and socially men have been the producers, distributers, and sellers of knowledge. Women, by contrast, have been hurt by the use of this knowledge –be it by an inaccessibility to it, its manipulation, or its distortion to a lie. Since the onset of the feminist standpoint theory, how the male control of knowledge had been a predominant reason for women’s insurmountable subordination has been emphasized.2 Within this context, “knowledge is power” has been a dictum, which reveals that knowledge in circulation is a social construct, reinvented “in accordance with norms of authoritativeness; thus it both embodies and furthers the values and interests of the powerful.”3 The powerful by default have been men and knowledge in their hands has been reconfigured to support and perpetuate their exclusive authority. Nevertheless, in the cases in which authority tends to be progressively more authoritarian, the lack or distortion of knowledge begins to hurt men as much as women.

5 From Metis to Wonder Woman, heroines in mythology and fiction have stood up against patriarchal hegemony over knowledge. And yet there are many real women whom these legendary figures have inspired and empowered. Against the regimes harboring lies in the public sphere similar to those of the authoritarian governments of the Second World War, the struggle for truth and knowledge grows out of the context of women’s emancipation and becomes a matter of humanity and human dignity. Under such circumstances, women’s historical existential expertise, gained as a consequence of their painful struggle to be rightful and “rational knowers,”4 could contribute to the entire society’s elevation to freedom from oppression and lawlessness. Such an approach would not only contribute to political feminism, but also to “contemporary scientific, philosophic, and political discussions more generally.”5 It is not a coincidence that truth-telling gained acceptance as an essential practice in the progress of second-wave feminism, as it grew under the shadow of a colossal governmental lie, Watergate.6

6 Women, freeing themselves from the patriarch’s accusations of wrong-doing and practicing truth-telling to unearth experiences, feelings, and of course the knowledge

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that were hidden from them by the agents of patriarchy, have gained a natural epistemological position against governmental lies. President Nixon’s lie, which was unprecedented in US history, spilt over the public sphere with traumatic impact on the American people’s firm belief in the constitution and civil rights. At that time female thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Sissela Bok had reacted to the matter publicly. The American presidential election of 2016 also deserves particular attention in this context, because for the first time in history a female candidate from a major party has run for presidency, but while fulfilling the political feminism’s greatest dream, in the meantime she has had to confront the claims that she herself promoted a lie. The long- anticipated emergence of a female president in the American political scene to fight against the lies of male authorities, as does the original 1940s version of Wonder Woman, has thus been overshadowed by accusations of lying and dishonesty.

7 When the feminist standpoint theory first emerged in the early 1980s, it challenged the established historical parameters on what was considered universal about truth, knowledge, and , partaking of the spirit of the time, which was the postmodernist critical interrogation of everything past and present. The all-male “ ‘true’ reality” was deconstructed by theorists such as Nancy Hartstock, Sandra Harding, and Dorothy Smith later to reveal the “relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power.”7 In the end, the truth expected to be attained, even if it is a women-only approach, could emerge as a concrete contribution to the universal epistemology of the human condition. This pre-supposition considered women’s standpoint privileged, because their primordial struggle against oppression throughout centuries had bestowed on them the experience that would help men as well on their occasional fight against the suppressive patriarchal authority and the ideologically manipulated knowledge that it spreads. The “partial and perverse perspective”8 of the hegemonic ideology offered as true knowledge victimizes the entirety of a particular society.

8 Despite Susan Hekman’s criticism of the feminist standpoint as ignoring many different female standpoints by using the term ‘the standpoint,’ and for producing a counter- hegemonic discourse only to become the new claimants to universality,9 this paper chooses the 1980s version of the feminist standpoint theory to approach the problematic of women and lie as a vital concern for humanity. The feminist standpoint theory has most insistently elaborated on how “the male supremacy and the production of knowledge” are interrelated, and how it could still help venture into a “knowledge that is more useful for enabling women to improve the conditions of our lives.”10 To that end I consider appropriate the focus on the historical, political, and philosophical aspects of the grand narrative of gender and authority from the feminist standpoint.

9 It is true that women’s similar experiences in varying political, economic, and social contexts produce differing and the feminist standpoint theory has revised itself by taking such differences and relevant criticism into account.11 The existence of differing standpoints, however, does not exclude the possibility of a common feminist interest in topics such as the detrimental power of a patriarchal lie. It is a context where “there is a generalizable, identifiable, and collectively shared experience of womanhood.”12 Martha Nussbaum’s call for the re-emphasis on the notion of one common humanity13, which would provide a firm unshaken ground for the and feminist theory to build on, has become a significant attempt toward

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possible universality after much debate on differences and multitude. The feminist standpoint theory’s criticism of the historical and structural relations between “the production of knowledge and practices of power”14 similarly offers my research the theoretical background required to pin down a singular women’s attitude towards political lies intended to harm women’s human and citizenship capacities. The assessment of the ‘Hillary’ experience from that perspective would contribute to the accumulative knowledge that women collect as they proceed along history’s path.

A Historical Overview: From Metis to Wonder Woman

10 Women’s perspective of the world and the universal has been absent from the discussions of world order, which recount “a merely partial story of the world as told by men to know.”15 In mythological narrative, the disappearance of women from the realm of knowledge can be traced back to Zeus’s swallowing his wife Metis, who was in possession of a special type of knowledge that appeared difficult for Zeus to control. The myth of Metis, in effect, is a very apt context to understand the primordial tension between “the dominant world view and alternative, ‘other’ epistemologies.” Metis’s knowledge, which was confiscated by the patriarchal authority, consists of wisdom, perception, intuition, human emancipation, trickery, and potential for change. Such a promise for transformation and progress manifested itself as “chaotic and threatening to the patriarchal .”16 Philosophers such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell argue that unless “men remove this fear [of Metis] from their psyches, women will continue to be victimized.”17

11 With the aim of controlling all pieces of information and all sorts of knowledge to secure its supremacy, first against women then against all opponents, the patriarchal mindset removed metis from mainstream epistemology and created arcana imperii, the state’s secrets as one of the most influential concepts of male human authority in controlling the flow of knowledge. The disappearance of metis and the silencing authority of arcana imperii have become the mytho-historical beginning of the quest for knowing by the repressed. The lies told and secrets kept by the patriarchal authorities profoundly interfere with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge in the public sphere. The notion of arcana imperii has justified such interference and, in its most extreme uses, reduces men together with women to the status of “failing to be knowers.”18 One of the notorious examples of the sort is Leo Strauss’s The City and Man (1964) in which, though inferior to noble truth, the author embraces the idea of the noble lie as a noble necessity. The rise of neo-conservatism during the Bush administration and the ‘big lie’ about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq owed much to this Straussian Machiavellism (or Straussian realism) for its theoretical justification.

12 As a recent contribution to the grand narrative of women in pursuit of truth and truth- telling, historian Jill Lepore has discovered a missing link between the first wave feminism and truth-chasing, which, interestingly enough, is the comic book character Wonder Woman. In her book, which is praised by Cynthia Enloe as “a meticulous and fascinating account of the invention of Wonder Woman,”19 Lepore argues that the birth control pioneer and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger may have inspired the creation of this most famous fictional “goddess of truth.”20 Olive Byrne, the niece of Sanger, was the girlfriend of the Harvard-trained psychologist William

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Moulton Marston, who is best known as the author of Wonder Woman under the pseudonym Charles Moulton. Wonder Woman, whose super power is to make liars tell the truth, first appeared in 1941 when there was a public need for a new fictional inspiration in the fight against evil during the Second World War. As the standpoint theory suggests, women’s empowerment depends on “a distinctive kind of knowledge,” which could only be acquired and used, in Harding’s words, “through political processes.”21 Although Wonder Woman was a fictitious character to acquire such specific knowledge of empowerment enshrined by the truth, the female readers expected her contours to have reflected on the real political processes in the much awaited image of the first female president of the US in the coming years.

13 Wonder Woman’s creator Marston was also a prominent member of the team who discovered the Lie Detector while working on the physical symptoms of deception as an undergraduate in 1915.22 Throughout his lab work on deception, truth and gender, he arrived at the conclusion that women were naturally endowed with greater power in the fight against lie in public space. If fighting against deception is an integral part of the struggle for freedom, women, as the first wave movement might show, possessed the progressive discipline that is required to break “the bonds of those who are slaves to evil masters.”23 Superman (1938) and Batman (1939) before her could not stop the war but, as the Wonder Woman theme song sings, “Now the world is ready for you, And the wonders you can do, Make a hawk a dove, Stop a war with love, Make a liar tell the truth.” One of the most evil enemies of Wonder Woman is the Duke of Deceptions who owns an advertising agency called the Lie Factory, the business of which is merely to produce “plots, deceptions, false propaganda, fake publicity and personality camouflage.”24 Wonder Woman’s epic fight against male deception made her, as Lepore beautifully puts it, a “Progressive Era feminist charged with fighting evil, intolerance, destruction, injustice, suffering and even sorrow on behalf of democracy, freedom, justice and equal rights for women.”25 Her legacy was greatly treasured by the second- wave feminists in the United States, namely by Gloria Steinem. The first issue of her magazine Ms. appeared in 1972 with Wonder Woman on its cover, calling on her to run for president.

14 Quest for truth emerges particularly in times of uncertainty and deception in the public space, as it is the moral way to attach responsibility to the wrong-doer.26 Wonder Woman was a character of absolute ideals, certainty and solid-proof convictions during the troublesome and painful days of the Second World War, when nothing represented the truth.27 All male authorities’ prolonged, destructive war over patriarchal supremacy, in Marston’s eyes, had proven the crucial requisite for women’s participation in ending the deception and exhibiting the big lie preventing access to truth. Wonder Woman, in that sense, overcame the perennial imposition on women to fulfill themselves “through the development of a man” by claiming the right to “self- development”28 and criticizing men. It must not be surprising to see all emancipating practices of women to appear first “in myth and fable”29 and then in real life. The first woman to challenge patriarchy with truth was Metis; the first women to stand against men’s thirst for war were those in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; the first woman to risk her life in the pursuit of truth was Wonder Woman. Their standpoints have resonated in real life and become the realities of real women. The revival of the Wonder Woman’s visibility during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in that sense, could not be mere coincidence, since Wonder Woman has been the comic book heroine associated most with women’s empowerment in the US politics. How Senator Elizabeth Warren

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expressed her wish to have Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth in her speech at Harvard University on 8 April 2016 testifies to this connection.30

15 If a regime of freedom could be achieved only through the “interior practices of ‘self- knowledge, self-interrogation and the liberation of an inner truth,”31 as the standpoint theory suggests, women would have the upper hand because of their centuries-long struggle against the systematically disadvantaged situations in life. Among their most hurtful experiences, lack of knowledge or the prevention of their access to knowledge has been the most predominant. Throughout the historical process in which women have fought for the rediscovery of the feminine principles, “ignorance masked as knowledge”32 has been proven to be the worst form of deception for them. Generation after generation, women have strived to retrieve the insight they lost due to deprivation of truth and knowledge. Within this context, as the second wave feminism emerged as a in the second half of the 1960s, women who had been “the object of the inquiries of their actual or would-be-rulers,”33 prepared to reverse this role to become the inquirers of those authorities as well as of their own lives. Before assessing Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid from the perspective of truth and truth-telling, it is necessary to continue with this focus on the second waves’ struggle with political lies, as the first ethical definition of a lie emerged in the 1970s during the Watergate.

Watergate and Sissela Bok’s Definition of A Lie

16 Following the , the and Watergate, the beginning of the 1970s and second wave feminism coincided with the US government’s particularly enhanced attempt at concealing the truth and withholding information from the public. Since the invention of arcana imperii, all matters, directly related or not, when categorized under national security have fallen out of reach of the public scrutiny.34 If the truth is “how things are,” then the extreme and frequent reference to national security by the governmental authorities serves to create an atmosphere of ‘how things are not,’ which is fundamentally detrimental to people’s capacity to make the right decisions affecting their own lives. Most of the time the person for whom the lie is intended “has a right to know the truth.”35 History has taught us that such suggestion is valid for the relation between the government and public; on the issues that the government lie, public generally has the right to know. The political atmosphere in which the American second wave feminism gained momentum was significantly conflictual because of the successive lies of the presidents under the pretext of national security. Although the feminist movement has always been troubled by the risk of overgeneralizing all women’s issues by ignoring the differences of race, class and geography, among these issues there exist some categories of analysis, which allow “to generalize about many aspects of inequality.”36 Pursuing the truth must be considered as one of them. Standing against the patriarchy’s lies women were likely to demonstrate a stance that, in Harding’s words, could “transform a source of oppression into a source of knowledge and potential liberation.”37

17 A real life wonder woman, Sissela Bok, came forward against this background of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to define philosophically and ethically what a government lie was as well as to show the ways to remain unharmed by such a lie. When the Pentagon Papers leaked to the New York Times in 1971, the American public

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was outraged by the fact that the US government had purposely exaggerated the security threat to justify intervention in Vietnam. The US Defense Department’s seven- thousand-page dossier of the history of Vietnam decision-making during the administrations of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson was more than enough to reveal a government intrigue.38 Hannah Arendt wrote her renowned essay, ‘Lying in Politics,’ to dissect and analyze this major public crisis of trust by elaborating on the concept of the modern lie harbored by governments with immense destructive power.39

18 The subsequent outbreak of the Watergate Scandal proved that lying was no longer an arcana imperii type of exception, but became acute and structural in American high politics. Those were the times of the twentieth century defined rather generically in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of as follows: Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of commonsense and self interest –forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.40

19 Whenever “the distinction between fact and fiction” and “the distinction between true and false”41 continuously blur in the hands of governments, the human need to detect a lie becomes urgently vital. A governmental lie with an overspread outreach would distort the past of its people and destroy the reality of today by “replacing it with an entirely fabricated alternative,” which would soon become the new reality.42

20 The famous second-wave feminist Betty Friedan had criticized Gloria Steinem’s promotion of Wonder Woman in Ms. in July 1972 on the grounds that women did not need to be super women to be feminists.43 Yet, it took a woman to defy the male epistemology’s unproblematic historical relation with the necessary lies of governments under the pretext of national security and public benefit. Sissela Bok, daughter of two-times Nobel Prize winner feminist Alva Myrdal, approached Richard Nixon’s ‘big’ public lie, which would later be known as the Watergate Scandal in a manner reminiscent of the clash between Wonder Woman and Duke of Deceptions. The “shabby deceits of Watergate,” in Bok’s words, were purposely fabricated by the Republican government through “the fake telegrams, the erased tapes, the elaborate cover-ups, the bribing of witnesses to make them lie, the televised pleas for trust”44 to manipulate the adverse and legal opposition. When President Nixon, who retrospectively came to be called the “wizard of the dark arts,”45 spectacularly denied that all those acts were actually within his knowledge, the emerging political crisis resulted in the American society’s collective questioning of the virtue of truth telling.46 Bok began by defining what a lie was. To her surprise, she saw that the Index of the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy did not provide a definition for “lying or deception,” but instead a catalogue search with the keyword “truth” hit “over 100 references.”47

21 Nixon’s secret tapings of 3432 hours during his presidency between February 16, 1971 and July 12, 1973 constitute one of the most significant abuses of power in American history. One of the tapes openly proves the US President’s order of the Brookings Institute break-in. 48In the face of a political scandal of such range, Bok alone, as a moral philosopher, chose to respond to the crisis by “confronting urgent practical moral choices.”49 After the Vietnam War and Watergate, society had lost its sense of truth, truthfulness, lie and deception and Bok conducted “an ethical conversation”50 with herself to offer her standpoint as well as practical solutions to this confusion and

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disillusion. The restoration of trust in the private and public spaces bore utmost importance to her on the grounds that “[w]hatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”51 A lie is “an intentionally deceptive message in the form of a statement”52 with an ultimate consequence of destroying the habitat of human development. Human development fails when “individual choice and survival” is “imperiled,” such as when a government statement that is intended to be a lie is transmitted. The society “whose members were unable to distinguish truthful messages from deceptive one, would collapse.”53 These are the reasons why, according to Bok, “a respect for veracity” must be observed in both “our personal choices” and “the social decisions.”54

22 Deception through lie is a coercive act, because it gives power to the deceiver who could not have acquired such power democratically in the absence of that lie. Deceit and lying, therefore, are “deliberate assaults on human beings.”55 Generally, the governments’ excuse for a deliberately deceiving statement would be the necessity of averting an immediate crisis and acting in the . Nevertheless, Bok in her book demonstrates how “lies in times of crisis can expand into vast practices,” how the crisis to be averted becomes “less and less immediate” and how, in the end, those lies are followed by even more cover-up lies told for “increasingly dubious purposes to the detriment of all.”56 Again as a general political rule, leaders who are accustomed to deceive the public intentionally first under the pretext of national security, then of anything that falls into the category of crisis, become less and less sensitive to “fairness and veracity.”57 They steal “the moral autonomy and the right to choose of the voter.”58 Democracy could only function as long as the governments “promote the general welfare,” which could only happen when “the public has accurate information about the policy matters.”59

23 With her book Lying, Sissela Bok stood against the rationalization and normalization of Watergate by the patriarchal keepers of knowledge; such was also the case with the Bush administration, Iraq and Leo Strauss.60 Yet, she also challenged philosophically the male epistemology, which accepts the urgent and necessary government secrets and lies as an undisputed since Plato.61 Bok’s moral philosophy of truth and truthfulness has paved the way for the coming generations of politics, both theoretically and practically, and helped them venture into uncharted territories such as a more “democratic conception of national security,”62 “broader public interest in disclosure,”63 “transparency” and “openness,” 64 and “withholding information,” “concealing information” and “half .”65 Because of Bok’s argument that the lying politician usurps “the moral autonomy and the right to choose” of the citizen, the acts of a lying politician, at least philosophically, have come to be seen as acts of violence..66 Bok was also among the first scholars who provided a legal and theoretical definition for “whistleblowing,” as a “new label generated by our increased awareness of the ethical conflicts at work.”67

24 The polls measuring American public’s reaction to the Watergate Scandal did not reflect the same immediate response that Bok puts forward as the ethical normative standard. In 1973, fifty-three percent of the Americans who had heard of Watergate considered the affair “just politics,” whereas only thirty-one percent called it “a very serious matter.” The Harris and Gallup polls conducted from the outbreak of the scandal to Nixon’s resignation, for example, demonstrated “how slowly and reluctantly” Americans came to terms with the situation.68 In this case, too, the

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political practice fell short of the theory and philosophy. Bok’s definition of a lie, however, has transcended its own time when she complained that lying and deception “have received extraordinarily little contemporary analysis.”69 According to her, if one intends his/her statement to mislead, then it is a lie.70 This definition is still honored today as the most apt, simple and neutral reference. By the same token, politicians’ “telling untruths for what they regard as a much ‘higher’ truth”71 is a political lie.

25 Bok’s feminism may not have been as overt a version of this perspective as that of the second wave muses –even found as “unfeminist”72 when compared to her mother– but has inspired and guided the female standpoint especially within the context of moral philosophy. Establishing trust by truth-telling was a subject, deliberately or not, ignored by the moral philosophers throughout history. Among the followers of this creed, who were “minimally influenced by women” with the exception of Hume, Hegel and J.S. Mill, Bok is the first philosopher to tackle the issue most directly against the background of a ‘big’ patriarchal lie.73 Her influence on the coming generations of feminist study in Ethics is highly visible.74 She has encouraged women to become conscious of their standpoints and thus to interrupt moral philosophy, one of the perennial streams of patriarchy. Bok’s works have also provided the theoretical foundation for the “transnational women’s movements for peace and social justice.”75

26 Bok’s moral philosophy offers four concrete norms to be observed at all times by all democratic governments. These are “truth-telling and non-deceptiveness, promise- keeping, constraints on violence and limits on secrecy.”76 These are not “culturally relative;”77 on the contrary, they are the most necessary conditions for any standpoint to survive and offer an alternative order of things without the manipulation of the knowledge in the hands of the patriarchal hierarchies. The feminist standpoint, too, above all relies on the unraveling of the relation between power and knowledge.78 The dismantling of such complex and secretive interdependence requires a defining in history such as Watergate and an incessant political struggle to follow. Women’s political struggle against secrecy would eventually enhance their “resistance to the irrational and the pathological,” which has been historically presented as the norm and the moral by the governments.79 A female US president, a real-life Wonder Woman, could be the highlight of this political process aiming at truth, knowledge, justice, and women’s standpoints to produce a more accurate account of life and being alive.

Wonder Woman for President? Clinton’s Presidential Bid

27 In 2016, the United Nations (UN) announced Wonder Woman to be its ambassador for the gender equality goals of 2030, whereas Hollywood heralded the shooting of an all- female-cast movie of Wonder Woman for the coming year. It should not be a mere coincidence that the return of Wonder Woman from Themyscira to empower girls and women in our contemporary world preceded the 2016 US presidential elections in which, for the first time in history, a woman became the candidate of a major party. Nevertheless, that moment of a possible victory for women’s hard struggle for gaining maximum influence and visibility to challenge patriarchal politics has gone quickly, as the UN withdrew the Wonder Woman campaign because of a of 45,000 signatures protesting the inappropriateness of “[a] large-breasted white woman of impossible proportions”80such as the 1960s Wonder Woman to become a UN

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spokeswoman; the movie fell short of the Wonder Woman fans’ expectations of spreading real “feminist inspiration” other than “busting balls,”81 and, of course, Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump.

28 The 1960s depictions of Wonder Woman have evidently distorted Marston’s philosophy of women’s emancipation through truth and created a perception completely divorced from the original heroine. Nor did Hillary Clinton’s ambivalent attitude towards truth and truth-telling support the second wave’s analogy between Wonder Woman and the first female president. Particularly, the email controversy involving an FBI interrogation irretrievably damaged Clinton’s campaign as it severely damaged public perception of her trustworthiness. On that account, the first time the women’s rights movement would be blessed with the combination of a superhero, a woman president, and the feminist standpoint to disrupt the interwoven politics of patriarchy, secrecy, and deception, has also failed. Although Clinton does not overtly identify with the feminist movement and one “could vote against her without voting against feminism,” her loss would mark a colossal setback for the future of the women’s movement.82 In a world where the feminist politics is already being treated as “irrelevant, unnecessary or passé” and the high politics, especially foreign policy, with the exception of Sweden and perhaps Canada, globally tends to adopt “postfeminist discourses” with the aim of “undermining material feminist politics,”83 the feminine future is drifting away from the current generations to a too distant point to be grabbed in their lifetimes. The 2016 US election marks a significant backlash in the promotion of feminist ideals and practices in politics.

29 Hillary Clinton, evidently, may not be the most appropriate candidate to represent political feminism. The facts that she was “subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury; and previously, her open involvement in her husband’s campaigns as well as her public policy influence during his [her husband’s] terms as Arkansas Governor and United States President”84 caused her to suffer eternal image problems. Her attitude of denying any misconduct in the ethically difficult incidents such as Whitewater and the health- care plan or her resistance to apologize for offending women in charge of traditional home-making, as in the cases of “Stand by Your Man” or “Baking Cookies and Hosting Teas” earned her the incorrigible nickname “the Hillary Factor.”85 Nevertheless, despite the occasional lowest levels of likeability and trustworthiness reflected by the public opinion, Clinton, as the “former first lady-turned-senator-turned presidential candidate”86 has reinvented herself each time she was accused of being inauthentic, controversial, inappropriate, too progressive, too masculine, too feminist and so on. Her extraordinary capacity to persist has made her the first woman to pursue a presidential campaign, which is unprecedented in American women’s rights history.

30 Hillary Clinton, though not directly involved in the second wave moment, was definitely a child of the political transformation of the time. Upon her graduation from Yale Law School, she first worked for Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then joined the team advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives on Nixon’s impeachment subsequent to the Watergate Scandal.87 One of her opinion pieces from 1974 would later be blamed for promoting radical feminism by the Republican Patrick Buchanan on the grounds of its defending “the ability of children to sue their parents.”88 Clinton’s appearance on the political scene as First Lady took place in 1992, which was the UN’s Year of the Woman. Her contribution to the 1995 Fourth World Congress on Women in Beijing with the words “Human rights

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are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights” became a monumental moment in the history of women’s rights.89 Hillary Clinton would, twenty years later, announce that her 2016 candidacy was intended to finally launch the 12-part plan for women’s empowerment she had proposed in Beijing.90 Nevertheless, she is also known to have voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, the authorization of the Iraq War in 2002, and the Wall Street bailout in 2008; none was compatible with the ethical feminist standpoint. It would take her thirteen years to admit that her Iraq vote as a senator was a mistake.91

31 When compared to the patriarchal one, feminist politics is still a fresh vocation lacking the millennia-old experiences, established practices, and globally uniformed claims on policy-making. It has its struggles, contradictions, and failures, but each time the agents of feminist politics, such as the current Swedish government, surmount a difficult, dilemmatic decision, they create precedence by charting the uncharted waters and provide experience for the coming generations of feminists. Those experiences, as the feminist standpoint theory promoted in the 1990s, would be “summoned by what women can find they have in common” and could be “translated into the universalizing discourse of a movement making political claims across a variety of fronts.”92 Hillary Clinton’s experiences, in that sense, both straightforward and complicated, have been real enough to shed light on the making of the feminist future. As it is one of the main arguments of the feminist standpoint, experiences generate knowledge for the present and coming generations. Even though Clinton has suffered from her own contradictions, ambivalence and sloppiness while reinventing herself in high politics, to many, who has followed her throughout this process, her “most authentic moments” were considered to be “her feminist commitments.”93 Authenticity does not necessarily entail perfection; it sometimes requires humane attributes such as the cognitive flexibility that would allow one to reposition herself within a changing context.

32 Foreign policy is one of the areas in which the feminist standpoint finds it hard to influence. The complex nature of foreign policymaking involves various forms of coalitions, bargaining, behavioral patterns and action preferences, all of which significantly influence or constrain the decision-maker. The secretary of state, despite being the most prominent actor in the US foreign policymaking, is subject to these factors and so was Hillary Clinton. Her intention to shape the state’s agenda of foreign policy could be traced back to 1995, when, as First Lady, she launched a world tour to promote human, as well as women’s rights, consequent to Beijing. 94Nevertheless, her controversial visit to the Middle East, especially her hug-in-tears with Suha Arafat on the West Bank, forced her to tone down.95 Her capacity to exercise her personal influence on the American foreign policy as the Secretary of State was not significantly expanded either. Although her initial position during the Libya crisis was non- intervention, her negotiations with the Arab League, G8, UN Security Council – particularly Russia-, and the US allies convinced her to intervene, because the possibility to be in solidarity with the Arab world and Moscow gained priority within the context of global peace over Clinton’s personal standpoint.96

33 Attempts at bringing women’s standpoints into the most historically and structurally male-dominant areas such as foreign policy and national defense have met with hard resistance by the authorities of the world system. This is why , the first female secretary of state in the US, said that the first female president, because of being the first female commander-in-chief at the same time, “would be a true

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revolution.”97 Feminist foreign policy, inspired by first Bok then the feminist standpoint, puts forward three principles, which are not “culturally relative” and, therefore, could be translated into action all around the world. In that sense, a foreign policy relying on “cooperation, and quiet success” supported by “truth-telling, promise-keeping, constraints on violence, and limitations on secrecy” reflect the principles that all governments committed to harmonious co-existence in the international system could execute.98 This, however, is a process still in very little progress.

34 As this study argues, truth and truth-telling are attributes that the feminist standpoint thrives on, but the patriarchy lacks. Yet, especially within the context of her email controversy with the FBI, this aspect has been neglected in Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to such an extent that one could question its feminist character. In her own words, “[c]overage of [her]… emails crowded out virtually everything else [her]… campaign said or did.”99 As Gloria Steinem admitted, because of the FBI interrogation, Clinton sunk “from being frequently elected the most admired woman in the world to a trustworthy rating that is something like Richard Nixon’s.”100 One of the reasons why her career, which was launched at Nixon’s impeachment, has been transformed into one that is like Nixon’s is the ambivalent attitudes that it has harbored towards truth. Even though her actions were found “within the law,”101 each time she went through an interrogation, the perceptions of Clinton convinced the public otherwise.

35 According to the FBI, Hillary Clinton logged into her private home server on her prized Blackberry during her mandate as the Secretary of State; thus she sent, received, and erased state-owned classified emails through her personal email account in addition to the official one. Out of 62,320 emails, FBI Director James B. Comey insisted that there were 110 emails, which were definitely not supposed to be found on Clinton’s server. Although the FBI in the end recommended that no charges be brought on the former Secretary of State, the interrogation had already taken its toll on her presidential dreams.102 Her dismissive and blame-shifting responses to the questions directed at her on the issue reflected poorly on her ratings of trustworthiness. Clinton’s answer to the question whether she “wiped the server” saying “like with a cloth or something?”103 aptly demonstrates her precarious stance against truth and truth-telling. In her own account of the email affair, she would later admit that she “even told a bad joke,” because she “never found the right words.” 104Nevertheless, the fact that she took the matter lightly made the impact of a lie on the public questioning her honesty.

36 The feminist standpoint strives to promote truth, transparency and good knowledge in order to enhance the “resistance to the irrational and the pathological,”105 which receive approval in the contemporary male politics to their extreme. The analysis of Clinton’s presidential campaign from that perspective suggests that an uncompromised accountability and reliability alone is the way to partake of such resistance. Otherwise, again in Hillary Clinton’s words, the “abnormalization” of a decent, joyful, and feminism-friendly would be quick and easy, as it was during the 2016 election campaigns.

37 Susan Bordo’s book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, demonstrates the academia’s interest in Clinton’s presidential campaign as something bigger than a current affair of American politics –something that would set the path for the coming generations of female politicians. The deterioration of Hillary Clinton’s image from “an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, admired, accomplished candidate” to “a

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tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician”106 bears lessons for all women seeking prominent governmental positions. The “mistrust” associated with her has played a definite role in her loss of the elections.107 It is true that the fake news published by the National Enquirer or Donald Trump’s attacks such as calling Clinton a “world-class liar” have built on the negative perceptions of Hillary Clinton in public.108 Nevertheless, what Bordo fails to bring into the debate is Clinton’s inconsistent and conflicting practices of truth-telling, which did equal damage to her image as a woman presidential candidate. As Mariana Valverde argues, there is, of course, not “a rock- solid truth” among women to depend on; but it is definitely “the process of truth- telling,” which would improve the women’s condition on every level and in every context.109 Hillary Clinton’s career has unveiled once again that truth-telling is crucial in reclaiming women’s epistemological authority in politics.

Conclusion: The ‘Hillary’ Experience

38 As history and politics have taught us, the male epistemology has presupposed that only a privileged few males could handle the truth and therefore have access to knowledge. The struggle for knowledge, in that sense, has become the struggle for power between genders. Particularly, the traditional patriarchal recourse to lie in the form of arcana imperii has alienated women from government, power-sharing and public space, hence preventing their empowerment in its full sense. In the cases when “the secrets of politics” overlap with the secrets of politicians who could maintain their power only in a thick mist of lies,110 women and men together suffer from the withholding of the truth by the patriarchal authorities in the public space. The greater the influence the corrupt politician exerts on the law-making processes, the faster the public space is transformed into a venue for “the pursuit of under the cover of high ideals.”111 The pretext of national security and defense ranks top among such high ideals, which legitimize the non-legitimate ways of withholding knowledge.112

39 The feminist standpoint theory claims that empowerment requires “a distinctive kind of knowledge” and “only through political processes” could such knowledge be acquired.113 If women achieve high-level empowerment through their version of truth and reality, it would serve the improvement of the entire society and all genders. Within their historical, social and political contexts, as Susan Harding argues, “feminist issues could not be pigeon-holed and ignored as only women’s issues,” they belong to the greater whole of humanity. In this vein, the standpoint theory seeks to demonstrate how “a social and political disadvantage can be turned into an epistemological, scientific and political advantage.”114 Women’s standpoint in the face of a ‘big’ government lie in public space has been significantly different from that of the patriarchal as it aims to be able to “generate less false stories”115 not only about the social but also political world. Women’s conception of knowledge and practices of inquiry propose to compel the government to reveal the truth, whereas patriarcha’s historical faith in the necessity of state secrets reinforces the limited public access to knowledge.

40 As the civil rights ascend, citizens develop a “broader public interest in disclosure” by governments and do not easily consent to “withholding information that properly belongs in the public domain.”116 In cases of intense opacity in public space, mostly in the form of national security requirements, citizens of all genders are deprived even of

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the minimum information about the real intentions of the government. Although the real intentions of governments could not be fully known, still, through transparency and accountability, citizens could gain sight of what is central to policy makers and react knowledgeably and accordingly. After all, as Bok contends, even though “the whole truth is out of reach,” there is always a choice to make between “to lie” and “to speak honestly about what to say and what to hold back.”117 When government secrecy under the pretext of national security becomes a norm rather than an exception, the Straussian justifications of a government lie as noble and necessary lose potential value even for the male proponents who once believed that the patriarchal authorities’ “intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity.”118 Such was the case in the aftermath of the US occupation of Iraq in 2003.

41 Mythologically, Metis was the first woman in pursuit of the truth that was withheld from her by the first male authority in the universe. Fictitiously, Wonder Woman chased after the knowledge with her super powers and fought against the evil of the Duke of Deceptions. Historically, the moral philosopher Sissela Bok provided the academia with the first philosophical definition of lying. In terms of concealing a public truth through a government lie, the Watergate Scandal has become a defining moment in political history and Bok’s standpoint demonstrated that when a government lost its respect for veracity, not only women but the entire society suffered. Historically oppressed and deprived of knowledge, women have an advantage in the pursuit of truth. If not distorted or manipulated by the “masculine ,”119 women’s standpoint promises a truer understanding of politics, society and environment, because this standpoint has emerged consequent to a continuous struggle against the male authorities and their big lies. “Feminist truth-telling,” Mariana Valverde claims, “can help to reconstruct a community united both through shared memory and through common hopes.”120

42 Bok believes that individuals and societies experience an erosion of the “sense of ethical coherence in everyday life;”121 contemplating on topics such as lying, secrets and peace could help them regain that sense which stimulates human development. As standpoint theory suggests, this is a process, not a given, but one that is achieved through effort, awareness, and time. As Clinton’s presidential bid reveals, the need to achieve the feminist standpoint is even more urgent and complex in high politics. The feminist standpoint theory, since its emergence in the 1980s, has developed and expanded to integrate all women’s experiences as well as to avoid the imposition of one single, fit-them-all, truth. Such a detailed interrogation with too many narratives of difference, however, has today resulted in “excessive personalizing,”122 which hinders the political struggle against the suppressive patriarchal structures. In that sense, it is helpful to revisit the early version of the feminist standpoint epistemology to once again gain a common ground fortified by truth and truth-telling. Otherwise, too many standpoints fragmented with too many narratives will allow the abnormalization, absurdity and irrationalization of the patriarchal agents to taint the feminist politics’ claim for authenticity through practices of truth-telling.

43 Assessing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign from the feminist standpoint provides us with the opportunity to once again grasp the inevitability of truth, truth- telling, and accurate information in women’s political struggle. Hillary Clinton lightly remarks that since Wonder Woman is “a movie about a strong, powerful woman fighting to save the world from a massive international disaster,” it is “right up [her]

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ally.”123 However, a more up to date adoption of the authentic philosophy behind the creation of this most aspired female super hero, which is truth and truth-telling, could have brought greater success to Clinton’s campaign. In their study of female politicians’ image in the post-feminist political culture, Anderson and Sheeler contend that US politics feel greater affinity to “fictional and potential women presidential candidates” than the real ones. 124Learning from the ‘Hillary’ experience will provide the aspiring feminist politicians with valuable knowledge to transform the fictious image of a woman president into reality.

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NOTES

1. Susan Bordo, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (Brooklyn, London: Melville House, 2017), 15. 2. R. Langton, ‘Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification’ in M. Fricker and J. Hornsby (eds), Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 131. 3. J.E. Hartman and E. Messer-Davidow, ‘ “Who Wants to Know?” The Epistemological Value of Values’ in Naomi Scheman (ed.), (En)genderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority and Privilege (New York: Routledge, 1993), 206. 4. Langton, ‘Feminism in Epistemology,’ 129. 5. Sandra Harding, ‘Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate’ in Sandra Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 1. 6. Mariana Valverde, ‘Experience and Truth Telling in a Post-Humanist World: A Foucauldian Contribution to Feminist Ethical Reflections’ in Dianna Taylor and Karen Vingets (eds), Feminism and the Final Foucault (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 68. 7. Harding, ‘Introduction: Standpoint Theory,’ 1. 8. Sandra Harding, ‘Conclusion: Epistemological Questions’ in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 185. 9. Susan Hekman, ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited,’ Signs, Vol.22 No: 2, 349 and 355. 10. Sandra Harding, ‘Comment on Hekman’s “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited”: Whose Standpoint Needs the Regimes of Truth and Reality?,’ Signs, Vol. 22 No: 2, 382-383. 11. Hekman, ‘Truth and Method,’ 349. 12. S. Benhabib and D. Cornell, ‘Introduction: Beyond the Politics of Gender’ in S. Benhabib and D. Cornell (eds.), Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 13. 13. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,’ Political Theory, Vol. 22 No: 2, 202-46. 14. Sandra Harding, ‘Introduction’ in Harding and Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality, 1. 15. Langton, ‘Feminism in Epistemology,’ 132.

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16. T. Wilkinson, ‘Metis and Her Unborn Children: Notes on an Epistemology of the Gut,’ A Feminist Journal of Transformative Wisdom, Vol. 2 No: 1, 42. 17. J. W. Tigue, The Transformation of Consciousness in Myth: Integrating the Thought of Jung and Campbell (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 125. 18. Langton, ‘Feminism in Epistemology,’ 130. 19. Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017), 183, n. 32. 20. C. Pitkethly, ‘Wonder Woman’ in R. Duncan and M. J. Smith (eds.), Icons of the American Comic Book: From Captain America to Wonder Woman (California: ABC-CLIO-,LLC, 2013), 834. 21. Harding, ‘Standpoint Theory,’ 8. 22. G. C. Bunn, ‘The Lie Detector, Wonder Woman and Liberty: The Life, and Work of William Moulton Marston,’ History of Human Sciences, Vol. 10 No: 91, 96. 23. Ibid., 109. 24. Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 9. 25. Ibid., 211. 26. Marianne Valverde, Michel Foucault (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 143. 27. Pitkethly, ‘Wonder Woman,’ 834. 28. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (Oxford University Press, 1994), 11. 29. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 222. 30. ‘Comic Book Heroine Senator Elizabeth Warren: Voices in Leadership,’ Harvard University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vynUmK8jYoA. Posted on 18 April 2016. 31. Bunn, ‘The Lie Detector,’ 113. 32. Langton, ‘Feminism in Epistemology,’ 143. 33. Harding, ‘Standpoint Theory,’ 4. 34. Alasdair Roberts, ‘Transparency in the Security Sector’ in Ann Florini (ed.), The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 323. 35. T. L. Carson, Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4 and 18. 36. Susan M. Okin, ‘Gender Inequality and Cultural Differences,’ Political Theory, 1994, 22(1), 20. 37. Harding, ‘Standpoint Theory,’ 10. 38. K. Hughes, Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 12. 39. Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,’ The New York Review of Books, November 18, 1971, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1971/nov/18/lying-in- politics-reflections-on-the-Pentagon-pape. 40. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Book, 1976), Preface to the First English Edition. 41. Arendt, Totalitarianism, 474. 42. Jay, Virtues of Mendacity, 135. 43. Jill Lepore, ‘The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns,’ The New Yorker, September 22, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon. 44. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 124. 45. R. Ben-Veniste, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exposing the Truth (New York: Thomas Dunne Books St Martin’s Press, 2009), 25. 46. R. C. Arnett and P. Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope and Interpersonal Relationships (New York: State University of New York, 1999), 197. 47. Bok, Lying, 127. 48. Hughes, Chasing Shadows, 8 and 12.

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49. Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), Preface. 50. Arnett and Arneson, Dialogic Civility, 191. 51. Bok, Lying, 924. 52. Ibid., 636-37 53. Ibid.,, 710-11. 54. Ibid., 128. 55. Bok, Lying, 127. 56. , Ibid.,130. 57. Ibid., 140. 58. P. Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying (London: Free Press, 2005), 224. 59. Carson, Lying and Deception, 208. 60. See, for example, S. Earnshaw, ‘Leo Strauss and the Invasion of Iraq: Encountering the Abyss,’ Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2017, 28:1, 259-262 and P. Owens, ‘Beyond Strauss, Lies, and the War in Iraq: Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Neoconservatism,’ Review of International Studies, 2007, 33:2, 265-283. 61. Mariavittoria Catanzariti, ‘New Arcana Imperii,’ Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program Papers, UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/ 81g0030z.,12. 62. K. G. Robertson, Secrecy and Open Government: Why Governments Want You To Know (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan, 1999), 22. 63. Roberts, ‘Transparency,’ 314. 64. A. Florini, ‘Conclusion: Whither Transparency’ in A. Florini (ed.), The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 337-348. 65. Carson, Lying and Deception, 4. 66. Oborne, Political Lying, 224. 67. Sissela Bok, ‘Whistleblowing and Professional Responsibility,’ New York Education Quarterly, Vol. 11 No: 4, 2-10. 68. E. C. Ladd, ‘Nixon and Watergate Revisited,’ Public Perspective, 1998, Vol. 9, 25. 69. Bok, Lying, 5. 70. Ibid., 6. 71. Ibid., 7. 72. S. Kress, Carolyn G. Heilburn: Feminist in a Tenured Position (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 188. 73. A. Baier, ‘Trust and Antitrust’ in D. Tietjiens Meyer (ed.), Feminist Social Thought: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997), 606, 617 and 627/n.1. 74. E. Boulding, ‘Feminist Inventions in the Art of Peacemaking: A Century Overview,’ Peace & Change, Vol 20 No:4, 408-438; S. Berges, A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics. London: Palgrave, MacMillan, 2015; T. Govier, ‘The Realist Model of International Politics and Three Feminist Alternatives,’ Peace Research, Vol. 27 No:4, 63-77; M. Walker Urban, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 75. Ibid., 408. 76. Govier, ‘Realist Model,’ 70. 77. Ibid., 72. 78. Harding, ‘Comment,’ 382. 79. Bok, Secrets, 25. 80. ‘UN Drops Wonder Woman as an Ambassador’ The New York Times, December 14, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/world/un-wonder-woman-campaign.html 81. Z. Heller, ‘God’s Gift to Men,’ The New York Review of Books, August 17, 2017, http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/wonder-woman-gods-gift-to-men

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82. S. Chira, ‘Feminism Lost. Now What?,’ The New York Times, December 20, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/feminism-lost-now-what.html 83. H. K. Sheeler and A. K. Vasby, Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture. Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. 84. D. Oles-Acevedo, ‘Fixing the Hillary Factor: Examining the Trajectory of Hillary Clinton’s Image Repair from Political Bumbler to Political Powerhouse,’ American Communication Journal, Vol. 14 No: 1, 34. 85. Ibid., 34-41. 86. S. J. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics (Urbana Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 1. 87. ‘First Lady Biography: Hillary Clinton,’ National First Ladies’ Library. 88. Parry-Giles, Clinton in the News, 31. 89. Bordo, Destruction of Hillary Clinton, 15. 90. A. Chozick, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Beijing Speech on Women Resonates 20 Years Later,’ The New York Times, September 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/ 2015/09/05/20-years-later-hillary-clintons-beijing-speech-on-women-resonates/ 91. M. Haberman and A. Chozick, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Long Road to ‘Sorry’ Over Email Use,’ The New York Times, September 12, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/hillary- clinton-email-secretary-of-state.html 92. Smith, ‘Comment,’ 395. 93. Parry-Giles, Clinton in the News, 25. 94. Ibid., 103. 95. Ibid., 150. 96. K. P. Marsh and C. M. Jones, ‘Breaking Miles’ Law: The Curious Case of Hillary Clinton the Hawk,’ Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 13, 550-554. 97. Alan Rappeport, ‘Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright Rebuke Young Women Backing Bernie Sanders,’ The New York Times, February 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/ us/politics/gloria-steinem-madeleine-albright-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders.html 98. Govier, ‘Realist Model,’ 71-72. 99. Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. 100. ‘Gloria Steinem: For Feminism a Clinton Win Would ‘Be Helpful’ but ‘Only One Step,’ NPR, October 21, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498736729/steinem-for-feminism-a-clinton- win-would-be-helpful-but-only-one-step. 101. Haberman and Chozick, ‘Long Road to Sorry’. 102. C. Cillizza, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Email Problems Might Even Worse than We Thought,’ The Washington Post, July 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/05/ hillary-clintons-email-problems-might-be-even-worse-than-we-thought/ 103. C. Cillizza, ‘5 Mistakes Hillary Clinton Made in Her Latest E-mail Press Conference,’ August 19, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/19/5-things-hillary- clinton-did-wrong-in-her-nevada-e-mail-press-conference/ 104. Clinton, What Happened, 105. Bok, Secrets, 25. 106. Bordo, Destruction of Clinton, 22. 107. Ibid.,15. 108. Ibid., 153-54. 109. Valverde, ‘Experience and Truth-Telling,’ 88. 110. Catanzariti, ‘New Arcana Imperii,’ 12. 111. Ibid., 15. 112. Robertson, Secrecy, 22.

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113. Harding, ‘Introduction,’ 8. 114. Ibid., 2 and 8. 115. Shelley Budgeon, Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 78. 116. Roberts, ‘Transparency,’ 326 and 329. 117. Bok, Lying, 4. 118. C. H. Zuckert and M. P. Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7. 119. Harding, ‘Standpoint Theory.’ 120. Valverde, ‘Experience and Truth-Telling,’ 74). 121. Arnett and Arneson, Dialogic Civility, 191. 122. Budgeon, Third-Wave Feminism, 83. 123. M. Overdeep, ‘Hillary Clinton Says She Can Relate to Wonder Woman ,’ InStyle, June 14, 2017, www.instyle.com/news/hilalry-clinton-elizabeth-banks-crystal-lucy-awards. 124. K. V. Anderson and K. Horn Sheeler, ‘Texts (and Tweets) from Hillary: Meta-Meming and Postfeminist Political Culture,’ Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2014, 44 (2), 225.

ABSTRACTS

Among the highest goals to be achieved by political feminism, a female US president has held an elusive but prominent place. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which coincided with Wonder Woman’s new post as the United Nations ambassador, has been the closest moment for this goal to be achieved. Clinton’s inattention to truth-telling, the email interrogation pursued by the FBI against her and her failure to win the election, however, have in part resulted in the passing of that moment. This study, on this account, probes Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president in terms of women’s historical relation with truth-telling and feminist standpoint. It argues that if Clinton had been more committed to the truth-telling principles and practices, her presidential campaign would have been a substantial contribution to historical and political feminism.

INDEX

Keywords: truth-telling, Wonder Woman, Sissela Bok, Hillary Clinton, Feminist Standpoint

AUTHOR

C. AKÇA ATAÇ Dr. C. Akça Ataç is an Associate Professor of Political History at Çankaya University in Ankara. She did her PhD in History at Bilkent University and pursued postdoctoral studies at the UCLA. She has publications in journals such as History of Political Thought, Turkish Studies, Global Change, Peace and Security, Digest of Middle East Studies, All Azimuth and Perceptions, and she has contributed chapters to books published by Brill, I.B. Tauris and Honore Champion/Paris, among others. She

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won second place in the 5th International Sakıp Sabancı Research Awards in 2010. She is on the editorial board of Turkey-based gender studies journal Fe Journal: Feminist Critique/Fe Dergi: Feminist Eleştiri and the co-editor of the special issue on Gender and International Relations of Cyprus-based gender studies journal Woman 2000/Kadın 2000.

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US Conservative and Libertarian Experts and Solar Geoengineering: An Assessment

Jean-Daniel Collomb

1 As the international community and the United States have been struggling with how to address human-made climate change, some voices have started calling for conscious efforts to engineer the earth’s climate in order to limit the amount of damage humankind will incur in the 21st century and beyond. Consider, for instance, former Exxon Mobil CEO and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s remark to the effect that climate change is “an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.”1

2 According to J.G. Shepherd, “geoengineering is deliberate intervention in the climate system to counteract man-made global warming.”2 He goes on to reference two main classes of geoengineering, “direct carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management that aims to cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight back to space.”3 So far, much of the discussion regarding geoengineering has been taking place in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in English-speaking countries, although it has also been happening on occasions in China.4

3 Over the last few years, the growing visibility of geoengineering has prompted some to accuse conservative and libertarian climate skeptics of being hellbent on using the promise of geoengineering to downplay the need for strong mitigation such as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system. Chief among those critics of free-market conservatives is Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton. In a book entirely devoted to geoengineering, Hamilton lambasts it as “a Promethean urge”5 and bemoans the fact that technology is systematically called upon to resolve problems begotten by technological development, while also underlining the potentially disastrous side- effects of geoengineering. In a passage specifically devoted to US free-market think tanks, he highlights the paradox of the climate skeptics who favor unprecedented techno-fixes to solve a problem the existence or seriousness of which they doubt,6 which leads Hamilton to characterize geoengineering as “an essentially conservative technology.”7 More broadly, the main idea behind the critique of geoengineering is that

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the Earth-system is simply too vast, too complex, and too unpredictable for humanity to engage in such large-scale experiments.8

4 Even before the publication of Hamilton’s book, the journalist Eli Kintisch had cast very serious doubts about the motives of conservative and libertarian policy experts who have shown interest in solar geoengineering: By focusing the conversation about climate change on geoengineering, conservatives have a new way to recast the climate problem that takes carbon dioxide completely out of the picture. Keeping the Pinatubo option as a worst-case scenario in their back pocket allows them to appear to act responsibly while avoiding its cause: the greenhouse effect, which humanity has exacerbated by burning fossil fuels.9

5 Recently Hamilton’s and Kintisch’s concern about a potential convergence between free-market conservative climate skeptics and proponents of climate engineering has been echoed several times.10

6 As if to prove Hamilton and Kintisch right, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had confidently asserted in a 2008 online article published in Human Events that “geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year.”11 However, other conservative backers of geoengineering appear to be a lot less sanguine about its political prospects, even in conservative and Republican circles. For instance, Lee Lane and J. Eric Bickel, two of the most vocal supporters of solar geoengineering in US free-market think tanks, complain that geoengineering is a political orphan on both sides of the political spectrum: In effect, for different reasons, the two politically mobilized ends of the political spectrum on climate change tend to reject use of SRM. The Greens do so because they regard it as morally abhorrent. Conservatives do so because, in rationalizing their opposition to GHG control, they have come to insist that man-made climate change is a hoax. The practical effect is that no organized support exists for research into SRM.12

7 Nevertheless, an emblematic quote one way or another does not suffice to generalize about what conservative and libertarian experts think and say about climate engineering. I will therefore try to map out the various positions put forward by policy experts in major conservative and libertarian think tanks regarding geoengineering. More specifically, I have chosen to focus on solar geoengineering, often referred to as SRM (Solar Radiation Management), for two reasons.

8 First, SRM is the category of climate engineering that is most often discussed because it is viewed as more promising than carbon capture. According to its proponents, the deployment of SRM could be quick, could produce more immediate and significant effects than carbon capture, and may prove relatively cheap, at least compared with the costs of mitigation or carbon capture. Second, it seems to me that lumping together SRM and carbon capture, which both fall into the broader category of geoengineering, might turn out to be confusing for the reader. In fact, there are highly significant differences between SRM technologies and carbon removal technologies. For example, SRM would do nothing to reduce GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. Nor could it ameliorate ocean acidification. By contrast, carbon removal, if successful and conducted on a large enough scale, could help humankind make progress on these two fronts. I will therefore focus on SRM.

9 I have decided to focus on US conservative and libertarian think tanks for two reasons. First geoengineering is mainly discussed in elite circles as very few people are even

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aware of its existence. An even more limited fraction of the public seem to be familiar with its complexities and intricacies.13 The very low visibility of SRM means that it is taken into consideration almost exclusively by public policy experts and academics, especially economists and philosophers. Paul Burstein has shown that topics that do not elicit significant interest from the general public, as appears to be the case for SRM, give special interests more leeway to shape policy outcomes.14 As a result, at least for the time being, it makes sense to concentrate on what is said and written in free- market think tanks.

10 Second, the positions staked out by those think tanks should give us pause because they can potentially influence the decision-making process when the Republican party controls part or all of the federal government. For instance, President Trump’s deregulatory push and his hostility toward the idea of a social cost of carbon are both rooted in the policy prescriptions made by think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.15

11 US think tanks began to emerge during the Progressive Era. Their goal was to give a voice to experts and specialists in public discourse, which is why their members did their utmost to stay clear of political squabbling and partisan confrontations.16 This began to change from the 1960s onwards when an increasing number of think tanks turned more militant and began to sound more ideological. This trend was especially notable among conservative and libertarian think tanks, many of which aspired to lay out a consistent ideological doctrine.17 Jason Stahl claims that those think tanks sought to call into question the so-called liberal consensus and undermine what they perceived as the ideological hegemony of the Left in US politics and among policy-makers.18 In the process, Stahl argues, they succeeded in promoting the notion of a marketplace of ideas so that each ideological side would get equal access to the public debate regardless of the factual validity of their claims.19 No doubt the blatantly ideological nature of the advocacy of those think tanks has markedly undermined their credibility. But their publications offer a detailed and sophisticated reflection of the ideology that undergirds Republican policies in the 21st century. That is why it seems crucial to gain a clear understanding of where the experts who staff free-market think tanks stand on SRM, how diverse or monolithic their positions are, and how prominently SRM features in their reflections and recommendations.

12 Hence I will provide an analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of the contents put online by the following think tanks: the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Niskanen Center, and R-Street. The first seven are listed in James G. McGann’s Global Go to Think Tank Index Report. They have been chosen because they feature among McGann’s list of the 90 most influential think tanks in the United States.20 Heartland belongs in this study because, for decades, it has been one of the most vocal free- market think tanks on the issue of climate change and has been identified as one of the fountainheads of climate skepticism in the US.21 The Niskanen Center and R-Street were founded very recently, in 2014 and 2012 respectively. I have elected to include them in my study on account of their staff’s pronounced interest in climate and energy issues. R-Street’s case is also worth studying as it was set up by former Heartland experts who had grown uncomfortable with the institute’s militant and hard-hitting climate skepticism.

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13 In order to analyze the perspectives of those think tanks and their experts on SRM, I have opted for an interdisciplinary approach as I rely on a quantitative method in line with the standards of political science while also resorting to textual analysis in order to study the substance of the positions taken by free-market experts from the perspective of the history of ideas. I have looked at the book chapters, articles, press releases, policy briefs and posts they have published on the issue of solar geoengineering until the end of 2018. I will first endeavor to define SRM and sketch out the terms of the public and academic discussion about it in the US. Then I will provide a quantitative assessment of the state of the debate in the world of US conservative and libertarian think tanks with a view to measuring how prominent this policy proposal is and gauging the extent of conservative and libertarian experts’ support for or hostility toward SRM. Lastly, I will present a qualitative analysis of the arguments laid out for and against solar geoengineering by those experts.

1. Solar geoengineering in America

14 Solar radiation management refers to a family of emerging technologies, the purpose of which is to reflect sunlight back into space so as to limit temperature increases temporarily. Two caveats have to be borne in mind with regards to SRM: solar geoengineering does not help lower GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, which cause climate change, and it has no impact on ocean acidification, which stems from soaring carbon emissions. If successful, what SRM could do is allow humankind to slow down the rise in temperatures and use the delay to actually decarbonize the while also building more resilient infrastructures. SRM encompasses several techniques, including marine cloud brightening, cirrus cloud thinning, urban whitewashing, and the use of orbital mirrors to reflect sunlight back into space.22 Stratospheric sulfate aerosols are far and away the SRM technique that is most frequently mentioned and discussed because it is touted by its proponents as the cheapest and quickest way of slowing warming. Put simply, it consists in mimicking the cooling effect of volcanoes by spraying sulfur into the stratosphere, twenty kilometers above the surface of the Earth.23

15 The term geoengineering was coined by Cesare Marchetti in 1977, but various forms of it had been previously considered by the Soviet and US military establishments during the cold war.24 Yet, in the context of the fight against human-made climate change, SRM was seldom discussed until the late 1990s. Things slowly began to change in the early 2000s. For example, geoengineering was designated by national security experts Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall as one among a series of policy instruments to address human-made climate change.25 The genuine turning point for the visibility of SRM occurred in 2006 when the Dutch geo-chemist and Nobel-Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who wields considerable influence in environmentalist circles thanks to his decisive contribution to the effort to reverse ozone depletion, published an article in support of research into SRM. Crutzen’s move was spurred by political inertia in the face of climate change and his impression that mitigation policies, which he continued to wholeheartedly support, would fall short of what was necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. Under such circumstances, Crutzen claimed, research into the potential and feasibility of SRM was worth pursuing so that future generations might have a contingency plan to grapple with the worst effects of climate change.

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16 The publication of this article was a highly consequential and controversial move because of the enormous prestige Crutzen enjoys in scientific and environmentalist circles. In effect a scientific figure of authority was lending legitimacy to an emerging technology which many environmental advocates wanted to keep out of the climate change conversation lest it be used as an opportunity to downplay the need for vigorous mitigation policies. Unsurprisingly, Crutzen experienced a severe backlash from several of his colleagues,26 some of whom even tried to talk him out of publishing his article.27 And indeed, once the article was published the importance of geoengineering in policy discussions about climate change began to grow. More and more articles, books, and reports were being published in order to discuss the merits of SRM. Chief among those publications was a special report of the British Royal Society in 2008. SRM also featured in the 2014 Summary for Policy-Makers of the IPCC.

17 It bears repeating that SRM technologies are emerging technologies, which means that what is at stake is whether significant funding will be invested in research into them. Recently several scientific institutions have cautiously recommended that funds be allocated to research into climate engineering. In 2015, for instance, the Committee on Geoengineering Climate of the US National Academies of Sciences underscored, albeit with many caveats, “the need for more research on albedo modification.”28 Three years later the American Geophysical Union published a statement urging “national funding agencies to create substantial research programs on climate intervention so that the risks and opportunities are much better understood.”29 In both cases SRM is presented as a potential complement to a set of strong mitigation and adaptation policies. It should be noted, however, that the 2018 IPCC Report for Policy-Makers does not include SRM in its portfolio of measures to address climate change, citing, among other concerns, “substantial risks and institutional and social constraints to deployment related to governance, ethics, and impacts on sustainable development.”30

18 I now turn to a brief presentation of the terms of the debate about SRM in the United States. Stefan Schäfer and Sean Low have argued that the public discussion about geoengineering, unlike that about recombinant DNA in the 1970s, does not just revolve around technical issues but has also resulted in “an inclusive narrative that also focuses on complex social, political, and ethical issues.”31 As a matter of fact, many social scientists, be they economists, philosophers, or historians of science, have already contributed to this discussion.

19 Ken Caldeira and David Keith, who are two of the most prominent and visible champions of SRM research in North America, are careful to preface their advocacy of SRM by an unequivocal word of support for vigorous mitigation policies. SRM, they insist, is not a substitute for emissions reduction but a contingency plan.32 Many of the proponents of research on SRM also claim that it would not dispense humanity from significantly reducing GHG emissions as diligently as possible.33 Far from presenting SRM as an unproblematic and ideal solution to climate change, Caldeira and Keith claim that our inability to enact strong enough mitigation measures should prompt us to consider a plan B in the form of SRM, which, they write, is “shockingly inexpensive” and “can be deployed rapidly.”34 Hence their call for immediate funding for research.

20 Central to SRM advocacy is the desperation argument, which is predicated on the fear that rich countries will not change sufficiently, at least not quickly enough, so that humankind needs to invest in research to be ready to deploy SRM technologies if and when it becomes necessary.35 On a more optimistic note, Oliver Morton, who also

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believes that we will not be able to decarbonize the world economy quickly enough, claims that geoengineering could allow us to buy time so as to continue to grow the world economy and improve the living standards of the inhabitants of developing countries,36 an argument echoed by David Keith.37 The objective would be to limit the impact of climate change while generalizing the benefits of material prosperity, which, Morton asserts, will not happen without “a massive expansion of the energy systems of developing countries.”38

21 This approach to SRM seems to align perfectly with the of the so-called eco- modernists, who hope to mobilize the resources of science and technology to overcome environmental and energy challenges while upholding and broadening very high standards of economic development.39 That is why, for example, Steward Brand has come out in support of geoengineering.40 In his much-discussed book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, who unequivocally sides with the eco-modernists, briefly touches on SRM. After summarizing all the risks involved, Pinker cautiously endorses support for research into SRM techniques.41 Likewise, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer has offered tentative support for SRM research, which, he thinks, could be useful as a plan B on the condition that effective global governance mechanisms be put in place so as to make unilateral and irresponsible uses of geoengineering less likely.42

22 Unsurprisingly SRM has also aroused doubts, fears, and a lot of skepticism.43 First and foremost critics of SRM are usually quick to point out that trying to control the global climate is a fool’s errand because of the sheer complexity of the Earth-system. For instance, the geophysicist James Lovelock has cast doubts on our ability to keep “the Earth in homeostasis” for a very long time, claiming that efforts to engineer the global climate would probably create more problems than it would solve.44 This concern is echoed by Hulme who underlines the many uncertainties involved in solar geoengineering.45

23 The fear of the potential effects of geoengineering on climate politics is also a recurrent theme among SRM skeptics. Although he reluctantly supports research, Stephen Schneider worries that the promise of geoengineering might reinforce political apathy and complacency.46 According to the logic of this argument, the implementation of mechanisms like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems would then become even more difficult to achieve than now. Yet, according to Kahan et al, exposure to information about climate engineering may not actually make the general public more complacent about the dangers of climate change.47 They even contend that awareness of the existence of SRM could in fact reduce cultural polarization over climate science somewhat by making some segments of the public that are reluctant to engage with climate science more likely to do so because geoengineering better aligns with their worldview than taxing carbon.

24 Other critics of SRM argue that resorting to geoengineering would be unfair to future generations. Wil Burns points out that implementing SRM schemes would force future generations to hold on to them for an indefinite period of time lest temperatures rise abruptly.48 In contrast to David Keith who has suggested that SRM experiments could be gradually and safely phased out,49 Jack Stilgoe worries that that solar geoengineering “will initiate a perpetual experiment with the planet.”50

25 Finally, concerns about geopolitical risks usually loom large in the critiques leveled at SRM. As a matter of fact, even David Keith concedes that the geopolitical risks are the most concerning risks attached to SRM.51 The philosopher Stephen Gardiner has

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warned against “parochial geoengineering, where the current generation secures short- term benefits for itself only by passing on much more serious long-term risks to the future, and predatory geoengineering, where one country chooses a particular form of geoengineering mainly to disadvantage its geopolitical rivals.”52 Stephen Schneider also believes that the implementation of SRM schemes could be rife with conflict and create situations that would be all the more volatile as “institutions currently do not exist with the firm authority to assess or enforce responsible use of the global commons.”53 Joshua Horton counters that SRM is very unlikely to be deployed unilaterally because, absent multilateral cooperation, geoengineering efforts would almost certainly defeat their purposes simply because the effects of one unilateral SRM scheme could be cancelled, or at least derailed, by another SRM scheme.54 Hence the strong incentive for consensus and cooperation between nations.

26 Because the discussion about SRM is still quite new, the terms of the debate will certainly continue to evolve quickly. Over the last twenty years several conservative and libertarian experts have set out to participate to this debate. I will now turn to their contributions to it.

2. A quantitative assessment of the state of the debate in the world of conservative and libertarian think tanks

27 In 2014, Steven F. Hayward, a conservative public policy scholar who collaborated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Cornwall Alliance, affirmed that conservatives were unlikely to look favorably on geoengineering because of the emphasis they usually put on the limitations of human understanding.55 On closer examination, however, several conservative free-market advocates appear to be considering SRM seriously. It is, therefore, worth assessing the importance of geoengineering in the deliberations of conservative and libertarian experts regarding climate change. More specifically, I will try to answer three sets of questions. First, I intend to determine how prominent SRM is in their analyses and policy prescriptions: how often is it discussed? Is it central or marginal in their thinking about climate change? Second, I will study the timing of their statements: are there periods and circumstances when SRM is more prominent, and others when it becomes less visible? Third, it seems crucial to map out the diversity of perspectives on SRM among conservative and libertarian experts: when they do broach this subject, do they tend to be favorable or unfavorable to it? Or do some of them adopt a neutral and noncommittal approach to it?

28 In order to get a sense of the importance and visibility of SRM in the analyses and prescriptions of conservative and libertarian experts, I have examined the material that free-market think tanks put on their websites. These websites contain substantial archives going back decades and featuring a vast range of documents, such as policy briefs, press releases, book chapters, blog articles and congressional testimonies. They are used by those think tanks to advertise their positions and their experts’ policy recommendations.

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29 What is most striking is how little the ten think tanks under study have said about SRM so far, even though they have published a wealth of documents about climate and energy issues for several decades.

30 Table 1: share of solar geoengineering in the online publications of major US conservative and libertarian think tanks between 1996 and November 2018

31 In other words, SRM appears extremely marginal in the larger framework of their positions regarding climate change. After eliminating occurrences that were not directly relevant to it, I have found that by the end of 2018, SRM had been mentioned only six times on the website of the Manhattan Institute even as this website contained 416 references to climate change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s website features 8 mentions of SRM out of 9,050 references to climate change. The most spectacular example is that of Heritage with only one quick mention out of 12,959 references to climate change. The only partial outlier is the American Enterprise Institute with 35 occurrences. Nevertheless SRM still accounts for a tiny fraction of AEI’s 1,230 publications on climate change.

32 It is then useful to find out when those references occurred, which might reveal the impact of particular political, economic or scientific developments on their positions. Hence I have decided to reference how the 100 relevant references to SRM on the websites of the ten think tanks under study are distributed in six time periods: before 1997, the year of the Kyoto protocol; from 1997 to the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001; from 2001 to 2006, when Paul Crutzen published his much- discussed and highly controversial endorsement of public funding for SRM research; from 2006 to the beginning of the Obama presidency in 2009; from early 2009 to early 2017, which spans the presidency of Barack Obama; from early 2017 to the end of 2018, under the presidency of Donald Trump.

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33 Table 2: timing of online publications about geoengineering by major US conservative and libertarian think tanks

34 What my analysis shows is that, before 2001, SRM was almost never discussed in the public statements and recommendations of the 10 think tanks under study (only twice before 1997, and three times between 1997 and 2001). The publication of Crutzen’s article really appears to have been a watershed moment since, in the last two years of George W. Bush’s presidency, the topic came up eleven times while the Obama era saw a significant uptick in interest with 69 occurrences. The election of Donald Trump has not led to a reduction in the pace of publications. From early 2017 to the end of 2018, SRM was raised 15 times by five different think tanks. It is therefore safe to argue that after the publication of Paul Crutzen’s 2006 article, SRM became a regular, though marginal, feature of the climate deliberations of several prominent conservative and libertarian think tanks.

35 Finally, I have looked at the proportions of publications and references that were favorable, unfavorable, and neutral with regards to SRM.

36 Table 3: proportions of publications and references that were favorable, unfavorable, and neutral with regards to SRM between 1996 and November 2018

37 For a statement to qualify as favorable, it had to at least signal support for public funding for SRM while unfavorable references reflected unequivocal opposition. Neutral references point to statements in which SRM was mentioned and referenced

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without the author of the publication voicing an opinion about its desirability either way. My analysis reveals that very few conservative and libertarian experts have taken a stand against SRM so far. Out of the 100 references to SRM on the websites of the ten think tanks under study, only seven can be characterized as hostile, three of them by Cato experts, three by Heartland experts, and one by a Hoover Institution scholar. It should also be noted that all of those statements were made during the Obama presidency and that I have been unable to identify a single hostile statement since the beginning of the Trump administration. By contrast, a clear majority of references to SRM (64 out of 100) contained support for funding research, while SRM was also mentioned 29 times in a neutral fashion.

38 Overall this quantitative analysis qualifies the notion that free-market conservatives and libertarian experts have rallied behind geoengineering with a view to marginalizing other, less ideologically and economically convenient, policy options like carbon taxes and onerous . In order to make his case, Clive Hamilton emphasizes the role performed by the American Enterprise Institute but also affirms that “the Exxon-funded Heartland Institute ̶ the leading denialist organization that has hosted a series of conferences at which climate science is denounced as a hoax and a communist conspiracy ̶ has enthusiastically endorsed geoengineering as the answer to the problem that does not exist.”56 Likewise, Jack Stilgoe references Heritage, AEI, and Heartland as three think tanks that raised the issue of SRM “enthusiastically” after Crutzen published his article in 2006.57 Eli Kintisch also singles out AEI as a major free- market institution in favor of SRM along with the physicist Edward Teller, the then Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens, and the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg.58

39 Although AEI’s support for SRM is a matter of public record and is corroborated by my analysis, the case of Heartland is a lot less clear and self-evident. The Heartland Institute has no official position on SRM and this topic is almost never raised in its online publications. Hamilton’s, Kintisch’s, and Stilgoe’s account of Heartland’s position appears to rely on statements by a policy expert named David Schnare who gave a talk in support of SRM at the first International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-1) hosted by Heartland in 2008. Heartland’s website also features an online article by Alexander Cockburn who pours scorn on the idea of climate engineering.59 As for Heritage, in late 2018, it had no position on SRM. In a private email on October 30 2018, Heritage’s Nick Loris confirmed it although he wrote that he found “it to be a more intriguing, far more cost-effective solution to mitigate warming than re-engineering the global energy landscape” before warning about “the unintended consequences geoengineering may produce.”60 He also cited limited time and resources to justify Heritage’s silence on SRM.

40 No doubt SRM has elicited favorable attention among a few conservative and libertarian experts but it seems too early to affirm that free-market conservatives have enthusiastically fallen behind SRM. Right now the most frequent recommendation made by those think tanks consists in arguing that mitigation policies would be ineffective, impractical, and economically devastating, and that, consequently, the US government would be well-advised to focus on spurring economic growth so that American people will be able to afford adaptation measures and strategies when faced with the negative consequences of climate change.61 In the larger context of free- market policy advice those positions and recommendations are vastly more visible and common than SRM.

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41 Overemphasizing the importance of SRM for conservative and libertarian experts and exaggerating the degree of their support for it will not help our understanding of their attitudes regarding climate engineering and, more broadly, regarding climate policy. In 2017 the environmentalist group ETC, which has been steadfast in its opposition to geoengineering, tried to link the Trump administration to SRM. In order to do so, it mentioned David Schnare (who briefly worked for Donald Trump’s EPA), Newt Gingrich, and Rex Tillerson who have ties with the Trump administration and have on occasions made statements favorable to SRM.62 Here again, those links are not insignificant but they are certainly insufficient to suggest that the Trump administration is likely to consider SRM seriously.

3. A qualitative assessment of the state of the debate in the world of conservative and libertarian think tanks

42 Finally it seems worth probing into the substance of what free-market experts have been writing about solar geoengineering. In this part, I will list and review all the arguments for and against SRM put forward by those experts. It is important to preface this list with a reminder that almost all those policy experts recognize that there are many risks and uncertainties attached to SRM. I begin with the arguments in favor of SRM research and moves on to the arguments against.

43 I have identified eight types of arguments in favor of SRM research.

44 The cost-effectiveness argument. This is undoubtedly the argument most often invoked by free-market experts. It is predicated on the assumption that the cost of truly effective mitigation policies will be simply too high and will outweigh the climate benefits. Consider, for instance, Lee Lane and Samuel Thernstrom’s critique of the Kyoto protocol: “Kyoto’s reach is too short, its grasp too weak and its costs too high.”63 Instead of trying to reduce GHG emissions, they add, governments across the world should invest in research and development and in SRM research.64 In the wake of COP15 in Copenhagen, Diana Furchtgott-Roth at the Manhattan Institute insisted on the economic disadvantages of emissions reductions: “The approach would raise energy prices and costs of production, suppress wage and employment growth, and drive up prices of houses, home eating and cooling, cars, and other manufactured goods by raising production costs. It is a recipe for economic drag.” She went on to promote geoengineering as an alternative to mitigation:

45 Successful geoengineering would permit earth’s population to make far smaller reductions in carbon use and still slow or reverse global warming, but at a vastly lower cost. Just as critically, it would also buy time until more information is known about the process of global warming.65

46 Reason’s Ronald Bailey has made a similar argument.66

47 The breathing-space argument. According to this view, a successful implementation of SRM would enable humanity to develop technologies that could hasten the decarbonization of the world economy while momentarily averting high levels of climate damages that are likely to materialize under business-as-usual scenarios.67 A corollary to this argument posits that SRM would make it possible to continue the task of reducing world poverty while exempting developing countries from being forced to adapt to climate change for several decades.68

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48 The desperation argument. Proponents of this view usually warn that the task of decarbonizing the world economy is an impossible one because the process would inevitably be too complex, too slow, and too costly. From this perspective SRM is really all we have and is, therefore, our last, indeed our only viable option. In 2013, Lee Lane and J. Eric Bickel claimed that “the increasingly evident political bankruptcy of GHG control policies has driven much of the interest in SRM”69 and noted that this trend was also enhanced by the Great Recession of 2008, which made climate action less of a priority.70

49 The insurance-policy argument. Those holding this view claim that a crippling climate outcome under a business-as-usual scenario is possible but by no means certain so that instead of embarking on an onerous effort to reshape the world economy, rich nations like the US ought to buy some sort of an insurance policy in the form of SRM technologies. According to Lane and Bickel, SRM could “play an important risk management role.”71 Alan Carlin, an economist whose work is often referenced by free- market experts, takes a resolute stand against any sort of mitigation policies, which he dismisses as both futile and unnecessarily costly. Interestingly he downplays the likelihood of catastrophic climate change but concedes that SRM could turn out to be “a very low-cost insurance policy until and unless there is strong evidence that global temperatures are increasing (or decreasingly) rapidly.”72 Writing for the Hoover Institution, former US Secretary of State George P. Schultz made a similar argument in a more guarded and cautious manner.73

50 The following arguments are a lot less common than the previous ones in the publications of free-market think tanks.

51 The survival-of-consumer-capitalism argument. In defense of SRM, Lee Lane writes that it would be “more consistent with individual liberty than are GHG controls” and “would require no government-imposed changes.”74 This remark seems to partly corroborate Clive Hamilton’s suspicion that conservative support for geoengineering is but a strategy to salvage capitalism and the consumer society. Reason’s Shikha Dalmia describes climate engineering as “a much easier task than coaxing or coercing people to give up their cars and children.”75 In Reason magazine, Gregory Benford derides the environmentalist preference for strong mitigation policies as one predicated on ‘a starkly Puritan ethic: ‘Abstain, sinner!’.”76

52 The if-you-want-peace-prepare-for-war argument. R-Street’s Josiah Neeley believes that, in a world where climate engineering is a real possibility, it is incumbent on the US government to be capable of deploying it in case other nations, especially major rivals like China or Russia, have developed their own capabilities to do so. Neeley’s argument both addresses and reverses Stephen Gardiner’s concern about the geopolitical risks inherent to SRM deployment by claiming that SRM is likely to be deployed sooner or later, regardless of the qualms US decision-makers may have about it.77

53 The this-is-the-anthropocene argument. Lee Lane and J. Eric Bickel make the point that human-made climate change is already a form of global-scale climate engineering but an uncontrolled and potentially very damaging one. In other words, our fossil fuel economy is already a gigantic exercise in geoengineering. It follows from that proposition that the notion that humanity may choose between a world with geoengineering and a world without it is an illusion. This leads Bickel and Lane to argue that the only choice we are faced with is between the haphazard and uncontrolled

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climate change we are already experiencing right now and a scientifically informed attempt at regulating the global climate.78

54 This vision is echoed in Reason magazine. Gregory Benford presents the Earth as a spaceship that a tech-savvy and scientifically sophisticated humanity has a duty to control: “As we begin correcting for our inadvertent insults to Mother Earth, we should realize that it’s forever. Once we become caretakers, we cannot stop.”79 Benford’s account of geoengineering foreshadowed Steward Brand’s recognition that “humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role.”80

55 The silver-bullet argument. David Schnare, who seems to be an isolated case among free- market experts, describes geoengineering as a panacea. Starting from the assumption that mitigation is a technical and economic dead end, he confidently asserts that carbon capture and solar radiation management will allow us to solve climate change in a cheap and effective way.81 It should be noted that the silver-bullet argument is an outlier in the publications of conservative and libertarian experts on the subject of geoengineering. Most of them acknowledge that SRM would probably be an imperfect solution.82

56 At the other end of the spectrum there is a much smaller variety of arguments against SRM, if only because very few free-market experts have taken a stand against SRM. I have identified four types of arguments, three of which overlap with those used by liberal critics of geoengineering.

57 The uncertainty argument. In the Cato journal, Berry et al. review several geoengineering technologies and then warn that “the solutions proposed above ignore the complexities of the decision that would need to be made ̶ one which demands comprehension of a complex adaptive system like the environment.”83 They rely on the work of Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger to underscore the limitations of climate modeling. In another article published in the Cato Journal, Dholakia-Lehenbauer and Elliott seem equally skeptical of the power of human understanding to engineer the climate in an effective fashion and affirm that “confidence in the predictive power of simulation models leads to excessive confidence in the ability to predict future events.”84 In that respect, those critics of geoengineering sound a lot more consistent than their colleagues who justify their support for SRM research thanks to highly speculative projections. As Stilgoe puts it, geoengineering is “an idea rather than a technology”85 so that SRM is heralded as a relatively inexpensive solution by its proponents, conservatives and libertarians included, only on the basis of mathematical models, the foundations of which are highly hypothetical. For instance, in a congressional testimony, Furchtgott-Roth highlighted the uncertainties which surround climate science, only to characterize SRM as cost-effective on the basis of highly speculative economic projections.86

58 The unintended-consequences argument. Paul C. Knappenberger of the Cato Institute warns that “geoengineering schemes seem like really bad ideas full of nasty consequences (unintentional and otherwise).”87

59 The geopolitical-risks argument. Herb Lin of the Hoover Institution is highly ambivalent about geoengineering, first because of the many uncertainties surrounding its potential deployment and second because of the risk of destabilizing unilateral action.88

60 The denial argument. In the wake of the Copenhagen conference, Heartland’s Alexander Cockburn lays out an impeccably consistent position: since humanmade climate change

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is not real, there is no reason to engage in geoengineering.89 Cockburn’s blog post is the only one of its kind I have been able to identify.

4. Conclusion

61 Although there are signs that institutions which have been instrumental in delaying action on climate change are considering geoengineering as a policy option to address climate change, it seems too early to say with confidence that support for geoengineering will become a standard position in conservative and libertarian circles. In late 2018 the standard position regarding climate change on the American right still consisted in opposing mitigation and prioritizing high rates of economic growth that will enable humankind to afford adaptation to climate change. Solar geoengineering remained a marginal topic of discussion among free-market experts and scholars.

62 Put simply, this article qualifies the claim made by several social scientists and journalists to the effect that solar geoengineering is fast becoming a powerful new weapon in the arsenal used by conservative and libertarian experts with a view to making the adoption of strong mitigation measures even more improbable than they already are. Analysis of data produced by prominent free-market think tanks suggests that this claim is premature. Solar geoengineering is being discussed in US free-market circles and might become more prominent as our climate predicament worsens but, until now, it has not been a key objective of those institutions.

63 It is notable, however, that most of those who did consider SRM tended to support funding for research often, though not always, as an alternative to mitigation policies. Hence the need for researchers to keep track of what is being said about SRM in the free-market think tanks that have a close relationship with the Republican party. It could also be instructive to find out whether elected officials start taking up their recommendations in favor of SRM funding.

64 So far, the influence of free-market think tanks on climate policy has been largely negative in that it has consisted in defeating or limiting the implementation of policy mechanisms intended for climate change mitigation, such as carbon taxes and emissions trading systems. Whether they are able to place SRM near the top of the policy agenda will help us determine how likely they are to marginalize mitigation even further. The important role performed by Crutzen’s 2006 article, which led to a spike in the number of publications on SRM by free-market experts, does not seem to have any obvious precedent in the way in which free-market think tanks have approached climate policy historically. In order to gauge the ability of think tanks to turn marginal ideas into more mainstream policy proposals, it could be interesting to compare the attempts at promoting SRM described in this article with recent efforts by progressive think tanks like New Consensus to advertise the so-called Green New Deal. Although the chances of legislative success of the Green New Deal remain vanishingly small, there is no question that its proponents have already managed to capture the attention of the political class, both positively and negatively, in a way that SRM advocates have not until now. Looking into the reasons for this discrepancy could open promising avenues of research.

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Neeley, Josiah. “Geoengineering: The Cold War on Global Warming.” R-Street, February 27, 2015. https://www.rstreet.org/2015/02/27/geoengineering-the-cold-war-on-global-warming/.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, , and Progress. New York: Viking, 2018.

Rich, Andrew. Think Tanks and Public Policy Advice in the United States: Academics, Advisers and Advocates. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Robock, Alan. “Twenty Reasons Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64, no. 2 (2008): 14-18.

Schäfer, Stefan, and Sean Low. “Asilomar Moments: Formative Framings in Recombinant DNA and Solar Climate Engineering Research.” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 372, no. 2031 (2014): 1-15.

David W. Schnare. “Climate Change and the Uncomfortable Middle Ground: The Geoengineering and ‘No Regrets’ Policy Alternative.” The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, March 2008. http://www.thomasjeffersoninst.org/pdf/articles/Schnare_speech_2.pdf .

Schneider, Stephen H. “Geoengineering: Could we or Should we Make it Work?” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 366, no. 1882 (2008): 3857-3858.

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Schultz, George P. “The Past Must Not Be Prologue.” The Hoover Institution, December 9, 2008. https://www.hoover.org/research/past-must-not-be-prologue.

Schwartz, Peter, and Doug Randall. “An Abrupt Climate Change and its Implications for United States National Security.” 2003. https://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/readings/ Pentagon.pdf.

Shepherd, John G. “Geoengineering the Climate: An Overview and Update.” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 370, no. 1974 (2012): 4166-4175.

Singer, Peter. One World Now: The Ethics of . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Stahl, Jason. Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Stilgoe, Jack. Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering. London: Earthscan, 2015.

Thernstrom, Samuel. “Engineering the Climate.” American Enterprise Institute, January 14, 2009. http://www.aei.org/publication/engineering-the-climate-2/.

NOTES

1. Chris Mooney, “Rex Tillerson’s View of Climate Change: It’s an ‘Engineering Problem’,” The Washington Post, December 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/13/rex-tillersons-view-of-climate-change-its- just-an-engineering-problem/?utm_term=.6d7110a1cd1c. 2. John G. Shepherd, “Geoengineering the Climate: An Overview and Update,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 370, no. 1974 (2012): 4166-4175. 3. Ibid., 4166. 4. Sanna Huttunen, Emmi Skyten, and Mikael Hilden, “Emerging Policy Perspectives on Geoengineering: An International Comparison,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 18. 5. Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 18. 6. Ibid., 90. 7. Ibid., 119. 8. Dominique Bourg and Gérald Hess, « La géo-ingénierie: réduction, adaptation et scénario du désespoir, » Natures Sciences Sociétés 18, no. 3 (2010): 300. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’événement Anthropocène : la terre, l’histoire et nous (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013), 102-107. Catherine Larrère, « Anthropocène: le nouveau grand récit, » Esprit 12 (2015): 50. 9. Eli Kintisch, Hack the Planet: Science’s Best Hope ̶ or Worst Nightmare ̶ for Averting Catastrophe (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 199. 10. David Appell, “Strange Bedfellows? Climate Change Denial and Support for Geoengineering,” Yale Climate Connections, October 10, 2013, https:// www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2013/10/strange-bedfellows-climate-change-denial- and-support-for-geoengineering/. Pierre Charbonnier, « L’ambition démocratique à l’âge de l’anthropocène, » Esprit 12 (2015): 34-35. Katherine Ellison, “Why Climate Change Skeptics Are Backing Geoengineering,” Wired magazine, March 28, 2018,

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https://www.wired.com/story/why-climate-change-skeptics-are-backing- geoengineering/. 11. Newt Gingrich, “Stop the Green Pig: Defeat the Boxer-Warner-Lieberman Green Pork Bill Capping American Jobs and Trading America’s Future,” Human Events, June 3, 2008, http://humanevents.com/2008/06/03/stop-the-green-pig-defeat-the- boxerwarnerlieberman-green-pork-bill-capping-american-jobs-and-trading-americas- future/. 12. Lee Lane and J. Eric Bickel, “Solar Radiation Management: An Evolving Climate Policy Option,” American Enterprise Institute, May 1, 2013, http://www.aei.org/ publication/solar-radiation-management-an-evolving-climate-policy-option/. 13. Ashley M. Mercer., David W. Keith, and Jacqueline D. Sharp, “Public Understanding of Solar Radiation Management,” Environmental Research Letters 6, no. 4, (2011): 8. Adam Corner, Nick Pidgeon, and Karen Parkhill, “Perception of Geoengineering: Public Attitudes, Stakeholder Perspectives, and the Challenge of ‘Upstream’ Engagement,” WIREs Climate Change 3, no. 5 (2011): 454. Aseem Mahajan, Dustin Tingley, and Gernot Wagner, “Fast, Cheap, and Imperfect? US Public Opinion about Solar Geoengineering,” Environmental Politics 6 (2018): 6. 14. Paul Burstein, American Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress: What the Public Wants and What It Gets (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 68-70. 15. Jean-Daniel Collomb, “A Worthy Heir: Donald Trump, the Republican Party and Climate Change,” Revue LISA/LISA e-journal XVI, no. 2 (2018), https:// journals.openedition.org/lisa/9941. 16. Andrew Rich, Think Tanks and Public Policy Advice in the United States: Academics, Advisers and Advocates (New York: Routledge, 2007), 6. 17. Donald E. Abelson, “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Reflections on the Evolution of American Think Tanks,” Canadian Review of American Studies 46, no. 1 (2016): 141. 18. Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016): 37. 19. Ibid., 92. 20. James G. McGann, Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, 12 (2017): 55-56. 21. Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright, “Challenging Climate Change: The Denial Countermovement,” in Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives, ed. Riley E. Dunlap and Robert J. Brulle, 300-332 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 312. 22. Mike Hulme, Can Science Fix Climate Science? (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 7-8. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. James R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 165-188. 25. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt Climate Change and its Implications for United States National Security,” 2003, https://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/ readings/Pentagon.pdf. 26. Hamilton, Earthmasters, 15. 27. Oliver Morton, The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World (Princeton University Press, 2015), 154. 28. Committee on Geoengineering Climate, “Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool Earth,” (Washington DC: The National Academies of Sciences, 2015), 8, https:// www.nap.edu/read/18988/chapter/1.

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29. American Geophysical Union, “Climate Intervention Requires Enhanced Research, Consideration of Societal and Environmental Impacts, and Policy Development,” January 12, 2018, file:///E:/geoengineering/r%20sTREET/Climate-Intervention- Position-Statement-Final-2018-1%20American%20Geophysical%20Union.pdf. 30. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Summary for Policymakers, 2018, 14-15, https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf. 31. Stefan Schäfer and Sean Low, “Asilomar Moments: Formative Framings in Recombinant DNA and Solar Climate Engineering Research,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 372, no. 2031 (2014): 11. 32. Ken Caldeira and David Keith, “The Need for Climate Engineering Research,” Issues in Science and Technology 27, no. 1 (2010): 57-62. 33. Stephen H. Schneider, “Geoengineering: Could we or Should we Make it Work?,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 366, no. 1882 (2008): 3857-3858. Shepherd, “Geoengineering,” 4116. 34. Caldeira, “Need,” 58. 35. Jay Michaelson, “Geoengineering and Climate Management” in: Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues and Governance Frameworks, ed. Wil C.G. Burns and A.L. Strauss, 81-114 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 36. Morton, Planet, 9. 37. David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 137. 38. Morton, Planet, 9. 39. John Asafu-Adjaye, et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” Ecomodernism.org, April 2015, http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english/. 40. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), 275-302. 41. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), 152-153. 42. Peter Singer, One World Now: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 64-68. 43. Alan Robock, “Twenty Reasons Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64, no. 2 (2008): 14-18. Huttunen, Skyten, and Hilden, “Emerging Policy,” 21. Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed and What it Means for our Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 220-228. 44. James Lovelock, “A Geophysiologist’s Thoughts on Geoengineering,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 366, no. 1882 (2008): 3888. 45. Hulme, Science, 98-99. 46. Schneider, “Geoengineering,” 3847. 47. Dan M. Kahan, et al., “Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-Channel Model of Science Communication,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 658, no. 1 (2015): 205-206. 48. Wil C.G. Burns, “Climate Geoengineering: Solar Radiation Management and its Implications for Intergenerational Equity,” in: Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues and Governance Frameworks, ed. Wil C.G. Burns and Andrew L. Strauss, 81-114 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 208-213. 49. Keith, Case, 77-118. 50. Jack Stilgoe, Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering, (London: Earthscan, 2015): 13. 51. Keith, Case, 156.

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52. Stephen M. Gardiner, “The Desperation Argument for Geoengineering,” Political Science and Politics 46, no. 1 (2013): 31. 53. Schneider, “Geoengineering,” 3857. 54. Joshua Horton, “Geoengineering and the Myth of Unilateralism,” in: Climate Change Geoengineering: Philosophical Perspectives, Legal Issues and Governance Frameworks, ed. Wil C.G. Burns and Andrew L. Strauss, 168-181 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 172-173. 55. Steven F. Hayward, “Conservatism and Climate Science,” Issues in Science and Technology 30, no. 3 (2014): 54. 56. Hamilton, Earthmasters, 90. 57. Stilgoe, Experiment, 107. 58. Kintisch, Hack, chapter 10. 59. Alexander Cockburn, “Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce,” Heartland Institute, December 24, 2009, https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/ publications/anthropogenic-global-warming-is-a-farce. 60. Private email from Nick Loris to Jean-Daniel Collomb, October 30, 2018. 61. Competitive Enterprise Institute, Energy and Environment: Free to Prosper: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 115th Congress, (Washington DC: Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2016), 64-68, https://cei.org/agendaforcongress-2017. Heritage Foundation, Blueprint for Reform: A Comprehensive Policy Agenda for a New Administration in 2017, (Washington DC: Heritage Foundation, 2016), 21-25, https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/ report/blueprint-reform-comprehensive-policy-agenda-new-administration-2017. Cato Institute, Cato Handbook for Policymakers, (Washington DC: Cato Institute, 2017), 627-636, https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policy- makers-8th-edition-2017. 62. ETC, “The Trump administration ̶ a Geoengineering Administration?,” ETC Group Briefing, March 27, 2017, http://www.etcgroup.org/sites/www.etcgroup.org/files/ files/etc_briefing_the_trump_administration_-_a_geoengineering_administration.pdf. 63. Lee Lane and Samuel Thernstrom, “A New Direction for US Climate Policy: Credible Alternatives to Kyoto,” American Enterprise Institute, Environmental Policy Outlook, n°1, 2007, 2, https://www.aei.org/publication/a-new-direction-for-bush-administration- climate-policy/. 64. Ibid., 3-4. 65. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, “Climate Change: Another Option,” Manhattan Institute, December 10, 2009, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/climate-change- another-option-2232.html. 66. Ronald Bailey, “An Emergency Cooling System for the Planet,” Reason Foundation, June 10, 2008, https://reason.com/archives/2008/06/10/an-emergency-cooling- system-fo. 67. Ibid. Fred C. Iklé and Lowell Wood, “Sunscreen for Planet Earth,” Hoover Institution, June 10, 2008, https://www.hoover.org/research/sunscreen-planet-earth. Samuel Thernstrom, “Engineering the Climate,” American Enterprise Institute, January 14, 2009, http://www.aei.org/publication/engineering-the-climate-2/. 68. Robert P. Murphy, “The Benefits of Procrastination: The Economics of Geo- Engineering,” The Library of Economics and Liberty, December 7, 2009, https:// www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Murphygeoengineering.html. 69. Lane and Bickel, “Solar,” 20. 70. Ibid., 9.

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71. Lee Lane and Eric J. Bickel, “Climate Change, Climate Engineering R&D,” Copenhagen Consensus, Challenge Paper, 2012, 4, http://www.schrogl.com/03ClimateGeo/ DOKUMENTE/201_BICKEL_LANE_CLIMATE_CHANGE_2012.pdf. 72. Alan Carlin, “A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 8 (2011): 1017. 73. George P. Schultz, “The Past Must Not Be Prologue,” The Hoover Institution, December 9, 2008, https://www.hoover.org/research/past-must-not-be-prologue. 74. Lee Lane, Strategic Policy Options for the Bush Administration Climate Policy, (Washington DC: AEI Press, 2006), 73 75. Shikha Dalmia, “Why the Left Can’t Solve Global Warming,” Reason Foundation, July 28, 2017, https://reason.com/archives/2017/07/28/why-the-left-cant-solve-global- warming. 76. Gregory Benford, “Climate Controls,” Reason Foundation, November 1997, https:// reason.com/archives/1997/11/01/climate-controls. 77. Josiah Neeley, “Geoengineering: The Cold War on Global Warming,” R-Street, February 27, 2015, https://www.rstreet.org/2015/02/27/geoengineering-the-cold-war- on-global-warming/. 78. Lane and Bickel, “Climate Change,” 4. 79. Benford, “Climate”. 80. Steward Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, (London: Atlantic Books, 2010): 275. 81. David W. Schnare, “Climate Change and the Uncomfortable Middle Ground: The Geoengineering and ‘No Regrets’ Policy Alternative,” The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, March 2008, http://www.thomasjeffersoninst.org/pdf/articles/ Schnare_speech_2.pdf . 82. Lee Lane and J. Eric Bickel, An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change, (Fredericksburg, Denmark: Copenhagen Consensus on Climate, 2009): 49, http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/AP-Climate-Engineering-Bickel- Lane-v.3.0.pdf. 83. Brian J.L. Berry, Jayshree Bihari, and Euel Elliott, “The Limits of Knowledge and the Climate Change Debate,” Cato Journal 36, no. 3 (2016): 600. 84. Kruti Dholakia-Lehenbauer and Euel W. Elliott, “Decisionmaking, Risk, and Uncertainty: An Analysis of Climate Change Policy,” Cato Journal, 32, no. 3 (2012): 554. 85. Stilgoe, Experiment, 87. 86. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, “Testimony of Diana Furchtgott-Roth on Climate Change,” Manhattan Institute, July 18, 2013, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ testimony-diana-furchtgott-roth-climate-change-6091.html. 87. Paul C. Knappenberger, “Geo-Engineering the Climate? A Geo-Bad Idea,” Cato Institute, November 11, 2014, https://www.cato.org/blog/geo-engineering-climate-geo- bad-idea. 88. Herb Lin, “Large-scale geoengineering and threats to national security,” Lawfare, October 31, 2015, https://www.lawfareblog.com/large-scale-geoengineering-and- threats-national-security. 89. Cockburn, “Anthropogenic.”

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ABSTRACTS

The goal of this article is to review the various positions taken by free-market conservative and libertarian public policy experts regarding solar geoengineering. A quantitative analysis and a qualitative analysis of the online publications of ten major free-market think tanks are provided with a view to determining whether free-market conservative and libertarian experts are embracing solar geoengineering as a key solution to climate change. Specifically, the article looks at how prominent solar geoengineering is in the publications of free-market think tanks, gauges their level of support for or hostility toward solar geoengineering, and lists the arguments that they use for or against it. The analysis shows that solar geoengineering is still a marginal topic of discussion in the world of free-market think tanks, but that a majority of the experts who have considered solar geoengineering tend to support funding for research, often as an alternative to mitigation policies.

AUTHOR

JEAN-DANIEL COLLOMB Jean-Daniel Collomb is a professor of American studies at Université Grenoble Alpes. His research is focused on environmental issues in the United States and on the history of the social movements intent on preserving the environment in the United States from the mid-19th century to the present time. He is the author of John Muir, parcs nationaux et écologie (2013) and Une histoire de la radicalité environnementale aux États-Unis (2018). He has also written several articles about the opposition between the American Right and the US from the early 1980s to the present time.

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Close to Home, One at a Time, Not in My Backyard: Individualism and the Mantras of Depoliticization in US Reform Discourses

Olga Thierbach-McLean

1 The US boasts a rich and continuous history of political . From the Abolitionist and Civil Rights struggle to the Women's Rights Movement, the Environmental, Anti- War, Gay Rights and LGBTQ Movements, America has been the home of epoch-making reform campaigns that resonated far beyond its borders and developed into major political shaping powers of the twentieth century. One of the main sources for this vitality is the country’s strong individualistic tradition. With its celebration of individual dignity and personal , it encourages critical views of the status quo and provides the language for disenfranchised groups to challenge oppressive structures.

2 And yet, despite this impressive historical track record, traditionally conceived notions of personal autonomy and self-responsibility seem to be increasingly at odds with the dynamics of a modern mass democracy. Here, it often appears as if individualistic recipes for social reform, the basic principles of which have remained almost unchanged in US public discourse since the nineteenth century, are often clashing with the conditions in a complexly interconnected globalized world. The discrepancy between culturally promoted strategy and can be observed in prominent slogans of US reform campaigns, such as “close to home,” “one at a time,” “not in my backyard,” or “a thousand points of light.” Running as a common thread through various modes and fields of activism from the fight against poverty to to gun control, all of them reveal the widely shared collective assumption that meaningful social change can ultimately only occur through the transformation of one’s immediate environment and engagement in one-on-one interaction.

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1. Close to Home: A Case of Cultural Scotoma

3 Thus, when in her study Avoiding Politics Nina Eliasoph explored the motivations and strategies of American activists, she was struck by how often the phrase “close to home” emerged at the center of the discussion (Eliasoph 1-3). For instance, one interviewee who was actively involved in an anti-drug group expressed strong concern regarding the nuclear battleships stationed near her home. Her worries were clearly justified given the fact that repeated leaks of radioactivity had already occurred at that site. Another member of the same group lived close to a chemical plant that had been the subject of a major environmental scandal only a few weeks earlier. When asked whether they could also see themselves campaigning against the nuclear ships or the chemical plant, both women answered in the negative independently of each other by arguing that the respective problem was not “close to home” – and therefore beyond the range of their personal responsibility. Both seemed to be entirely unaware of the incongruity of this rationale, given the palpable threat to their personal health and quality of life (Ibid.).

4 This episode illustrates a typical cultural bias. Because US social discourse is pervaded by individualist tenets that celebrate the boundless possibilities of the self and prescribe personal initiative and character strength as the silver bullet to solving collective issues, a disconnect seems to occur when a problem exceeds the capacities of individual effort. “[E]vents that escape the control of individual choice and will cannot coherently be encompassed in a moral calculation,” as Robert N. Bellah sums up this characteristically American dilemma (Bellah et al. 204). In other words, a circumstance that has a direct impact on one’s private world but cannot be made sense of without taking into account the broader political context has to be labelled “not close to home” in order to keep the individualist myth intact.

5 The collective reflex to block out inconvenient realities rather than readjust internalized convictions regarding absolute personal sovereignty is a powerful indicator of the ongoing dominance of individualist values in the American mind. The reluctance to replace the concept of the “Imperial Self”1 with a more balanced – and one may say, more realistic – view of the relationship between individual and society is deeply rooted in the country’s intellectual history in which radical individualism has traditionally been understood as synonymous with democracy itself. While in other Western nations the political structures of public exchange, negotiation and compromise are usually held up as the mainstays of democratic society, US citizens are likely to take the contrary view; in a cultural ambiance that entices people to assume that “what is shared is oppressive” (Eliasoph 128), it is the option to remain separate from the body politic that is priced as the main democratic privilege.

6 This attitude is reflected in the oft-quoted fact that US voter turnouts consistently lie below those of other Western democracies2 – despite the fact that Americans are famously proud of their country’s democratic tradition and more likely to cite it as a source of patriotism than members of other Western nations (cf. Huntington 37). This goes to show that Americans’ democratic zeal is stirred less by the trust in the workings of concrete political institutions than by the abstract national myth of America as the “Land of the Free.”

7 But while critics have been lamenting this “political evaporation” (Eliasoph passim), “flight from public life” (Dionne 10) and “ideology of hostile privatism" (McKenzie 19),

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there is also a contrasting side to US society, namely that American citizens are more active in private charity organizations than any other nation in the world. A survey by the US Department of Labor of February 2014 determined that 25.4 percent of US citizens have volunteered at least once in the regarded time period from September 2012 to September 2013, most of them within the framework of an organization. An earlier poll conducted in 1990 as part of the World Values Survey found that at that point 82 percent of all Americans were members of at least one volunteer organization or “other group.” As many as 60 percent of the interviewed individuals stated that they had volunteered without pay at least once in their lives. According to other official statistics, the number of Americans participating as volunteers in various areas of public life has been steadily within the range of 60 to 65 million for the last 12 years (cf. Corporation for National and Community Service 2010). Thus, when it comes to private social commitment, Americans are well ahead of all other countries (cf. Lipset 278–79).3

8 To an observer of American culture, these facts will hardly come as a surprise. The vast number of volunteer agencies and the omnipresent appeals to take volunteer opportunities attest to just how much informal social involvement has become an integral part of the societal routine. Millions of Americans put in their time and energy in child and elderly care, psychological counselling, youth sports, hospices, soup kitchens, libraries, art galleries, and various other sectors. Given this large-scale participation, it would clearly be misguided to interpret America’s individualistic mentality as blatant selfishness or general indifference to the common good. And yet, at first glance it is hard to reconcile this vibrant community spirit with the lack of political interest many Americans explicitly admit to. But what may seem contradictory at first can be traced to the very same ideological premise. After all, the active community involvement on the one hand and the aversion to formal political participation on the other are both consistent with a worldview that draws a sharp dividing line between private and public sphere. While everything that is interpreted as lying beyond one’s personal domain tends to be dismissed as irrelevant, the individualistically-minded person feels all the more spurred when it comes to shaping reality “close to home.” The fact that in the US public spirit commonly takes the form of voluntarism is mainly due to the fact that this mode of civic membership is widely taken to be the least political – and therefore the least morally offensive.

9 In fact, the generally negative connotation of the terms “government” and “politics” makes it harder to mobilize the US population for collective goals (cf. Bellah et al. 250). To some commentators, the persistent political even represents the greatest challenge faced by modern American democracy (cf. Goldfarb 1). Obviously, the United States is hardly the only country where the image of politics as a “dirty business” has become a well-established stereotype. Besides, a critical attitude towards state power is in itself not a degenerative symptom, but rather an indispensable feature of democratic culture. Having said that, in America the general mistrust towards politics – also manifesting itself in the proliferation of anti-government groups4 and the US public’s notorious obsession with conspiracy theories imputing the government with being the driving force behind various evils from the attacks on the World Trade Center to school shootings – has reached a level that renders constructive societal cooperation increasingly difficult.

10 This pronounced national aversion to the world of politics is stimulated by the pervasive cultural narrative according to which radical introspection, not interaction

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with the social environment, is the source through which truth and can be found. In this interpretation, the state figures as the individual’s malevolent, oppressive antagonist, or at the very best an “interfering father who won't recognize that his children have grown up and don't need him anymore” (Bellah et al. xxv). In keeping with this role distribution, the “American political myth differs from that of other Western industrial democracies by presuming that political practice will go forward in a ‘bottom-up’ mode rather than a ‘top-down’ mode” (Brion 34). Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the “teacher of the American tribe” (Kazin 3), once proclaimed: “And of the strength and wisdom of the private heart shall go forth at another era the regeneration of society” (Emerson, Early Lectures 2:186). Emerson, whose individualistic philosophy deeply shaped American discourses on identity and social reform, believed that “no forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves. The Devil nestles comfortably into them all” (Emerson, Complete Works 11:243). Consequently, he postulated that “the remedying is not a work for society, but for me to do” (Emerson Journals, 9:85). In fact, he even formulated his own version of “close to home” in the following famous passage of his seminal 1841 essay “Self-Reliance”: If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ (Emerson, Collected Works 2:30).

11 To the Bard of Concord, a generalized perspective on social ills as adopted by the “angry bigot” clearly smacks of hypocrisy. He suspects that focusing on elusive events happening elsewhere is just a convenient way of deflecting attention away from what could be done here and now to build a better community. Based on his viewpoint, what may at first appear like ardent dedication to the common weal quickly turns out to be nothing more than the lazy abdication of personal accountability. And with radical individualist ideals still thriving in the cultural climate of the United States, most Americans would probably still agree with Emerson that “society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him” (Emerson, Collected Works 3:154). For that reason, a person does not have either the competence or the moral right to direct their energies at making over superordinate administrative structures before having “put their own house in order.” Consequently, the individual’s duty to society is seen as lying first and foremost in the reformation of personal circumstances.

12 Set against this cultural backdrop, politically-minded discussion is implicitly perceived as a violation of social decorum. While in other countries public venues such as cafés, tea houses and bars have traditionally been classic forums of political exchange and debate between ordinary citizens, the motto of “No politics” has won through in many public spaces in the United States. Signs heralding this etiquette rule are ubiquitous in American bars and restaurants. But what is most surprising is that this rule even seems to apply within the realm of political activism itself. As Eliasoph has pointed out, it is particularly in exposed public settings such as press conferences or municipal assemblies that American activists are prone to adopt the stance of “mandatory public Momism” (Eliasoph 246). That is, instead of presenting themselves as critical citizens thinking within the larger social nexus, they are wont to voice their concerns in the

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language of self-interest, slipping into the stereotypical roles of worried parents or homeowners standing up to protect their own family and possessions. This is all the more astounding as Eliasoph has documented that the very same individuals did in fact express their ideas on broader political approaches to societal questions – but that only ever happened “backstage” in private conversations (Ibid.).

13 This seemingly paradoxical reversal makes perfect sense when viewed within the individualist paradigm: Because political aspirations quickly look morally suspect in the cultural climate of the US, the catchphrase “close to home” operates as a justification code. It signals that the targeted issue has directly perceivable contact points with one’s own private habitat, and therefore properly falls within one’s ‘jurisdiction’. This in turn means that, by way of exception, stepping out into the world of politics is morally warranted. As such, the depoliticization of the political represents a collective acceptance tactic for vindicating the breach of implicitly accepted individualist guidelines.

14 Remarkably, this kind of “unpolitical” input has been habitually advocated and incited by political decision makers, with voluntarism being typically depicted as the defining attribute of the ideal citizen. As a prominent example, in 1981 Ronald Reagan initiated the President's Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives to boost non-government solutions to social challenges, also creating The President’s Volunteer Service Award as an accolade for outstanding accomplishments by volunteers. Along the same lines, President George H. W. Bush envisioned “community organizations that are spread like stars, throughout the Nation, doing good” (Bush 1989) when he launched the Points of Light Foundation in 1990. The underlying imagery is clearly inspired by the classic individualistic concept of a societal network materializing from the bottom up, with an army of volunteers creating a gapless social canopy as each citizen takes care of their own manageable “territory” instead of draining their energies into the hubristic undertaking of trying to change the entire world.

15 Bush’s domestic agenda clearly struck a chord with the American public, even inspiring a hit song that featured the line “If you see what’s wrong and you try to make it right, you will be a point of light.”5 Albeit, there were also critical voices that expressed strong doubts about the adequacy of this approach, which was famously redubbed “a thousand points of blight” by The New York Times (DeParle). The active sponsoring of volunteer work has at times even been interpreted as a calculated scheme to coax citizens away from political activism into private charity so as to render the population more governable, and to mask structural deficits and financial shortages. This suspicion may not be entirely unfounded. After all, US society relies heavily on volunteers to gratuitously take over countless tasks in key sectors such as health care and education which elsewhere are financed exclusively by the state. And yet, if one wishes to take a less cynical view of politics and politicians, one could also assume that embracing collectively-spirited reform tactics is as counterintuitive to US officials as it is to their fellow citizens. For they too are influenced by a cultural mantra which prescribes that “not only should our circles of moral obligation never become so large that they lose their coherence, but morality should also be modest in its ambitions and quiet in its proclamations, not seeking to transform the entire world but to make a difference where it can.” (Wolfe 290) Within this mindset, the depoliticization of reform discourses by shrinking them down to problems “close to home” is not at all

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seen as an intellectual withdrawal from the complexities of modern mass society, but rather as a positive good.

2. One at a Time: When Everybody is an Island

16 It is in accordance with the very same sentiment that the dictum “one at a time” has become a universal rallying cry of US social activism. “Making a difference one step at a time” is a staple slogan displayed in many volunteer organizations. Whether it be recidivist programs designed to stop crime “one criminal at a time,” or rehabilitation clinics vouching to come to grips with the problem of substance abuse “one addict at a time” – the case-by-case approach has become the patent formula in response to various social grievances. For instance, in the award-winning CNN campaign CNN Heroes, which was launched in 2007 to honor “everyday people doing extraordinary things to change the world” by making outstanding contributions in humanitarian aid in their communities, one constantly comes across phrases such as “one household at a time,” “one person at a time,” or “one teenager at a time” (CNN Heroes). Similarly, in the widely publicized aid program Loads of Hope sponsored by US laundry detergent manufacturer Tide, which includes sending mobile wash centers into crisis regions so that people can wash their clothing for free, the declared goal is to provide help “one wash cycle at a time.” To members of other cultures, this may appear like a fundamentally inefficient approach and discouraging Sisyphean task. But to Americans it is an inspiring notion because it affirms the power of the individual to achieve social amelioration without having to contemplate things that are considered political. Sometimes it even appears as if many US citizens simply lack the abstract conceptions to be able to reflect on local developments on a synoptic level, and to detect the causal relationship between the overall political framework and their private lives.

17 When, for example, working parents living in areas with inadequate infrastructure see no other choice but to drop off their children on the school grounds long before the start of classes, where they sometimes have to wait for hours in the dark without supervision, this tends to be perceived as a private problem that appropriately calls for a private solution (cf. Eliasoph 24). Likewise, a national scenario in which a large number of citizens has to work multiple jobs just to secure a humble standard of living is widely seen as a discretely personal challenge. The idea to trace such conditions to structural failings and to demand systematic adjustments of the mass transit network, childcare offers, or the labor market is far less obvious to Americans than it is to Western Europeans.

18 A symptomatic example of such a depoliticization of American reform discourses is the case of the Detroiter James Robertson whose story made international headlines in early 2015. For ten years, the then 59-year-old factory worker had to walk 21 miles of his 23-mile work commute. Despite holding a full-time job that paid 10.55 dollars an hour – and thus significantly more than the Michigan minimum wage of 8.15 dollars – Robertson could not afford his own car. And since there was no public transport service from his home to his workplace, he walked to work five days a week in any weather, with his route also leading through dangerous areas of notoriously crime-ridden Detroit. After his plight became known, Robertson was celebrated as an admirable example of a stoic work ethic that defies even the most adverse of circumstances. In the

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outpouring of public sympathy that followed, he received a car as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in private donations.

19 As a success tale of personal initiative meeting private charity, this story resonated deeply with the American audience and was followed by the press for several weeks. But, rather bafflingly to European political sensibilities, the desolate state of the local public transport and the disastrous labor market figured only as a narrative background in most of the press coverage. David Graham of The Atlantic was a rare exception when tentatively pointing out that “this isn’t a feel-good story—it's a story about policy failures, structural economic obstacles, and about what it takes to keep working despite those challenges. Robertson is no doubt deserving, but it’ll take larger changes to help other people who face similar struggles.” This goes to show that, although Americans are certainly not oblivious to the import of systemic shortcomings on personal fortunes, the individualistic reflex remains the most powerful. The very fact that a leading left-of-center magazine feels the need to spell out the self-evident point that Robertson’s difficulties cannot be understood apart from the larger societal context illustrates that a collective approach to social issues is far from being natural to the American psyche.

20 Astoundingly, even the global reach of the Internet and the surge of social media has done little to modify this deliberately fragmented, depoliticized discourse. Quite the opposite, one may argue that contemporary online activism shows an even stronger disposition to abandon the political angle. In this context, it has become somewhat of a commonplace to hold the nature of digital communication itself responsible for the rise of superficial “slacktivism” or the tendency of many a cyber-protester to get preoccupied with insular and often short-lived pet projects. As a matter of fact, the easy accessibility of e-campaigns as well as the sheer multitude of single-issue niches they cover makes engaging as easy as disengaging. A medium inviting the perception that signing an online petition on change.org constitutes effective dissent, or that a Like equals participation in democratic opinion-forming processes, makes it all too easy to feel active with barely any effort. And so “raising awareness” for one hashtagged cause after another has all too often become a substitute for thorough reflection, enduring commitment and concerted action. But contrary to a commonly raised point of criticism, this token-based style is not an entirely novel symptom of the digital age, but rather the digitally amplified version of the old American preference for the private gesture over systemic restructuring, for bottom-up versus top-down lines of action. Here, the central aspect common to both online and offline activism is the ambition to change personal attitudes “one at a time” by relying on the inspirational power of purely symbolic gestures, which often have no direct pragmatic connection to the targeted cause. This applies to pre-Internet campaigns like Just Say No, which typically included activities such as running obstacle courses (cf. Eliasoph 55), as it does to web- based activism prompting people to add profile pic frames as a way of boosting the latest social crusade, or to grow a mustache in “Movember” in support of the fight against cancer.

21 A notable recent example of this apolitical style of Internet activism is Help-Portrait, a movement that was started by American photographer Jeremy Cowart in 2008 with the mission “to empower photographers, hairstylists and makeup artists to use their skills, tools and expertise to give back to their local community” (Help-Portrait) by giving people in need the possibility to have their portraits taken. “Find someone in Need.

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Take their Picture. Print their Picture. Deliver their Picture,” is the four-step instruction given on the project’s website for how to “help people see the beauty of who they are.” But while it is certainly true that man does not live by bread alone – and that especially for people living on the fringes of society enjoying a little luxury may do a lot to restore their sense of personal dignity – providing the extra only makes sense if it is on top of the basic, if it is embedded in a wider discussion of how to secure the indispensable. Granted, the Help-Portrait promo video does suggest to participants that “[m]aybe, along the way, you could give: meals, blankets, conversation, books.” But this is offered almost as a second thought, as an incidental prop in a scenario that is centered on the abstract idea of the photographer as a modern Prometheus bringing light and hope with just a click of the camera.

22 The core problem with campaigns such as Help-Portrait is not that they choose to take a symbolic and estheticized approach to a social problem, but rather in their tendency to do so by fading out the political. In this way, they keep perpetuating the cultural narrative that sporadic face-to-face interaction is enough to make up for systemic gaps. Here, the aspirations of the participants to use their abilities to the benefit of others in a direct and unbureaucratic manner falls short of its full potential because it fails to make a connection to the institutionalized ways in which society fails its weakest members. For, as touching and thought-provoking it may be to see the metamorphosis of a street person into a photo model, the sad truth is that, without lasting structural reform, the potential seeds of such positive transformation fall on barren ground as the cameras are turned off and the star of the photo shoot is sent back into their usual dysfunctional environment.

23 This is in no way to deny that symbolic gestures are a powerful means of reinforcing political claims, and much less to dismiss the admirable work of local activists as pointless and naïve dabbling, or, in Emerson’s famous words, as mere “stirring in the philanthropic mud” (Emerson, Journals 5:479). On the contrary, individual involvement and participation constitutes the very fabric of a healthy, inclusive democratic society. But the most powerful potential for social renewal is generated by combining personal and administrative channels, emblematic signal effects and practical measures, local and global understanding. With the American inclination to divorce individually experienced challenges from the larger social milieu and to rely on individual inspiration as the better alternative to collective restructuring, too often half the feasible capacity is left lying dormant. Here, a focus set too narrowly on “one at a time” not only fails to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the social experience, but also hampers the emergence of a broader dialogue regarding societal structures and practices.

3. and the Civic Duty of Selfishness

Such splintering of collective debates into a myriad of seemingly disconnected private cases and causes has also taken the form of NIMBYism, a term derived from the acronym for “Not In My Backyard.” NIMBYs or LULUs (Locally Unwanted Land Use) are groups of local residents organized in opposition to undesirable developments in their community. News about NIMBY controversies surrounding planned public or private- sector projects reaches the American public on an almost daily basis. Needless to say, the resistance against facilities that are perceived to be unsightly or have a negative

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impact on one’s personal interests or quality of life – whether they be landfills, industrial parks, military bases, jails, drug rehabilitation centers, or concert venues – is neither a new nor an exclusively American phenomenon. Even so, there is a marked qualitative difference. In other Western democracies, comparable disputes are more likely to include questions regarding the fundamental legitimacy of the respective institution. The less individualistically charged cultural atmosphere of Western European countries demands that the common good be inserted into the equation, even as one may safely assume that vested interests play no lesser a role for European than they do for US citizens. For instance, whenever the construction of a new prison is proposed, Europeans are more likely to back up their objections with a lack of trust in the legally stipulated security standards. Similarly, civic crusades against incinerators would typically be accompanied by the call for a collective shift in favor of more eco- friendly methods of waste management and recycling. By contrast, the names NIMBY und LULU themselves underline that the activists explicitly come together under the banner of self-interest. Remarkably, the fundamental necessity of inconvenient collective establishments is not necessarily questioned in the process. NIMBYs are not out to change the world; correctional facilities, chemical factories, and waste incineration plants are largely accepted as unavoidable parts of the system – they just shouldn’t pop up “close to home,” least of all “in my backyard.” By thus detaching themselves from the concerns of public interest, NIMBYs not only reduce the radius of potentially important discussions, but also cultivate a style of argument that is less and less about societal obligations, democratic processes and the rights of others, and more and more about personal tastes and attitudes. “In Seattle, the neighbors don’t want apartments for formerly homeless seniors nearby. In Los Angeles, they don’t want more high-rises. In San Jose, Calif., they don’t want tiny homes. In Phoenix, they don’t want design that’s not midcentury modern,” as Emily Badger of The New York Times impressionistically describes the kaleidoscope of NIMBY claims, adding that “increasingly it also means the senior affordable housing, the high- rises and the tiny homes — also arguably vital to the larger community — are never built.” With their intransigence, NIMBYs often neuter rather than engender the transformative potential for a better collective future. In some cases, they even cause innovative green projects to be stalled: Take Vermont, where New England NIMBYs sought to block an electric transmission project that would bring zero-carbon hydropower to the region from Canada. The plan […] is to build a 1,000-megawatt line under Lake Champlain to Ludlow, Vt., where it would patch into the grid near the decommissioned Vermont Yankee nuclear plant (closed in 2014 due to pressure by activists who – you guessed it – didn't want a reactor operating in their backyard). (Helman)

24 NIMBYism has also been identified as a key factor in the affordable housing crisis many urban areas of the U.S are currently struggling with. With incumbent homeowners often opposing new developments, and especially low-income housing projects, many middle- and lower-class Americans are unable to find accommodation that is within their financial reach. This does not only result in a progressing segregation into rich and poor neighborhoods, but also has detrimental effects on the national labor market. As privately initiated housing constrains make it unfeasible for workers to move to booming cities such as New York, San Francisco or San Jose, they are effectively cut off from the access to the most productive labor markets in the US. According to a paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, protectionist housing policies have thus led to increased wage inequality and held back US GDP growth by no less

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than 13.5 percent in the regarded time period between 1964 and 2009 (cf. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti).

25 It is in view of such corollaries that NIMBY has now become a pejorative term mostly used to describe retrogressive selfishness. But even though American NIMBYs have been facing increasing criticism from within their own country, they are very much a fruit of the home-grown individualistic ideology that promotes the aggressive defense of personal interests against state and fellow citizens as the lifeblood of liberal society. As Denis J. Brion points out with regard to the NIMBY phenomenon: Our processes are not meant to impose an agenda of political choices determined by a political and technocratic elite. [...] A concept of political society that adopts a strong system of individual liberties and accords strong protection to individual rights also properly incorporates a strong element of individual responsibility into the conception of the politically autonomous person. (Brion 34)

26 Seen from this angle, NIMBY-style activism may be interpreted as the most authentic way of fulfilling one’s obligation to the collective, namely by rigorously taking care of one’s designated ambit. This is very much consistent with Emerson’s famous call to “[b]uild, therefore, your own world" (Emerson, Collected Works 1:45) as the best way to create a thriving society. In the context of an intellectual tradition thus buttressing that private happiness is the precondition for a healthy society, not the other way around, a hardnosed me-first approach seems to be the most auspicious form of social cooperation. Given this cultural substrate, NIMBY activists may be driven not so much by unabashed egotism but by the century-old American idea that egotism and altruism are ultimately the same thing.

27 As a matter of fact, they have good reason to think so. After all, grassroots activism has been an important collective driving force in the history of social reform. Notably, it has played a major role in the formation of the ecology movement, often resulting in positive changes far beyond the particular disputed siting and profoundly reshaping the ways we as a global community think about our environment. In that sense, resident have been a positive example of the American political myth in action as they demonstrated how problematic collective practices can be successfully checked by private consciousness and the resolute protection of local domains. It would therefore not only be unrealistic, but even harmful to censure the motivation of self- interest as such. It has an important place in the public debate as a direct expression of the core democratic right of private citizens to challenge government decisions and protect their personal sphere from the reach of arbitrary state power. But to effectively do so, social activism must be conscious of the correlation between personally experienced realities and the collective context. By contrast, the problematic side effects of the NIMBY movement expose the dangers and limitations of a cultural narrative that fosters a dichotomous view of private interests and political practice.

4. Gun Control: Waiting for a Change of Heart

28 On a related note, the strong cultural predilection for pushing reform from a bottom- up direction also plays a key role in the protracted national struggle with the escalating gun violence. For although the strong opposition to stricter gun control laws is typically attributed to conservative anti-government sentiments, it is also buoyed by the “one at a time” spirit that is held across lines of political orientation. The deep-

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seated conflict between the desire for a profound change on the one hand and the wariness of legal measures on the other is revealed in a 2018 Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes towards guns (Gallup). Still under the fresh impression of a series of mass shootings, an overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that they personally worry about the availability of guns a “great deal” (51%) or a “fair amount” (19%), with 67% thinking that laws covering the sale of firearms should be more strict. Even so, many believe that new gun control laws would reduce mass shootings “not at all” (42%), “a little” (16%), or only a “moderate amount” (20%).

29 This pessimism is especially remarkable given the ample evidence to the contrary. One need only think of the European situation, where, as a result of stricter gun legislation, gun violence does not constitute a mass problem. Maybe most compellingly, Australia with its cultural similarity to the US provides persuasive evidence of how tighter control of private access to firearms can effectively curb gun-related violence. While the Australian federal government had little involvement in firearms legislation until 1996, a series of mass shootings between 1984 and 2002 prompted the enactment of the National Firearms Agreement (1996), the National Firearm Trafficking Policy Agreement (2002), and the National Handgun Control Agreement (2002) for regulating the ownership and use of firearms by state law. As a result, shooting deaths dropped dramatically, with a 47 percent decrease in firearm-related deaths in Australia between 1991 and 2001 (cf. Mouzos and Rushforth).

30 Despite such precursors, Americans – notoriously reluctant to accept the experience of other countries as a possible model for approaching domestic issues – mostly prefer on- the-ground measures to systemic legislative changes. Asked which approaches they favor when it comes to preventing mass shootings at schools, most advocated “increased training for police officers and first responders on how to respond to active shootings” (95%), only then followed by “requiring background checks for all gun sales” (92%), and then by other decentralized strategies such as “installing more security checkpoints and security systems for allowing people into schools” (87%) and “instituting new programs to identify, assess and manage certain students who may pose a threat” (86%). Concurrently, scoring highest on the list of perceived reasons for mass shootings is “the failure of the mental health system to identify individuals who are a danger to others,” with 48% thinking it is to blame a “great deal,” while the “easy access to guns” is blamed “a great deal” by only 40%, followed by drug use with 37%, and violence in movies, video, games and music lyrics with 32%.

31 Although the results are at times contradictory, the overall tendency is towards empowering or controlling certain individuals over developing new political structures. Indeed, within the context of a culture that has traditionally upheld moral suasion as the most promising path to lasting social reform, it is not at all unreasonable to argue that immediate legal force should be foregone in favor of individual-level transformation and the future promise of voluntary self-improvement. Significantly, this attitude is not only held by many ordinary Americans, but also by experts within the medical community. As a case in point, in a widely quoted article published in The Annual Review of Public Health, Butts et al. advocate an approach to counteracting gun violence that “seeks to create individual-level and community-level change in communities where it is a norm for young people to carry a gun” (Butts et al.. 40). Programmatically named Cure Violence (CV), the proposed model attempts to

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stop the transmission of violence in a manner similar to that of public health interventions designed to curtail epidemics or to reduce the impact of harmful behavior such as smoking and overeating. The CV model identifies the individuals most at risk of spreading gun violence, and it intervenes to change their behavior and attitudes. (Ibid.)

32 Envisioned as the principal agents of this societal metamorphosis are individuals who “demonstrate in their own lives and personal conduct that it is possible to be both law- abiding and respected in the neighborhood” (Butts et al 41). Once again, the recommended means for conveying the message of non-violence are mostly symbolic “activities, including media campaigns, signs and billboards, and public events such as antiviolence marches and postshooting vigils” (Butts et al 42). And while the authors make a point of stating that their method is “not inherently incompatible with law enforcement strategies and the larger justice system” (Butts et al. 51), their expressed goal is to minimize the role of the formal justice system by “relying on the normative power of the social environment rather than on the coercive power of law enforcement and prosecution” (Butts et al. 48-9). True enough, hardline strategies based primarily on aggressive law enforcement and harsh punishment have largely proven inadequate when it comes to sustainably containing violent behavior. But the authors’ proclivity for winning over the “private heart” as a substitute for legal action betrays what seems to be a typically American prejudice: The law is viewed mainly as the executer of punishment, not as an effective platform for shaping social norms from the top down.

33 The same blind spot is present in the argument put forward by David Hemenway, Professor of Health Policy and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, in a contribution to JAMA Internal Medicine Journal entitled “Preventing Gun Violence by Changing Social Norms.” Therein, he promotes “peer-to-peer education and leadership development” in lieu of legal measures. Here again, it is not the pragmatic revision of the legislative framework for obtaining firearms, but rather the transmutation of personal feelings and circumstances that is presented as the best hope for extinguishing gun violence: Guns are frequently used in inner-city disputes between youths as a symbol of power and masculinity. Too often, when a young man is “dissed,” the norm requires that he respond violently, sometimes with a gun. A better norm would be that only “wusses” use guns and that hand-to-hand combat or nonviolent resolutions are more manly responses. The current norm is reminiscent of the old dueling norm among high-status whites. Although illegal, for centuries dueling was a common way to resolve disputes. If a man was disrespected and did not duel, he could lose face. Fortunately, the norm has changed—dueling is now considered silly.

34 The reference to dueling is interesting here. For, while it is true that the practice continued long after having been outlawed and faded only following a shift in public opinion, it seems curious that Hemenway choses to draw on this historically remote example embedded in rather different societal circumstances while at the same time eclipsing relevant data from contemporary Western societies, eminently the previously mentioned Australian example. Never acknowledging such recent successes attained by means of legal action, Hemenway instead offers “asking” as a key strategy. More specifically, he points to the ASK (Asking Saves Kids) campaign developed by the Center to Prevent Youth Violence in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is based on parents asking other parents about the accessibility of firearms in their home. As Hemenway argues, “[a]sking can help keep one’s own children and their friends safe and also help to promote the of safe gun storage in the

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community.” He also encourages “reporters (and the general public) to ask, whenever there is a street shooting, ‘Where did the gun come from?’.” In the same vein, he prompts potentially traumatized “families of victims killed by the guns of intimate partners [to] make their presence known when judges are considering gun removal when issuing restraining orders,” thus shifting the task of changing social norms and practices wholly to the affected parties. This even goes so far as to charge individuals with the responsibility for preventing gun suicides in their social environment: Like “friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” it should also be the social norm to help a friend going through a rough patch – his wife just divorced him, he’s drinking and talking crazy – by getting the guns out of the house for a while. Had Adam Lanza’s mother received this advice, the 2012 mass shooting by her son of school children and educators in Newtown, Connecticut, might have been prevented.

35 It is highly questionable whether it is realistic or, for that matter, ethical to expect ordinary people to routinely take on such heavy burdens, especially where they have no professional psychological training and are very likely grappling with their own day-to-day problems. The fact that such a strictly individual-based strategy is sponsored by a prominent member of the medical community in response to an acute national crisis is just another tell-tale example of the cultural instinct to eschew formal political and legal pathways at almost any cost. Concomitantly, as if to compensate for the vacuum created by the relinquishment of administrative tools, the capacities and obligations of the individual are inflated to unrealistic proportions.

36 The seemingly visceral aversion to depart from paradigms like “one at a time,” “close to home” and “not in my backyard” is all the more perplexing as even proponents of such strictly individual-based approaches often concede that the evidence in their support “to date is mixed at best” (Butts et al. 47). But within the context of a powerful cultural imperative that conditions people to see an unbridgeable dichotomy between the political and the private, there appears to be no middle ground between the ‘cold hand of ’ and the isolated efforts of individuals. So, when faced with the choice, Americans tend to opt for the latter as a way of asserting democratic values. Ironically, it is exactly this either/or mentality that stifles productive public discourse because it disregards the ubiquitous connections between the privately experienced realities and the world of formal politics.

37 All this is not to say that publicly-oriented activism does not exist in the United States, but rather to emphasize the Janus-faced nature of American individualism: While its sensibilities have often provided the fuel for civic by encouraging disobedience against authorities, they have simultaneously acted as “a brake on the democratic political imagination” (Marr 10) by obscuring how collective mechanisms can be used as levers to bring about wider social change. And it seems to become ever more obvious that decontextualized models of collective and personal advancement do little to shed light on the complex dynamics in an interconnected global community. Incidentally, it is not hard to see how, on an international level, “close to home,” “one at a time” and “not in my backyard” translate into a stance that puts “America First” at the negation of political, economic and cultural global ties. But even though the country’s intellectual mood keeps stimulating isolationist readings of what it means to be a productive member of (global) society, America does not have to look further than its own history to find more perceptive discourses on public reform and personal responsibility. For, as globally successful movements like the Civil Rights or Women’s Rights agitation have shown, American individualism was at its best when it embraced

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a social dimension, combining the pursuit of personal freedom with a broader analysis and critique of collective structures.

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Mouzos, Jenny and Catherine Rushforth. “Firearm related deaths in Australia, 1991-2001.” Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice, No. 269. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2003. .

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US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Volunteering in the United States.” 25 February 2014. .

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Wolfe, Alan. One Nation, After All: What Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, The Right, The Left and Each Other. New York: Viking Press, 1998.

NOTES

1. This expression is borrowed from Quentin Anderson’s influential study The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History. 2. However, it is important to note that there are also structural and procedural reasons for this lack of democratic participation. This includes the fact that in the United States the burden of voter registration is placed on the individual and that, unlike for example in European countries, election days are not automatically scheduled on a weekend. And yet, considering that being a democratic society represents the core feature of America’s national self-image, one could expect that a larger number of Americans would be willing to overcome these organizational obstacles in order to be able to exercise their civil rights. 3. By way of comparison, 65% of Canadians, 53% of Brits and 39% of the French stated that they have been members of a voluntary organization. Japan, which is often identified as the industrial nation with the least individualistic culture, made last place together with with respectively 36%. This seems telling insofar as other studies have found that Italians are the least individualistically-minded European nation, which also suggests a connection between individualistic values and volunteer activity. 4. A 2016 study published by the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as many as 623 active anti-government groups in the United States. And this number does not even include the explosively growing Freemen on the Land phenomenon, which has become such a serious domestic threat that the FBI classifies it as a terrorist organization. The adherents of this movement, who call themselves sovereign citizens, natural persons or freemen, insist on their fundamental personal independence from the state, arguing that citizenship can only come into effect by explicit consent of the individual. Consequently, they reject the use of identification documents as invalid and refuse to pay taxes or rent, instead proclaiming their own mini states or “embassies.” 5. The song “Point of Light” by Randy Travis, which was released in May 1991, reached #3 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks.

ABSTRACTS

The U.S. has a vibrant history of civic activism fueled by a strong individualistic tradition. But while stimulating critical views of the status quo, the individualist mindset has simultaneously acted as a brake on the democratic imagination by promoting the cultural narrative according to which meaningful social change can ultimately only occur by transforming one’s own private environment. This tendency finds expression in popular reform slogans, also including modern cyber-activism which – despite its global reach – shows a disposition to get absorbed in insular

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pet projects. It also plays a vital, jet largely unacknowledged role in America’s struggle with gun violence.

INDEX

Keywords: US social activism, reform movements, cyber activism, individualism, gun control, depoliticization, political cynicism, volunteerism.

AUTHOR

OLGA THIERBACH-MCLEAN Olga Thierbach-McLean is an independent researcher, author, and literary translator. After studying North American literature, Russian literature, and musicology at the University of Hamburg and UC Berkeley, she earned her doctorate in American Studies at UHH. She is the author of various articles on US politics, as well as of the book Emersonian Nation which traces theresonance of Emersonian individualism in current US discourses on personal rights, identity politics, and social reform. Her main research interests are in US political culture and particularly in how ideas and institutions interact in policy making processes, American , the intellectual history of liberalism, and dystopian fiction. Currently, her projects are focused on the significance of race in the cyberpunk genre as well as on reinterpretations of traditional individualist tenets in contemporary US cinema.

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The Conspiracist Strategy: Lessons from American Alternative Health Promotions

Gad Yair

Are you aware the Government wants you sick? Did you know that officials hold cheap and natural cures for cancer in secret? Have you realized the CIA used viruses for preserving White supremacy? How many doctors would Big Pharma1 murder until you realize they are only interested in your money? Have you heard about advocates for alternative solutions for illness? Did you know that those people and organizations risk their life for you? Well, it is about time. You must fight back for your constitutional rights of liberty. Fight back for your happiness and health. Be an American patriot. Buy one, get one free!

1 This, in a nutshell, is the 'conspiracist strategy.' It is effective, popular, and typically American. Scholars have indeed pointed that conspiracy theories have a strong grip on the American mind. Historians have typified a "paranoid style" in American politics (Hofstadter 2008). They also suggested that colonial leaders set those suspicious habitual tendencies on track even before Independence. Sociologists have added that modern America is awash with fear; cultural analysts have traced the effects of those conspiratorial fears in all manners of life; and psychologists have further clarified which individuals and groups are especially prone to hold conspiratorial beliefs.

2 This paper supplements those prior contributions by studying commercials for alternative medical cures. Despite its delimited niche, it exposes a general two-step "conspiracist strategy": First raise fear, then promise salvation. Commercials for alternative cures represent this well. They expose how entrepreneurs manipulate fears of secretive Governmental conspiracies to increase sales and promote alternative about health and sickness. Their strategy is effective for selling alternative medicines. However, it is just as effective in other areas of American life because American political culture creates a receptive suspicious habitus.

3 To understand this habitus and the effectiveness of the conspiracist strategy that manipulates it I follow two theoretical schools. First, I adopt Bourdieu's analytic strategy for analyzing habitus and social structures (Yair 2009). According to Bourdieu,

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societies create a 'fit' between the habitus, namely action predispositions, and social structure (Bourdieu 2005). He demonstrated that a 'mismatch' between pre-capitalist economic habits of Algerian peasants and the modern ventures that engulf them gave rise to social change and conflict. Bourdieu applied his thesis of 'fit' between habitus and structure in various other studies, arguing that 'fit' stabilizes structures. In the present context I analyze the fit between the suspicious American democratic habitus and the conspiracist strategy - testing both in the realm of health and illness.

4 The second theoretical scaffold is Erving Goffman's analysis of Gender Advertisements (Goffman 1976). In this treatise Goffman showed how to think about gender pictorial advertisements. For example, he suggested that the relative size of women and their position vis-à-vis men capitalizes on habitual perceptions regarding gender. I follow his approach of analyzing texts to expose latent and explicit messaging tactics that the conspiracist strategy employs. I thus expose its language (e.g., dark machinations), its institutional cloak, its scientific idioms, its graphical supports, and the apocalyptic narratives that call for swift actions.

5 I split the paper into three main sections. I first explore the literature on the centrality of conspiracy theories in American culture. I then devote a section for analyzing the suspicious habitus, namely habituated predispositions to suspect collusion between Government and Big Pharma. To do so I review available polls, research studies and media discussions on conspiracy theories in health and illness. In the third and major section I expose the two-stage conspiracist strategy by exploring how entrepreneurs manipulate patients' suspicions of government collusion with Big Pharma. It shows how entrepreneurs tap on habitual fears from hidden forces by raising fears of Government collusion with Big Pharma. They then promise 'American patriots' that in buying their cures they win back their liberty and health. Through the analysis of various advertisements and campaigns I also render the barebones of the strategy: Presentation of ample scientific (if censored) facts, a cloak of serious institutional standing, and professional presentation of self. In the discussion, I return to Bourdieu's theory of 'fit' by suggesting that habitus and strategy reflect American commitments to constitutional rights of liberty and freedom of choice. This approach also provides scaffolds for comparative studies. It points for the need to differentiate between 'audience receptivity,' namely the habitus, on the one hand; and 'broadcasting conspiracist strategies' that entrepreneurs and politicians use for manipulating it, on the other hand. I close by suggesting the conspiracist strategy is not an oddity at the fringes of American culture. Rather, political leaders use the same strategy for raising suspicions about 'the ' and 'its' investigations of the presidency. They succeed in doing so because the conspiracist strategy taps on deep fears of covert manipulations of freedom while urging people to act on democratic commitments for individual rights.

Conspiracy Theories in America

In the beginning was a theory, and the theory was conspiratorial. Before the United States united, American elites were incensed that King George III was encroaching on colonists' rights. This was no humdrum case of conflicting political priorities; the king was secretly scheming to strip colonists of their liberty and rule over them with absolute authority. A large literature sprang up to chronicle the king's covert

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plot and alert Americans to the impending catastrophe (Uscinski and Parent 2014, p. 1).

6 Uscinski and Parent followed on Richard Hofstadter's famous essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," originally published in 1964 (Hofstadter 2008). According to Hofstadter, "There is a style of mind which is far from new… I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind" (Hofstadter 2008, p. 3). In this "paranoid style… the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy" (Ibid, p. 4). His essay opened a floodgate for analyses of the American infatuation with fear and conspiracy theories. Historians, political scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, psychologists, sociologists, and cultural analysts have followed Hofstadter's lead with rich and diverse studies (Arnold 2008; Fenster 1999; Goertzel 1994; Keeley 1999; Knight 2003; Knight 2000; Miller and Saunders 2016; Pipes 1999; Uscinski and Parent 2014; Walker 2013; Warner and Neville-Shepard 2014).

7 As Hofstadter claimed, American beliefs in conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon. The American public was obsessed with conspiracy theories already in colonial America (Bailyn 1992; Davis 1971). As later historians suggested, "The United States was born of conspiracy, real and imagined. Fears of ministerial conspiracy to deprive the American colonists of their liberty drove the Americans to war and, ultimately, to independence" (Critchlow, Korasick, and Sherman 2008, p. 1). Suspicions of secretive machinations have remained a rather stable mark until today (Brotherton 2015). Some scholars even suspect that fears of conspiratorial deeds have growing political and economic effects – to the point that Fenster concluded that "Conspiracy theory in the United States has poisoned our political system, culture, and public sphere to an unprecedented degree" (Fenster 1999, p. xi). Other scholars pointed that the media manipulates suspicions of secret manipulations for capitalistic motives (Altheide 2002; Glassner 1999). Fear, they suggested, makes people buy protections, making conspiracist manipulations part of capitalistic marketing strategies.

8 Cultural analysts and sociologists point that the American public is obsessed with fear and conspiracy theories. As one commentator suggested, in America "Fear has emerged as a framework for developing identities and for engaging in social life. Fear is one of the few perspectives that citizens share today" (Altheide 2002, p. 3). Another opined that "Since the 1960s… conspiracy theories have become far more prominent, no longer the favored rhetoric of backwater scaremongers, but the lingua franca of many ordinary Americans." Others have simply stated that the US is mired in "conspiracy culture" (Barkun 2013; Barkun 2003; Knight 2003; Knight 2000). A recent book captures this predisposition in its very title: The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (Walker 2013). As pundits indeed suggest, the American obsession with conspiracy theories runs across a wide spectrum. For example, many Americans suspect that the FBI covered evidence about the assassination of JFK. Many also fear the invasion of the Russians, while UFOs in Roswell keep haunting others. African-Americans entertain conspiratorial beliefs about the spread of HIV, while still others suspect that NASA staged the landing on the moon. As became clear in the 2016 elections, American voters were suspicious of Hillary Clinton and her collusion with Big Money. Many fear that the "Deep State" is after Trump, while right-wingers accuse Clinton and Soros of the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. As someone opined (with Constitutional rights in mind), this event was organized by "A left-wing operative at the heart of a

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false flag designed to spark civil war, introduce martial law, and take away the rights of conservative groups to assemble peacefully" (see the report in the website Snopes, August 15, 2017).

9 According to Uscinski and Parent, "Conspiracy theories permeate all parts of American society and cut across gender, age, race, income, political affiliation, educational level, and occupational status" (Uscinski and Parent 2014, p. 5). Alleged to be fantasized and flawed, conspiratorial narratives have had real and at times appalling consequences in , murders and bombings (see Uscinski and Parent 2014 for a review); they have also affected political campaigns and voting outcomes, and not least important – personal choices that determine health (Lamberty and Imhoff 2018), longevity and people's quality of life (Nyhan 2010).

10 Psychological studies of conspiratorial beliefs clarify the differences between paranoia, psychosis, beliefs in paranormal phenomena, and conspiracy ideation (Darwin, Neave, and Holmes 2011; Douglas et al. 2016; Galliford and Furnham 2017; Imhoff and Bruder 2014; Imhoff and Lamberty 2018; Leone, Giacomantonio, and Lauriola 2017; Swami et al. 2011). Those studies have shown that the tendency to espouse conspiracy theories is highly prevalent across groups (Oliver and Wood 2014b; Oliver and Wood 2014a). Several researchers suggested that it is often related to powerlessness, anxiety, uncertainty, lack of control, and trauma (DiGrazia 2017; Miller and Saunders 2016). Recent additions have tied the sense of personal persecution with collective narratives of trauma and suffering (van Prooijen and Douglas 2017). Uscinski and Parent summarize those psychological observations in stating, "Conspiracy theories are for losers" (2014, see Ch. 6).

11 Despite the variety of those contributions, Uscinski and Parent remarked that "Social science has not been able to confirm or deny a panoply of popular explanations for conspiracy theorizing, leaving the field open for punditry to parade as wisdom" (2014, p. 8). Furthermore, people are oftentimes confused by conspiracy theories that have been exposed to be real conspiracies. Bale (2007), for example, suggested that politicians and media giants often engage in covert and clandestine activities. Therefore, calling their actions 'conspiratorial' is true rather than fantasized (Bale 2007; Grimes 2016). Some even argue that while scholars may write on delusional conspiracies, adherents regard them as reasonable. Actually, the border between delusional conspiracy theories and real conspiracies is at times but a fine line (Dentith 2018; Hagen 2017; Kakutani 2018).2

12 This study contributes to the rich literature on America's conspiracy culture by exposing the "conspiracist strategy" that entrepreneurs manipulate in advancing their interests. It sidesteps current political turmoil by empirically studying alternative health commercials, and shows that this seemingly fringe area can teach a lot about the alignment between the American habitus and the conspiracist strategies that pundits use for manipulating it. I present the analyses in the next two sections. The first analyses the American suspicious habitus by reviewing evidence about the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories in health and illness. This supplies a context for the second section, which analyses the "conspiracist strategy" that entrepreneurs use for manipulating clients' fears.

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The American Suspicious Habitus: Data on Health and Illness

13 As Uscinski and Parent concluded about beliefs in conspiracy theories (2014, p.6), "The polls are not reflecting transient or trivial responses; the beliefs appear to be strongly held and sincere." This is true in the realm of health and illness as in all others. The American political tradition creates 'receptivity' for conspiratorial suspicions and this responsiveness creates ripe grounds for conspiracy theorists and their campaigns. This section prepares the ground for the analysis of those campaigns by providing evidence for the receptive suspicious American habitus.

14 Nationally representative surveys expose popular suspicions of government and Big Pharma colluding to hide natural remedies. Chapman University's America's Top Fears 2016 survey sampled 1,511 adults from across the United States and exposed that more than 60% fear Government corruption. This survey confirms prior polls, which brought together findings from more than 200 national opinion surveys conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard University’s School of Public Health, and other polling and media organizations (Blendon et al. 2011). This immense body of data consistently recorded little public trust in Government in what concerns healthcare. Other polls confirm the American public holds deep suspicions about the truthfulness of government in medical matters (Miller and Saunders 2016). In this representative study, the authors found 49% of Americans agreeing with at least one medical conspiracy theory. Furthermore, 18% agree with three conspiracies or more. The survey also exposed that 63% of the American public "Heard Before" the argument that "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is deliberately preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other diseases because of pressure from drug companies." 37% of the respondents agreed with the statement (Oliver and Wood 2014b).

15 Celebrating the 40th anniversary for the landing on the moon, Time Magazine discussed "The 10 of the world's most enduring conspiracy theories," number nine being the belief the CIA and government scientists are behind the HIV epidemic. The CIA is allegedly seeking to kill African-Americans and homosexuals and to de-populate the world (Pipes 1999; Zekeri et al. 2009). As the article describes, "Rumors have persisted that the deadly virus was created by the CIA to wipe out homosexuals and African Americans. Even today, the conspiracy theory has a number of high-profile believers." There are many conspiracy theories about Aids/HIV. Those upholding them claim that it is a genocide perpetrated by the CIA, the Government or The World Health Organization (see sources in Sourcewatch: Aids conspiracy). These conspiracies, indeed, enjoy wide embrace by the public. A study published in 2009, for example, found that "27% percent of blacks held AIDS-conspiracy views, and an additional 23% were undecided" (Klonoff and Landrine 2009, p. 451). The figures for those actually infected by HIV are significantly higher (Zekeri et al. 2009). In offering an explanation for the fact that while African-Americans are only 12% of the population yet 50% of those infected by HIV, Ronald Bailey dispels the CIA conspiracy theory only to raise a different one. In an article titled "Government Kills Blacks with Aids Virus," published in Reason.Com – he explained that Black males are incarcerated un-proportionally, amounting to roughly one in every three. Resulting from un-safe sex in prison, the infection spreads among inmates – explaining the overrepresentation of the virus

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among Blacks. "Government scientists did not create the HIV virus," he concluded in dispelling the CIA conspiracy theory. However, he pointed to another, arguing "A conspiracy of inaction and silence among government officials is worsening the AIDS epidemic among black Americans."

16 Public discussions often pick on those surveys while providing reasons for more suspicions about health and healthcare. For example, reports about the study above invited supporters to express their views. A respondent on a Bustle website adopted the common "greed" narrative by stating: "Cancer is a trillion dollar industry. They'll do anything not to get a cure to the people. That's not conspiracy nonsense, that's common sense." This post was re-tweeted or liked hundreds of times. Another respondent was cautious though supportive: "I'm not big on conspiracy theories but we all know they have a cure for Cancer and other diseases/viruses." As the Public Policy Polling agency reported, "15% of American voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry “invent” new diseases to make money" (April 2, 2013).

17 Proponents of those conspiratorial stratagems often express their suspicions with popular idioms. "If you follow the money, you will get the answer." Some insist that Big Pharma creates the illusion that a salvaging cure is around the corner to "pump money into the cancer industry." A popular debating website (Debate.org) supplied further examples for conspiracy theories concerning cheap or natural cures for cancer. About 84% of the respondents said "Yes" to the question "Is the government hiding the cure for cancer?" Indeed, respondents offered typical replies around two main arguments. First, the government seeks to maximize income from the sale of expansive drugs. Second, it has a darker aim to control population size. At times voters explain their support for those claims by offering a mixture of the two arguments. The following two excerpts exemplify this rhetoric. As one respondent said, "The government has the cure for cancer but won't release it because they would lose so much money." Another respondent wrote: "I feel strongly that the government, not just the US but governments in other countries know about a cure for cancer(s) and do not expose it because it is a means of population control." Quora, another discussion website that serves as a "place to share knowledge and better understand the world," posed a similar question: "Is there a cure for cancer and the government and companies are hiding it from the public?" The debate in this forum focused directly on "conspiracy theories about cancer" (money and population control again). Some professional commentators, including those who self-identify as cancer specialists, provided examples for how doctors and hospitals spread chronic disease instead of curing it.

The Conspiracist Strategy in Alternative Health Promotions

18 The suspicious American habitus falls prey to a conspiracist strategy. Entrepreneurs in alternative medicine tap on the above suspicions of collusion between Big Pharma, the White House and Government agencies. They repeatedly claim that those institutes collude to rob Americans of knowledge about health and of cheap treatments for their illnesses. They raise deep suspicions about canonical medical information and drive American patients to buy alternative medications. They first raise fears, only to follow with promises of liberty and health. In doing so, they tap on basic constitutional commitments for rights and freedoms.

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19 The following analyses expose how entrepreneurs in alternative medicine manipulate commitments to individual rights as tools for tapping the American suspicious habitus. Entrepreneurs continually startle the public with suspicions of conspiracies, collusions, and manipulations of information concerning health. In doing so they explicitly or implicitly reference American democratic commitments. They also signal who the bad people are, and suggest to potential clients whom they should opt to buy from (namely, from true American patriots).

20 My aim is neither to provide a thorough empirical sampling of all health promotions and organizations who participate in this market nor to provide an assessment of their spread and popularity. Furthermore, I did not sample promotions from an exhaustive list of all trades (homeopathy, acupuncture, or herbalism, for example). I also refrain from assessing the importance of those selected promotions within the wide realm of alternative cures. Rather, the aim is to use a select number of those promotions which best portray the cultural logic that underlies the conspiracist strategy. I also make the caveat that this strategy is not the only and, at times, not the primary tactic entrepreneurs use in alternative medicine. The analyses refrain from judging the trustworthiness of entrepreneurs and their claims. I focus on their pitch, not the value of the content.

21 To decipher the cultural logic that entrepreneurs manipulate through the conspiracist strategy I signed up to various health portals, which focus on natural healing. I also followed documentaries, read institutional self-descriptions, and was attentive to 'medical alerts' that Newsmax Health sent. I followed and documented a selection of those advertisements for three years (2015-2017). The data are commercial promotions that entrepreneurs distributed for the public. Hence, I kept names of entrepreneurs – individuals and organizations – as in the original messages as they were using their academic or professional credentials to sell their products. Finally, the author, a cultural sociologist, has no pecuniary interest in the realm of health and his positions on healthcare policies or alternative cures were irrelevant to the analysis.

22 The analyses show that the conspiracist strategy operates in a lock-step fashion. It first raises fears of government collusion with 'Big Pharma.' It then calls patients to regain their liberties by buying 'hidden' or 'censured' cures. While doing so, entrepreneurs cloak their messaging with scientific facts and present themselves as persecuted professionals who run respected institutions for the benefit of the public. They also employ graphic elements to concretize their arguments and use apocalyptic narratives to require swift action. At the end, they always have a product for sale - a salvaging panacea for body and citizenship.

23 The examples below show how entrepreneurs manipulate American fears from the machinations of Government and Big Pharma. After exposing alleged collusions, they call on patriotic motives, suggesting that good Americans stand cautiously against the plots of a rogue White House and Government agencies. Indeed, alternative doctors and organizations use the conspiracist strategy knowing that most Americans are socialized to hold dear the precepts of individual rights. Entrepreneurs use the conspiracist strategy for alerting American patients about governmental schemes and manipulations that rob their liberties. Their campaigns caution patients from the workings of government bureaus who intently ignore their rights for knowledge. They alert them to the trappings and manipulations of Big Pharma and their political lobbyists, who extort congressional representatives for money and positions. They

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expose plots to turn cheap natural cures into expensive medications and complain against the White House, Government agencies and Big Pharma for being self-serving. After exposing the battleground for consumer health, entrepreneurs propose alternative sources of information and cures. In doing so, they motivate patients to be patriotic and join an important battle for freedom and liberty. By calling on deeply held democratic convictions and libertarian rights, the conspiracist strategy offers patients an opportunity to be good Americans while being saved from cancer, Alzheimer or heart attack – albeit for a modest sum of money.

24 Dr. William Campbell Douglass provided a clear link between medical conspiracies and constitutional rights. His book – The Free Man's Declaration for Health and Longevity (2013) – provides a model for how fear of conspiracy drives the search for alternative therapies. The cover of his book is a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence over the American flag, making an iconic statement about the affinity between personal rights and freedom of medical knowledge. He accompanied the book with media calls that emphasized that "Our individual rights come from God, not from the government," and that "In order to exercise your true First Amendment rights, you need to leave the US." Presented as an "Exiled American doctor," William Campbell's book "Reveals six life-saving medical secrets denied by our own Government" – offering the public the rights that the government robbed them of. His newsletter – The Douglass Report – offered the public warnings about "doomsday," while criticizing the federal government and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for misleading the public. Upon his death, in 2015, Jack Harrison posted an obituary where he stated that "Dr. Douglass stood up to government bullies and billion-dollar drug company interests to make sure you’d always have access to the latest science and life-saving cures" (The Douglass Report, Nov. 2015).

25 Some health-related promotions push the "enemy above" type of paranoia to the extreme (Walker 2013), only to sell a product at the end. An advertisement for a product named NutriO2 opens up by reporting the 'mysterious deaths' of five doctors who practiced alternative medicine. It claims that all five were shot on questionable grounds. "Do you think these deaths are simply a strange coincidence or that perhaps something more sinister is transpiring?" asks the advertisement – couched as a report of facts. The text implicates "Big Pharma" with the possible assassination of those professionals, whose practice risked its profits. "Has big pharma gone too far this time? What were they trying to cover up?" By exposing the huge profits of leading pharmaceutical companies, the publisher, Kevin Richardson, attempts to recruit the reader into a quest for enlightened knowledge, ending with an invitation to the panaceas that those purportedly murdered seemingly had: "Think about it for a second... There is no money in finding a real cheap cure for any illness. They don't get to reap the benefits and recoup on their research investment. These doctors didn't have to die for nothing."

26 Accusations about murders abound. For example, the Health Nut News website reported in 2016 "Unintended Holistic Doctor Death Series: Over 90 Killed." Advertisements insinuate that "Big Pharma" is a mafia, and that pharmaceutical companies target competitors who risk their profits with a death sentence. Clearly, such promotions heighten fears, as they selectively pick up death cases while framing a script that the unsuspecting reader clearly understands without the advertisement actually making a legal accusation. However, being short of making such an accusation,

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it carries the reader into the dark world of organized crime. The strategy intimates that since the doctors took their medical panaceas with them to the grave, they left suffering readers to die with no cure. They leave patients suspecting that knowledge concerning alternative and cheap medicine lies literally buried. This strategy raises consumers' eagerness to learn what they have missed. At this point, the advertisement ends up by offering a bottle of liquid oxygen, "Get six for $199."

27 Claims about "A dangerous alliance between the government and corporate America" abound. Laissez Faire Books, whose American libertarian motto is "Freedom. Self- reliance. Action" sent an "Urgent public health warning," arguing that Americans are being denied the right to know what is in their food. In his warning, the publisher targeted food manufacturers who rely on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that are dangerous to health. "It's a conspiracy that runs right from a few massive food producing companies" up to the government, he argues, stating that "It's a tangled web of corruption that keeps politicians in power and safeguards the profits of certain corporations." Furthermore, documentaries like Food Inc. have exposed a "Revolving door syndrome," showing how top officials working at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) change offices to working for giant companies like Monsanto, or rotating back and forth between government and food conglomerates – thereby helping to write the regulations that guarantee corporate profits. Furthermore, entrepreneurs argue that big corporations fund scientific research in ways that raise suspicions about the validity and trustworthiness of publications. Paradoxically, this state of affairs and the very openness of democratic governance provide ripe grounds for collusion between corporations and government gatekeepers. They thus provide reason and commercial armament to raise suspicions of collusion and conspiracy.3 Repeated actual occurrences of such collusion help transforming popular suspicions into firmly held convictions. As the advertisement concludes, "They will lie and tell you something is good for you, as long as it helps corporations make a fortune and keep government officials in office."

28 To gain credibility and legitimacy, advertisers often cloth themselves with similar initials as governmental agencies (i.e., NIH, NSF) – but unlike the callous government, they allege to provide 'true facts' and 'real science' that they screen from 'all over the world.' For example, the Health Sciences Institute (HSI) presents itself as "An independent think tank of patriotic American doctors, scientists, and researchers." Like other publishers, HSI promotions tap on the American suspicious habitus while repeatedly using strategies that pump up fear and a sense of lost liberties. "Big pharma does not want you to know there are alternative solutions to taking harmful meds," announced an alarming message sent by Jenny Thompson from the HSI. She warns the reader to be weary of the government, which conspires against American freedoms and truth: "Call it a conspiracy… Call it a betrayal… Call it an outright crime… But whatever you call it, please understand… You're being lied to." Miss Thomson continues frightening the listener for being robbed of liberty by the institutions he or she trusts. As she states: "I'm going to expose a conspiracy hatched at the highest level of government… a conspiracy so corrupt, it makes the IRS targeting scandal, Benghazi cover-up, and even NSA domestic spying look innocent." She then leads the reader through a list of Government- or Pharma-approved medications for cancer, dementia, diabetes, and other serious ailments while claiming that those medications are lethal poisons. Her message exposes "The list of seven most dangerous drugs" that Big Pharma developed for extorting money from unsuspecting victims (e.g., Statins). After

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discussing the lethal dangers of those drugs, Miss Thomson cautions the duped of being the prime target for the lethal 'arsenal' that Big Pharma uses for extorting money. After evoking deep fears of the secret machinations of government and Big Pharma, she provides details about alternative, scientifically proven healthy cures. She offers the shocked and now suspicious reader salvation from this "betrayal, crime and conspiracy." After sounding a "medical alert," she goes on offering non-prescription natural cures with no side effects – cures the FDA and pharma companies have been hiding in the dark.

29 In 2017, after Donald Trump's election as President, the HSI continued raising libertarian suspicions while selling its products as panaceas for lost freedoms. In a new advertisement distributed by Newsmax (June 2017), Dr. Allan Spreen "Exposes a corrupt conspiracy involving Clinton, a secret society of gangsters, and other high- ranking government officials" who banded together to rob Americans of their basic rights. As he declared, "The people involved never expected the inner-workings of their plan to see the light of day. And if it weren’t just for one tiny mistake... it would have remained buried forever."

30 Plan, plot, scam, , stratagem or machination – the wording that such messages use varies, but they all ignite fears of lost liberties. Those advertisements tap on the American suspicious habitus and promise that if patients seek to be real Americans they need to stand steadfast on their constitutional rights. The solution? Read on and find the panaceas that promise to circumvent the plot against the American people. It is a question of life and death, they claim; it is a question of American patriotism. In the above advertisement, for example, Dr. Spreen accuses Hillary Clinton of being "A liar, a traitor and the conspiracy mastermind of a rigged election." Hillary's "cartel," her "cunning dangerous team," plotted to "Manipulate American politics — and the American people — for billions in pharmaceutical drug profits." Though Clinton lost the 2016 elections, Dr. Spreen goes on declaring that the plot is still in place, as her colluding mafia "owns" the FDA and the many legislators that vote on health care. Unless you pay the HSI $74 a year, you might cut your lifeline short.

31 The Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF; the same acronym as the Governmental National Science Foundation) exemplifies the constitutional foundation of the conspiracist strategy. Dr. Lima Laibow explains the vision of the Foundation: "The Natural Solutions Foundation is predicated on the belief that people own this Republic of ours and that decisions that impact their very lives must be made through a democratic process in which their voices are heard and counted. That is the United States we believe in and that is the United States we are participating in. We do not warm to the prospect of a United States of America controlled and run (through lies) by huge multi-national corporations and deceptive special interests." She refers to the spirit of the American Constitution in explaining that "Thomas Jefferson understood that a free people needs education and the passion to remain free… Fighting for freedom and warding of tyranny is part of our American heritage. We see it as our duty to contribute to the vision of a truly vibrant America, and Natural Solutions Foundation and the campaign to protect America from CODEX is our way of contributing to our country."

32 The NSF advances a series of claims such as the belief in "a new world order," or that the government has a hidden agenda to de-populate the world. In a series of talks about "Nutricide" – the intentional destruction of our nutrients – Dr. Lima argues "Our food is

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being weaponized, it is part of the global depopulation and enslavement regimen. This sounds very very paranoid, until you read the reality, perceive the reality." In another YouTube appearance, Dr. Lima claims that "Doctors are being assassinated for taking on Big Pharma corruption!" She adds that "Well over a hundred of scientists have been murdered who were speaking out about the horrors and dangers of genetic modification for the environment, for people, for our continued survival." She admits to being cautious in phrasing her positions because "We live in a fairyland of pharmaceutical, regulatory deceit and dishonesty." After mentioning endless amounts of scientific facts, Dr. Lima sends cancer-fearing individuals to her "Marketplace" to buy a natural cure. "Dr. Rima Recommends 12-pack, $529."

33 The Institute for Natural Healing (INH, playing on the NIH, the National Institute of Health) also adopts the conspiracist strategy. A section titled "What We Believe" declares "We are fed up with the lies and stupidity of the medical establishment and are committed to exposing these falsehoods to the public. We are well aware of the oft- hidden relationship between the large pharmaceutical companies and the government agencies that were established to disseminate information about good health… and we are devoted to stripping all health information of any financial bias." In blog posts or advertisements, they continually make use of the conspiracist strategy. They exemplified it by advertising a simple cure to all major cancers, a cure that the government hides for more than forty years. The headline goes immediately to the top, namely The White House: "White House Knows This Natural Therapy Beats Cancer— Bans it Anyway. They buried the results, they banned all future research on this treatment and they actively declared war on it." As is usual with most such suspicion- inducing advertisements, they end up offering the startled reader with a panacea, namely defense from presidential plots against the people – buy one, get one free.

34 The Patriot Health Alliance presents itself using the conspiracist strategy as well. They promise to "Show you the health secrets that the government and Big Pharma don't want you to know about." The alliance – a health company that is dedicated to helping seniors to live a healthier and vibrant life – sells natural dietary supplements and other health products. The title of this producer (The Patriot) and the conspiracist strategy it manipulates pick on deep suspicions regarding the collusion between government and pharmaceutical companies. Similarly, Dr. Al Sears, an alternative doctor, advances health conspiracy theories in a years-long campaign against the 'powers that be.' In various publications and websites, he attacks the "Medical Industrial Complex" which brainwashes the public and hides "the truth" about risks and causes of death in America. He attacks the administration with no censor. He claims to have exposed collusion of criminal interests: "Shameless liars and thieves! For over 80 years drug makers have conspired with the American Medical Association and the FDA to bury the secret to heal cancer." In another context, Dr. Sears went on to quote president Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech – the occasion for his criticism of the scientific- technological complex and the military-industrial complex. However, according to Dr. Sears, the warnings of President Eisenhower against the "medical-industrial complex" have been hidden from the public, laying "hidden in the archives of a government building." Dr. Sears employs superhuman powers to break the secret, even though he suspects that the "powers-that-be come and shut me down." According to Dr. Sears, Eisenhower was actually the first victim among 950,000 Americans who die annually because of the medical-industrial complex. As he proclaimed, "You see, during World War II, while then-General Eisenhower was fighting for American freedoms... A small

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group of drug companies was working against our freedoms. They pulled their strings in government. They consolidated and grabbed market share… And they blamed excess fat and cholesterol in Americans' diets."4 He ends his letter to his readers by stating: "In this letter, I introduced you to Big Pharma’s secret plot to kill our beloved 34th President and World War II hero. I showed you the hidden cause to the #1 killer of Americans." After pumping up the sense of conspiracy (i.e., killing of the President) – he goes on recommending his "outlawed cures for all diseases." His long texts are often accompanied by graphic elements which clearly convey how Big Pharma or food companies control the government and the media whilst extracting huge profits and robbing the public of knowledge and the capacity to act rationally for its best interests. Picture 1 provides an example.

35 Picture 1: A Typical Description of Health Conspiracy against the Public

36 Another Health Alert that Newsmax distributed employs the conspiracist strategy in exposing "What mainstream medicine doesn't want you to know!" Lee Euler, the publisher of this alert, continues by asking: "What if I told you that there’s a dirty little secret that the mainstream medical establishment doesn’t want you to know? That’s right, the anti-aging/beauty industry along with Big Pharma could lose BILLIONS of dollars with this nugget of information." Hidden "suppressed information" that Mr. Euler holds would hand readers their liberty and autonomy back – taking them out of the dark into the light of freedom of choice. "Hiding information" or "blinding the people" are other idioms entrepreneurs use to describe the loss of free speech and freedom to acquire knowledge. I extracted Picture 2, for example, from a documentary about alternative cures for cancer, depicting a person with eyes shut and mouth sealed by the dollar bill with digital numbers running over the entire picture. Three syringes provide the clue that financial interests of "Big Pharma" silence the public and keep it both blind of the truth and unable to take action to secure their rights and interests.

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37 Picture 2: Big Pharma Silencing the Public for Money

38 As Richard Hofstadter suggested, the paranoid style is often pedantry, with "almost touching concern with factuality" . Indeed, many advertisements for alternative cures arrive as e-mail messages leading to landing pages "packed-full" with information. Some of those promotions actually necessitate hours of reading of immense amounts of 'facts' or 'evidence' – as they bring readers "Loads and Loads of Information."

39 Another element that those health promotions employ is an 'apocalyptic' message requiring quick action: You must take action immediately, they warn the reader, else you lose liberty and freedom of action (see Barkun 2003). Indeed, the conspiracist strategy urges readers that "it's now or never" – that they have to take action right away, else their doomsday is around the corner. Advertisements employ this strategy to claim that given the power of "the cartel," "the mafia," "the dark alliance," or the "cunning dangerous team" – the publisher is actually in jeopardy. Entrepreneurs suggest that the government, Big Pharma, and big food conglomerates are likely to take legal actions against them. They warn readers that the proposed offer is unlikely to stay online, the product to be freely available, and the author to remain alive. A typical example of this conspiracist strategy is provided by a commercial that promises to cut belly fat within a day: "A lot of these big infomercial companies, supplement companies, and even big pharmaceutical companies are not going to like that I have a solution like this on the Internet. Especially at such a low price like this where everyone can get their hands on it… They can easily drop down a lawsuit, forcing me to take down this website and you will no longer have the opportunity to get your hands on this exclusive information." Your freedom – act now (for $37).

Discussion and Implications

40 The analyses exposed the fit between the American suspicious habitus and the conspiracist strategy. It made clear how entrepreneurs use this strategy in exploiting the American habitus in a two-step manner: First raising fear, then providing alternative solutions. While doing so they employ a series of means to seem professional, yet persecuted; scientific, though in clandestine. Their graphic means and apocalyptic narratives call for swift actions. They call on patients to be good Americans and act for freedom, liberty and health.

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41 The analysis advanced in a lock-step fashion. It first identified the American suspicious habitus - focusing on receptivity or responsiveness. Surveys and polls presented the endemic prevalence of suspicions in matters of health and illness. They also revealed their 'feel' in popular discussions and suggested that most Americans hold medical conspiratorial thoughts of one sort or another (e.g. Miller and Saunders 2016). The second section analyzed alternative health commercials and exposed the conspiracist strategy. It has shown how the strategy manipulates American suspicions of government by alerting patients to the dark forces that take away their agency, their freedom, and their right for health and happiness.

42 In authoring their commercials, entrepreneurs draw on the same cultural toolkit that feeds the American suspicious habitus . Indeed, their conspiracist strategy is effective because it 'fits' this predisposition. The American suspicious habitus is rooted in colonial America. It feeds from the creed that vouched to defend liberty and guarantee happiness. Hence, the ever-spiraling homology between habitus and strategy drives American patients to distrust authority and suspect claims for truth (Kakutani 2018). Medicare policies trouble them because they fear the Government colludes with big pharma and insurance companies. They fear invisible yet powerful and greedy hands robbing them of their rights for health and happiness. The conspiracist strategy fits this habitus like hand to glove. It feeds it with supporting 'evidence' while offering salvation through alternative medications and therapies. "Fifty dollars, your health back."

43 The analyses of alternative health campaigns provide a general theoretical approach for studying the prevalence and effectiveness of conspiracy theories. Scholars of conspiratorial phenomena need to pay attention to the fit between the 'broadcasting' conspiracist strategy on the one hand, and the predispositions of the 'audience,' on the other. This fit makes many Americans susceptible to the influence of conspiracist strategies. Such strategies use democratic ideals like freedom and personal rights and motivate actions by arousing patriotic inclinations.

44 Notwithstanding its singularity, scholars have shown that conspiracy theories are not limited to the USA. Studies in the UK, Austria, and in Middle Eastern countries exposed that conspiratorial beliefs are indeed widespread (Imhoff and Bruder 2014; Imhoff and Lamberty 2018; Pipes 1996). Following the general theoretical approach proposed here, comparative investigations need to partition the phenomenon into three parts. They first need to study local suspicious predispositions, namely historical narratives of trauma and suffering (Eyerman, Alexander, and Breese 2011; Uscinski, Klofstad, and Atkinson 2016; van Prooijen and Douglas 2017). They then need to analyze what strategies are effective in manipulating those habituated predispositions. Finally, they need to break open specific tactics of . A comparative approach may point out that predispositions are culturally distinct, reflecting particular histories and traumas.

45 Germany, for example, harbors unique suspicions from external Roman/Gallic/ American interventions (Yair 2015), making it susceptible to conspiracy theories about giants like Google and Facebook.5 In Germany, the dictum Die Gedanken Sind Frei (Thoughts are Free) serves as an anchor for susceptibility. The strategy for manipulating it would usually warn people from capitalist moguls who use various means for cannibalizing their privacy and thoughts.6

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46 By exposing how the conspiracist strategy manipulates libertarian ideals in America, I made clear that it is part of the American democratic worldview. The suspicious habitus and the conspiracist strategy both hinge on commitments to constitutional values of liberty and personal rights. Though manipulative and murky at times, the conspiracist strategy is part of the American democratic game. Uscinski and Parent (2014) clarified this: In socializing successive generations, cultures may use conspiracy theories as part of a protective armament, shielding themselves from the tyranny of opposing groups. Inculcating distrust and vigilance would be adaptive behaviors if groups have been victimized by actual conspiracies (p.15)… A skeptical eye toward power is… not only sensible but also desirable, and conspiracy theories are the culmination of this attitude (p. 162).

47 Audience mistrust and suspicion do not attest to a deranged mentality. Rather than being a sign for intellectual failure, the analyses of alternative health commercials suggest that the American obsession with health conspiracy theories testifies to its democratic commitments. True, American democracy depends on the intelligence of its people. However, it depends no less on a culture of active suspicion against power and privilege. The conspiracist strategy manipulates this creed by calling patients to stand vigilant for their rights and liberties. Therefore, heightened libertarian suspicions testify to the power of political socialization in America. Recent years have demonstrated how the White House and alternative media outlets employ the conspiracist strategy in debates about the 'Deep State,' 'Invasion of Caravans' and other contested policy domains. They succeed in doing so for the same reason: The Conspiracist Strategy and the suspicious American habitus spring from the same commitment to American constitutional rights.

48

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NOTES

1. Entrepreneurs often use the term "Big Pharma" in referencing large pharmaceutical companies. They blame such anonymous companies for betraying public trust. They employ similar pointers in referencing "food conglomerates," the "deep state," or the "White House" - all as conspiring against unsuspecting Americans. 2. Recent investigations of alleged Russian manipulations of Facebook - and the company's alleged conspiring to attack its critiques - have strengthened public fears and conspiratorial suspicions, blurring an already opaque reality. 3. There are honest and respectable doctors and entrepreneurs who battle on the same front. The Food Babe Vani Hari is a good example. Nutrition Facts by doctor Michael Greger is another. The confused consumer may find it hard to separate them from conspiratorial entrepreneurs. 4. A critique he shares with many respected doctors and researchers, thereby further confusing suspicious clients. 5. At times those predispositions to fear conspiracy prove to be correct, making it even more difficult to differentiate between fantasy and reality. 6. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2354651/STOP-using-Google-Facebook-fear-US- spying-says-Germany.html

ABSTRACTS

Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" opened a floodgate of analyses of fear and conspiracy theories in American culture. The present paper adds to those studies by providing a cultural interpretation of commercials for alternative cures. It shows that publishers of such commercials often use a "conspiracist strategy" in two interrelated steps. They first raise fears of government collusion with 'Big Pharma.' They then call citizens-cum- patients to protect their liberties from hidden machinations by buying 'hidden' or 'censured' cures. While doing so they employ a series of means to seem professional yet persecuted; scientific though in clandestine. Their graphics and apocalyptic narratives necessitate patients to take swift actions. By manipulating fears and conspiratorial suspicions, entrepreneurs promise suffering 'patriots' that by choosing their alternative cures they would win back their liberty and

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health. The paper discusses the general theoretical implications for studying conspiracy theories while calling for a comparative approach for observing local habitual predispositions on the one hand, and the culturally adapted conspiracist strategies for manipulating them, on the other hand. In contemporary America, for example, politicians and media outlets employ conspiracist strategies to raise fears from the 'deep state.' They succeed doing so because those conspiracist strategies and the suspicious habitus they manipulate spring from the same democratic source.

AUTHOR

GAD YAIR Gad Yair, Ph.D. 1994, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds the Louis and Ann Wolens Chair in Educational Research. His academic interests are social theory, culture and education. During the last five years Prof. Yair has made outstanding contributions to the study of Israeli and German culture and is now focusing on American culture. He has published seven books, 16 book chapters and 63 journal articles and appears on a documentary film on Israeli culture: Matzav Israeli (the Israeli condition; Directed by Ayelet Dekel). In 2018-2020 he serves as an Institute Visiting Professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

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Black Elitism and Cultural Entrepreneurship in 1920’s Boston, Massachusetts: The League of Women for Community Service

Craig Doughty

1 In her 1994 study, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950, Adelaide Cromwell acknowledges the existence of class differences in Boston, placing emphasis on a small black upper-crust. These people, consisting of business professionals, clerks, teachers, caterers, and small merchants had moderate wealth, were college educated, attended churches, and had some standing in community matters.1 Amongst this small collective was a group of upwardly mobile African-American females, who functioned under the group heading of the League of Women for Community Service (LWCS).2 This group pursued their own advancement through community activities in the arts, incorporating the tastes, organisational practices and aesthetic sensibilities of Boston’s Anglo-American cultural elites, the Brahmins. In doing so, they sought to advocate and promote a brand of high culture stewardship that, as Paul DiMaggio states, equated to ‘black cultural capitalism’, albeit within a context of rigid racial boundaries during an era of widespread discrimination.3 In the process of promoting an aesthetic hierarchy of distinction, the LWCS excluded the black the working class and poor and rejected mainstream musical forms, including Jazz and the Blues. This article explores the impact of black cultural entrepreneurship on black uplift within the developing social, cultural, and political landscape of early twentieth century Boston.

1. Introduction

2 The leaders of black political, social, and cultural movements across America throughout the first half of the twentieth century were primarily men. The influence of Booker T. Washington, W.E. B. DuBois, and James W. Johnson and others was great and has been widely documented. These men were culturally driven; they were civil rights

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activists intellectually mobilised for the justice and the equality of all blacks. But as William B. Gatewood noted, as influential as the black male aristocracy was in Boston, it was their wives who dominated the social etiquette and taste preferences of the black elite for many decades.4 In particular, the League of Women for Community Service (LWCS), established in 1918 was the leader of black cultural conventions for much of the nineteen-twenties.

3 The LWCS emerged out of the social reformist spirit of the black women’s club movement of the ‘Women’s Era’ (1880–1920), serving as a community comfort group during the First World War.5 In this respect, they provided much needed assistance to returning soldiers and bereaved wives. Post-1918, as the need for community comfort eased, the LWCS diversified and began to assist blacks in the quest to achieve social uplift. Through public engagement, they sought to advance black education and the arts by organising concerts, lectures, seminars, and exhibitions that showcased black creativity in the city with the aim of inspiring the wider black community, but also aimed at counteracting negative perceptions of black culture principally held by whites.

4 While the arts and cultural enterprise were gateways to social uplift for blacks in many American cities – for example, the Harlem Renaissance showcased a vibrant that redefined black music, theatre, and the visual arts - the LWCS differed because they pursued racial uplift by appropriating and appealing to white cultural sensibilities and taste preferences—in particular, those of the Brahmin class. The Brahmins were Boston’s elite, Anglo-American, figures of power.6 With their New England exclusivity, close ties to Harvard University, and staunch Puritanism, the Brahmins were the rich, the well-born, and the powerful and they had dictated political, social, economic, and cultural interests in Boston for over a century and their heritage was well established.

5 However, despite their wealth and standing, families including the Appletons, the Cabots, the Codmans, the Coolidges, the Lodges, and the Lowells were not lavish or wasteful. They promoted age-old mantras of charity, humility and an adherence to modesty, even going as far as to advocate frugalness. Moreover, the adages of hard work, culture and education were central to the Brahmin way of life. They maintained a legacy of staunchness based on historic accomplishments; i.e., if it used to be done this way, it ought to be done this way, and, by God, it will be done this way. In this respect, one might ask how many Boston Brahmins does it take to screw in a lightbulb? The Answer would be ten: one to put in the new bulb, and nine to reminisce about how great the old one was.

6 As patrons of the arts and wealthy philanthropists centrally located to Boston’s power structure, both literally and figuratively, the Brahmins endowed the city in the second half of the nineteenth century with theatres, concert halls, and museums, including The Athenaeum, the Peabody Essex, Boston Symphony Hall, the Museum of Fine Art, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.7 These institutions, which rivalled some of the finest in Europe, gave Boston a certain cultural distinction. In particular, they served to provide the city with a classical and Eurocentric canon of legitimate high- culture. Emphasis in this respect was placed on concert and symphony music, notably chorales, oratorios, and operatic airs.

7 By the turn of the twentieth century, aided by the industrial revolution and the subsequent creation of a defined middle-class in America, many white Bostonians

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found themselves beneficiaries of a new economic power. With greater wealth and more importance placed on the advantages of leisure time, the Brahmins took full charge of the baton they had shared with intellectuals and hymnodic reformers for much of the nineteenth-century and transformed culture into a form of capital. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, in a concert programme from 1967, reminiscing about its rise remarked: The industrial Revolution was fostering bourgeois communities. The prosperous tradesman, or more probably his wife, was found cultivating the arts. There began to accumulate a new phenomenon in the Western World—a potential concert public, a public in complete contrast to the social gatherings in the mansions of Vienna or Paris.8

8 The city embraced the music of Hector Berlioz, and later Brahms and Wagner - artists who were able to convert standard orchestral forms into canvases for abstract, vanguard expression that pushed the limits of performers, instruments, performance spaces, and the tastes of audiences.

9 The LWCS’s adoption and appropriation of the Brahmin approach to philanthropy, education, and culture set them apart from many black social and cultural cliques of the time. Their advocation and promotion of a nuanced brand of high-class cultural stewardship equated to what Crystal M. Fleming and Lorraine E Roses refer to as ‘black cultural capitalism’;9 terminology synonymous with Paul DiMaggio’s concept of the institutionalised cultural capitalism propagated by the Boston Brahmins during the eighteenth century: an approach to culture rooted in a sense of group consciousness and collective identity that served as an economic resource for the financial and material support of enterprises ultimately aimed at the advancement of an entire group.10

10 However, the LWCS were not nearly as financially advantaged, socially connected or as influential as their white counterparts. The Brahmins were centrally located at the heart of Boston’s power structure. In contrast, the LWCS existed on the periphery. As such, they were much more constrained in their ability to redefine the cultural field. Whereas the Brahmins successfully institutionalised their aesthetic sensibilities, the LWCS were limited in the symbolic and material resources they had at their disposal. Where the Brahmins could convert economic and social capital into durable cultural institutions, the LWCS were much more likely to bring about change through coalition building and, more infrequently, strategic partnerships with dominant Brahmins.

11 Drawing from archival records (meeting minutes and correspondences), historical documents (local news coverage) and biographies, this article focuses on the formative years of the LWCS, 1919 - 1923. In particular, attention here is on the ways that the LWCS appropriated, incorporated and on occasion diverged from the organisational practices and aesthetic sensibilities of the Boston Brahmins to cultivate a black sphere of high art. Insofar as the LWCS’s work was principally embedded in the objectives of social mobility for blacks in the city, their efforts to generate uplift relied upon their adherence to the cultural capitalist precept. Notably, they aspired to develop and thereafter perpetuate a sophisticated field of black artistry within the adopted framework of Eurocentric norms that had, similarly, been established by the Brahmins.

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2. Josephine Saint Pierre Ruffin and The Women’s Era Club: ‘Help to make the world better.’11

12 Studies of black communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries acknowledge the existence of class differences in America. In his 1899 study, The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. DuBois noted the presence of what he defined as a small upper class of blacks, which included caterers, government clerks, teachers, professionals, and small merchants.12 Many of these individuals had significant wealth, elite education, political influence, and connections.13 Similarly, Adelaide Cromwell in her work The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 notes comparable professional trends in Boston, adding that the black upper class during the period in question belonged to an upper crust that was principally college-educated, attended churches, and included community leaders.14

13 William B. Gatewood remarked that ‘Boston’s black upper class had a reputation for black exclusiveness that went beyond the refinement of comparable groups in more established black centres of the time, such as Washington and Philadelphia’.15 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, wealthy black men, including merchant, John H. Lewis and the Baker, Joseph Lee assisted in promoting old-line black families of less means in Boston like the Ruffins, Ridleys, Duprees and Haydens. For example, George L. Ruffin, a Harvard-educated attorney, legislator, city judge and noted loyal Republican in time became one of the most respected lawyers in New England in the late nineteenth century;16 and by the time of his death on November 20 1886 of Bright's disease, he had amassed more white clients than black.17

14 The black upper class in Boston established a genteel way of life that extended to the employment of white servants, musical training for their children, and membership into high-class associations that were modelled on those of their white counterparts. William H. Dupree was a prominent fixture in Boston's upper-class and a militant on racial matters. He was also in charge of the city’s largest postal sub-station alongside his brother-in-law, William Monroe Trotter. Trotter, himself a civil rights activist, also served as a newspaper editor and real estate businessman.18 His son, James Monroe Trotter studied at Harvard,19 graduated magna cum laude, and thereafter became an influential newspaper editor, a real estate businessman and, like his father, a prominent Civil Rights activist.20 The baton of success was ultimately shared and eventually passed on to future generations.

15 In 1893, Josephine Saint Pierre Ruffin, wife to George L. Ruffin, was working as the editor for the Boston Courant, a weekly ‘Negro newspaper’ founded three years prior. The Courant serviced the interests of a small black population of 8,125 (2% of the city’s total population) during a time when the Great Migration had fractured race relations.21 The newspaper functioned as a mouthpiece for the black struggle in Boston. Throughout its five years of publication, the Boston Courant regularly published work that supported the pursuit of equal rights, including W. E. B. Du Bois' early Harvard Daily Themes and classroom papers.22 His writings aired dissatisfaction with America's racial policies, which were considered discriminatory and restrictive.23

16 Through connected channels, including the influence of her husband, Saint Pierre Ruffin founded the Women’s Era newspaper in 1894. It was billed as the first national newspaper published by and for black women.24 As the paper’s editor and publisher,

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Ruffin shaped the Women’s Era into a platform for the promotion of women’s suffrage, black female activism, and general interest—social etiquette, exercise, and health and beauty.25 There were also regular interviews with prominent black female activists such as Victoria Earle Matthews and Ida B. Wells;26 and a series of articles entitled ‘Eminent Women’ that included a praiseworthy profile of Harriett Tubman. Ruffin also courted controversy by criticising those she felt were not doing enough for the black cause, including the city judge, Albion W. Tourgée, who took a particularly nuanced approach to stopping lynching: In his very admirable and searching address delivered in this city, April 16th, judge Albion W. Tourgee proposed as a remedy to prevent the lynching of colored people at the South, that the country where lynchings occur be compelled by law to pension the wife and children of the murdered man. This, he said would make murder costly and in self defense the local authorities would put a stop to it. At first blush, this is an attractive suggestion. But why not hang the murderers? Why make a distinction between the murderers of white men and the murderers of colored men?27

17 The broader aim of the Women’s Era was to supplement the Women’s Era Club (The WEC). Founded in 1892 by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the WEC was the first black women’s civic association in America and the driving force behind the National Federation of African-American Women, which comprised representatives of other groups from across the country. At its core, the WEC was philanthropic and promoted and moral reform. The Club comprised a small membership of around 130 members that met twice monthly and paid annual dues of one dollar.28 Funds raised serviced scholarships, the holding of classes in civics, domestic science, literature, the sponsorship of kindergartens, hospitals and the organising of clinics among other activities.29 Through the reportage of these activities, Boston’s black women, and those they came to inspire further afield, felt a special calling for racial uplift.30

18 The Women’s Era and The Women’s Era Club showcased the existence of a ‘growing class' of intelligent, cultured black women sharing the aims of 'all good, aspiring women' in Boston; and by this 'dignified showing' they sought to refute charges of ignorance and immorality levelled at blacks outright, particularly by the American press. Mary Church Terrell wrote that members: have determined to come into the closest possible touch with the masses of our women, through whom the womanhood of our people is always judged.31

19 The WEC reified its aims by aligning their practical approaches to community service with those of their white counterparts. In late nineteenth century Boston, white women of class, backed by their husbands including Julia Duff and Emily Fifield, garnered respect for their participation in practices such as scholarship, reform, social work, and gendered politics—notably inside the parameters of the Boston School Committee.32

20 Scholars of black women’s history, including Katie Canon, have used the term 'womanist' to capture the distinctive elements of political action employed during the period in question and to distinguish black reform politics and movements across America from those of middle-class white women.33 Insofar as there are obvious distinctions to be drawn between the women in question, they did to differing degrees all utilise the influence of their husbands and worked along the lines of class-affinity in the spheres of scholarship, reform, social work and gendered politics. The main difference lies in the aims of these women. Duff and Fifield pushed against one another

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within the boundaries of white hegemony and Yankee Protestantism and Unitarianism to appropriate the Boston School Committee in their respective images.

21 In contrast, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and the Women’s Era Club had a broader remit. They used class-affinity in predominantly black-centric spheres of scholarship, reform, and social work to target racial barriers both locally and nationally to promote unity and counteract racial inferiority.34 Locally, Ruffin subsequently became a founder of the Association for the Promotion of Child Training in the South of Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nurturing an aspirational mindset in young blacks; while nationally in 1896, the National Federation of Afro- American Women merged with the Colored Women's League to form the National Association of Colored Women. Ruffin was elected as vice president.35 In this capacity, she came to embody a nationwide movement led by women of colour for the benefit of women and men of colour.36

22 In 1918, assisted by Maria Baldwin, Saint Pierre Ruffin founded the League of Women for Community Service (LWCS). As an organisation, the LWCS was made up of a collective of well-connected and culturally aware women of experience in matters of race, education and the arts. Several of its members, Pierre Ruffin and Baldwin included, were older-line women with established roots in the community: Elizabeth Harley Forbes, Mrs Florida Ruffin Ridley, and Maud Cuney Hare.37 Baldwin was the serving principal of the well-known, predominantly white Agassiz Grammar School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was one of the few black women to head such a northern school, and she oversaw an all-white staff of twelve and a pupil body of 500: 98% white. This not only defied the social hierarchy of the time but also highlighted the ability of Baldwin to work in inter-racial alliance with whites and where necessary to have the wherewithal to lead them.38

23 To begin, the LWCS served the war effort on a local basis, and their activities mirrored those of Brahmin women, who had themselves taken to comfort work and fundraising a year earlier. Brahmins, including the Leiters, Rantouls, and Bradleys served the needs of returning soldiers in their respective locales.39 Many, however, had family or social connections in Europe and demonstrated their influence and financial power by extending their charitable work to them. There was fundraising such as classical musicales in support of the French wounded and Polish sufferers, and a mid-July fair held in support of the Navy YMCA.40 These events demonstrated the Brahmins' sense of noblesse oblige, which manifested itself through the intertwining of social (cultural) activities with good causes while simultaneously showcasing their far-reaching influence.

24 As the need for comfort services waned after , the LWCS initially remained functional by running a daily soup kitchen.41 Staffed by volunteers and supplemented by donations, the kitchen served the needs of ‘two hundred little boys of all races and creeds’, assisted new mothers, providing guidance and childcare, and in conjunction with the National Civic League, distributed luncheons to under-financed Boston schools.42 In doing so, the LWCS remained connected to their roots and adhered to the general practices of other female-led non-profit community groups in Boston, such as ‘The Women’s Service Club’ and ‘The Hattie B. Cooper Community Centre’. Both organisations undertook forms of civic, educational, and charitable work.43 What set the LWCS apart was an aspirational commitment to culture.44

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25 In 1920, seeking to advance their standing, they worked in conjunction with their husbands and associated members of Boston’s small black elite, including William L. Reed and Butler Wilson, to finance the purchase of a five-storey brownstone house to serve as their headquarters.45 The space was to double as a hub for community work but also as a communal meeting space for events, revues, and political functions. Seeking to attract elites in the city, the house was suitably finished. At the time of purchase, it was noted to have been adorned with ‘marble fireplaces, French gold leaf chandeliers, a ballroom and library, fine iron work around the windows, massive mahogany staircases and doors, Corinthian columns, elaborate plaster work, huge venetian mirrors on the walls, silver doorknobs, and beautiful Victorian furniture’.46

26 Ornamental iron lace work at 558 and 560 Massachusetts Ave., formerly 37 Chester Square47

27 Beyond its aesthetic properties, the purchase was significant for historically symbolic reasons but also for its geographical position. Located at 558 Massachusetts Avenue, the house, also known as the Farewell Mansion after John Farewell, a wealthy (white) sea captain, shipping merchant, and avowed abolitionist, was an important part of Boston’s black history. Built by William Rice Carnes in 1858, the mansion operated as an important stop on the Underground Railroad, a network of persons, including Harriet Tubman, that helped escaped slaves on their way to freedom during the period of abolition.48 Mary Ellen Snodgrass notes that, much like their abolitionist Brahmin counterparts of the time, Carnes and his wife, Martha B., consistently used their social prominence and wealth to aid the city’s under-classes and oppressed.49

28 Geographically, the address lay just south of Huntington Avenue, described by Lorraine E. Roses and Crystal M. Flemming as ‘the invisible demarcation between ethnic diversity and white homogeneity in early twentieth century Boston’.50 Huntington Avenue was home to many of Boston’s Brahmin-led structures of secular and religious

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culture, including the Museum of Fine Art, Horticultural Hall, the Christian Science Mother Church, the Boston Opera House, and Symphony Hall.51 As such, the LWCS’s establishment of headquarters in the Brahmin locality served to support the groups integrationist philosophy. Its proximity to venerable white institutions overstepped Boston’s well-defined traditional, cultural and social boundaries.52

29 At the formal opening of the Headquarters on March 20, 1920, members of the LWCS rubbed shoulders with Boston’s elite. Guests included the former United States assistant attorney general, William H. Lewis; District Attorney, Joseph Pelletier; and three years before ascending to the United States Presidency, the then Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge and his wife.53 This beginning set the tone for the League’s approach thereafter. Cultural events were consistently held and aimed at noteworthy Brahmins and black Bostonians of esteem, including politicians, university chairmen, reverends, socialites, anti-racialists, and wealthy patrons.54 Academic lectures, musical revues, art exhibitions, social functions, and charity events55 regularly attracted large audiences - on average, in excess of two hundred guests per event.56

30 Performance and showcase events held by the LWCS, in Brahmin fashion, regularly extolled the musical refinement of composers such as Antonín Leopold Dvořák and Walter Damrosch. Members, in particular Maud Cuney Hare, criticised 'the ordinary songs of today written in ragtime set in execrable rhymes'.57 In this sense, the League, who advocated the promotion of western classical-music appreciation, the kind firmly rooted in the study and practice of Mozart, as a way of uplift shared some sense of commonality with the white-led Boston media; for when blacks were seen to partake in the cultural preferences of whites, they were often accepted and on occasion, lauded. Black Spiritual singer, Paul Robeson, and composer and tenor singer, Laurence Brown both received praise from the Boston Globe for their contributions to music in the city,58 with the latter referred to as a ‘unique figure in American life’.59

31 While blacks in neighbouring New York during 1919 pushed jazz towards the ‘serious music’ that Locke envisioned, the League dismissed it. Hare complained that it stifled 'the true musical instinct by turning away many of our talented young people from the persistent and continued study of good music'.60 In this respect, Hare erred on the side of the widespread rejection of the music by America’s white elite and leading cultural spokespersons, including music columnist for the Chicago Defender and bandleader, Dave Peyton. In his column, he condemned ‘most jazz playing as rank musical ignorance, insisting that any trained musician could do it'.61 Again, the wider consensus in the LWCS was 'hokum music' lead race musicians to abandon concert hall instruments such as the violin for the louder and 'more vulgar' instruments of jazz. Robert Archey Woods adds: Love of really good music does not yet exist to any great extent amongst local people. Their demands are fairly well satisfied by the street pianos, the band concerts, and the efforts of the poorly trained singer and musician such as are found in the cheapest amusement places.62

32 In the 1890s, white cultural wealth in Boston had extended to the South End, and several venues were opened that offered ‘refined’ musical entertainment to non- whites. Amongst these venues were three first-class theatres: the Columbia, the Grand Opera House, and a smaller version of the latter, known simply as the Grand.63 By the close of 1897, however, all three had ‘failed’.64 Woods asserted in a 1898 Settlement Study that the collapse of these venues ‘illustrates very forcibly the distinctness with which the district is set off from the so-called better parts of the town’.65 However, the

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non-white population in the South End was relatively small and opening of three first- class venues in close proximity to one another meant that limited ticket sales were shared.66 Moreover, wages were low in the area and poorer people were often priced out of the leisure of entertainment.67

33 This was compounded by the fact that residents of wealthier areas, in particular whites from the Back Bay and neighbouring suburbs were rarely induced to visit the South End to be entertained.68 This was a contrast to the act of ‘slumming’ - whites venturing into black neighbourhoods to be entertained – that occurred in northern cities two decades later, including Chicago and New York. Slummers thought black life exciting because it was ‘primitive’ and vital. Visiting the ghetto’s haunts became the era’s way to snub mainstream society, to be in the avant-garde. ‘Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously,’ novelist Carl Van Vechten wrote H.L. Mencken in the summer of 1924. ‘Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time’” In Boston, both apathy and a commitment to high-art and religious music stifled jazz and blues.69

34 On January 9, 1922, one of LWCS’s figureheads, Maria L. Baldwin died from heart failure.70 Poignantly, she collapsed during a significant address to members of the council of the Robert Gould Shaw House Association in Boston’s Copley-Plaza. Eight weeks after her passing, the remaining members of the LWCS offered up a room at the Farewell Mansion for a public exhibition to honour her life and work.71 The exhibition, in the words of Ridley, Hare, and Trotter was a way to showcase the ‘collection and the preservation of material relating to the history of the Negro and those who have stood for justice to the Negro’.72 To commemorate Baldwin’s life and to promote the quest for black justice, prominent white speakers were invited, including clergymen, such as Samuel M. Crothers, and Pitt Dillingham; as well as the then President Emeritus of Harvard, Dr. Charles W. Elliot.73

35 The LWCS followed this in 1923 with the formal dedication of a library to Maria L. Baldwin at its headquarters.74 To mark the occasion, a bust of Anglo-American, John Brown (a participant in the Boston Tea Party, member of the Revolutionary Army, and prominent abolitionist) from the library of the late Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a proprietor of the Boston Athenaeum, was presented by his daughter; the Higginson’s, in short, were Harvard educated Brahmins of substantial influence in Boston.75 The gesture was, thus, a symbolic one. Firstly, Brown had been a figure who embodied the commitment of whites to interracial progress during the abolition era. But more importantly, the transfer of the bust from the Higginson library to the newly established Baldwin library served as a tangible marker that indicated the developing link between the Brahmins and the LWCS.

36 This link was substantiated by the number of esteemed white guests in attendance at the dedication, including prominent Brahmins, church leaders, academics, and politicians. Among them was once again, Harvard President, Charles W. Eliot, and additionally, Boston Ethical Society Director, Harold K. Estabrook, Social Reformers and writers, Lucia Ade Mead and Cornelia J. Cannon, and President of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Mrs Grace Morrison Poole.76 These guests were joined by significant black figures, including world-class collegiate athlete, lawyer, and politician, William H. Lewis. Guests were treated to a bibliographic tribute read by W. O. Goodell, and a performance of negro spirituals and hymns performed by the all black Vespers Quartet.

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37 By 1923, The LWCS were essentially part of a cultural hierarchy of distinction that effectively excluded the poor and working classes. Naturally, this approach to culture had implications. Wider black Boston rarely profited from the trickledown benefits of LWCS influence. Instead, the League’s exclusivity mainly served to distance them somewhat from black-centric community groups – including the Women’s Service Club (WSC), located at 464 Massachusetts Avenue – and civil rights organisations in the city. This resulted in what can loosely be defined as short-term black passivity. Hampered by limited support, and appeal, swathes of musicians, writers, artists, and more, including Jazz saxophonists Harry Carney and Johnny Hodges, and novelist Dorothy West migrated to more culturally affluent centres including New York, Chicago, and leading European cities such as Paris.

38 The LWCS were underpinned by a commitment to integration - i.e., bridging the gap between perceived ‘good’ black culture and the elite tastes of white Boston - served to legitimise the LWCS in the eyes of many Brahmins. But by opting to promote and present culture that was socially acceptable to the powerful and wealthy, the LWCS ultimately projected an outward indifference to the mainstream and popular artistic and expressive black forms of the time. Through fragmentation and siphoning talent, black Boston was reduced to a footnote in the grander narrative of the 1920s. Yet the paradoxical upside to the steady outward migration of its musicians, writers, artist and more is that the city was represented nationally, with individuals of cultural prominence enriching scenes and movements across America.

39 By the time jazz had made its way from the margins to the mainstream, the LWCS had all but exhausted the limited resources available to them, which grew thinner as more and more blacks, inspired by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Sidney Bechet, turned to the instruments the League had dismissed a decade earlier and assisted in the growth and success of music at odds with the taste sensibilities of the LWCS. Ultimately, as national tastes changed and black mainstream art forms such as jazz became palatable and of wide appeal to black musicians and audience, the LWCS, unable to define their cultural field in Boston, struggled to sustain the cultural links that had been fashioned with leading Brahmins, and in time they consequently retreated full circle back into comfort work, with focus on providing lessons in mother craft.77

40 The Farewell Mansion, still owned by the LWCS, was declared a National Historic Site in 1974 by the Department of Interior and National Park Service. However, the once grand structure is now a victim to the cumulative assaults of wind, rain, snow, and gravity and it has since 2006 remained boarded, its façade crumbling and its ironworks rusting. A commemorative plaque affixed to the building declares that the LWCS ‘has been dedicated to the cultural and educational advancement of Negro women’. While this is certainly true, their approach to advancement was not always the most profitable. Nonetheless, while the LWCS were not ‘entrepreneurial’ in the economic, Brahmin sense of the term, they intentionally constructed a defined professional and privileged black elite, and can, in this respect, be considered ‘culturally entrepreneurial’.78

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NOTES

1. Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (University of Arkansas Press, 1994). 2. The League of Women for Community Service was formed in 1918.Throughout its existence, the League has fostered intellectual and artistic activity among Black Bostonians. 3. P. DiMaggio., Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century. Boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in America (London: Academic Press, 1982). 33-50. 4. William B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Arkansas: University of Arkansas, 2000). 112. 5. Victoria Earle, 'The Woman's Era'. The Woman's Era. Volume 1. No. 2. May 1, 1894. 1 6. Alain Locke, The New Negro: An interpretation (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925). 7. Boston Athenaeum, Reports - Boston Athenaeum (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1898), 9. 8. Boston Symphony Orchestra, 'Boston Symphony Orchestra: The Beginning', Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert Programs., Volume 86, 1967. 1062 9. Crystal M. Flemming, 'Black cultural capitalists: African-American elites and the organization of the arts in early twentieth century Boston'. Poetics. Volume 35, Issue 6. (December 2007). 368-387. 10. Paul DiMaggio and John Mohr, Cultural Capital, Educational Attainment, and Marital Selection. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 90, No. 6. May 1985. pp. 1231-1261. 11. ‘Help to make the world better’ was the Woman’s Era’s motto. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 'The Woman's Era Club'. The Woman's Era. Volume 1. 1894. an electronic edition. Available: http://womenwriters.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/advocacy/content.php? level=div&id=era1_we.1.01.03.08&document=era1. Accessed: November 29, 2018. 12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) pp. 124-5. 13. Ibid. 14. Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (University of Arkansas Press, 1994). 15. William B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880 - 1920 (Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1990). 16. No Author Attributed, 'Assembles Papers of Famed Dad', The Pittsburgh Courier. January 14, 1939. 3. 17. William Edward Burghardt du Bois, The Crisis, Volumes 81-82. (Crisis Publishing Company, 1974), 347. 18. William Wells Brown, The Rising Son, Or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (A. G. Brown & Company, 1882) 391. 19. Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Harvard University (Boston: Harvard University, 1900). 20. Stephen R. Fox suggests that Trotter lived in a single room in College House, the cheapest student dormitory and paid for most of his education himself. Stephen R. Fox, The guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (Boston: Athenaeum, 1970), 17. 21. Department of Commerce: Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920. Volume III Population – Age for Cities and Towns of 10,000 or More 1920. Page 438. Despite its small size, the black community in Boston produced the Hub in the 1880s and the Courant in the 1890s. This tied in with more broadly race-related activities including the

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Colored National League and the Citizens' Equal Rights Association which sought to safeguard the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, known as the Civil Rights Amendments. 22. W. E. B. Du Bois, Du Bois on Education (Maryland: Rowman Altamira, 2002) 37. 23. W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Papers: Special Collections & University Archives University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts’, Journal of Pan African Studies. October 2017. Vol.10, p.395. 24. Victoria Earl, 'The Woman's Era, The Woman's Era. Volume 1. No. 2 (May 1, 1894.), p 1. 25. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, The Woman's Era Club'. The Woman's Era, Volume 1, an electronic edition. Saturday, March 24 1894. Available: http://womenwriters.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/ advocacy/content.php?level=div&id=era1_we.1.01.03.08&document=era1. Accessed: November 29, 2018. 26. Maude T. Jenkins, ‘Letters’. The Women's Review of Books. Vol. 16, No. 12. September 1999. 5. 27. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 'Tourgee in Boston'. The Woman's Era, Volume 1. 1894. 28. Ibid. 29. An example of its comfort services was the formation of a sewing circle to aid St. Monica's Home, a hospital for colored women. Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (University of Arkansas Press, 1994). 78. 30. Author Unknown, Colored Women Open Clubhouse. Boston Daily Globe. May 21, 1920. 48. 31. Mary Church Terrell in Beverly Washington Jones, Quest for equality: the life and writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863-1954 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990). 154. 32. Involvement in the Boston School Committee highlighted a developing rift in the city between Irish women, represented by Julia Duff, and Yankee women, represented by Emily Fifield, over control of the city’s School Committee, the first Massachusetts forum in which women were allowed political representation. Author Unknown, ‘Mrs. Duff Biffs School Board’, The Atlanta Constitution. November 16, 1902. p. 7 33. Katie Canon, Black Womanist Ethics (California: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006). 34. In 1896 when the National Federation of Afro-American Women in Washington D.C., merged with the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C., to form the National Association of Colored Women, Pierre Ruffin served as its first vice-president. She placed herself at the helm of the largest federation of local black women’s clubs. 35. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, Stanley Harrold, The African-American odyssey (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002), 372. 36. Members of the Women’s Era Club developed ties to the Equal Rights League, the Massachusetts State Union of Women's Clubs, the Northeastern Federation of Coloured Women's Clubs, and the Republic Ladies Auxiliary. U.S. Government. Superintendent of Documents, Catalogue of United States Public Documents, Issues 25-36 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897). 37. In addition to working as an on-off columnist for W.E.B Du Bois’ the Crisis, while living in Texas, she also served as the director of music at the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute (1897) and at Prairie View State College (1903-1904). Cuney Hare relocated to Boston in 1906, following her marriage to William Hare. Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, Recovering Five Generations Hence: The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 143. 38. Madeline G. Allison, The Horizon, The Crisis. April 1922. 271. 39. Nancy Glidden Coffey, The Story of Edgewater House, 1910-2016 (Beverly, Mass: Lulu.com, 2016). 26. 40. No Author Attributed, 'The War-Work Fund'. The Youth's Companion, Volume 92, Part 2. 530. 41. The League of Women for Community Service: Celebrating More Than 90 Years of Service to the Community (Home). Available: http://leagueofwomen.org. Accessed: 3 July, 2014.

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42. Author unknown, ‘Colored Women Open Clubhouse: Soup Kitchen Part of Its Community Service’. Boston Daily Globe. March 21, 1920. P. 46. 43. The League of Women for Community Service: Celebrating More Than 90 Years of Service to the Community (Home). Available: http://leagueofwomen.org. Accessed: 3 July, 2014. 44. Ibid. 45. Author Unknown, $4000 Subscribed for League Home, Boston Herald. Published: December 8, 1919. p. 13. 46. Lorraine Roses, ‘A Tale of Two Womens’ Organizations’ Boston Black History. February 22, 2006. Accessed December 1. Available: 47. John Leslie, August 1, 1956. Ornamental iron lace work at 558 and 560 Massachusetts Ave., formerly 37 Chester Square. Photographs: Film Negatives – Black and White. Accessed: November 11, 2018. Available: https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:8c97mt16w 48. Nancy C. Curtis, Black Heritage Sites: An African American Odyssey and Finder's Guide (Washington: American Library Association, 1996), 302. 49. In the mid-twentieth century, the mansion sheltered a struggling music student, Coretta Scott, who worked as a domestic assistant until her marriage to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1953. 50. Crystal M. Flemming, Lorraine E. Roses, ‘Black cultural capitalists: African-American elites and the organization of the arts in early twentieth century Boston’, Poetics 35 (2007), 374. 51. Boston Athenaeum, Reports - Boston Athenaeum (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1898), 9. 52. The LWCS distanced themselves not just from other black organisations in their vicinity, but also a concentration of speakeasies cum bordellos on Huntington Avenue and local entertainment venues of a questionable nature. Whereas, the compacted Harlem scene of New York can be seen to have used bordellos, jazz clubs, bars, and speakeasies to cultivate an innovative and shared black voice, in Boston there was no such concentration of black culture. 53. Author Unknown, ‘Governor and Wife at Formal Opening’, The Boston Herald. Published: March 20, 1920. 11. 54. President Emeritus Charles W. Elliot, Reverend Samuel M. Crothers, and William H. Lewis are but three examples. Author Unknown, ‘Members of the League of Women for Community Service’, The Boston Herald. Published: March 12, 1922. 5. 55. Author Unknown, ‘Members of the League of Women for Community Service’, The Boston Herald. Published: March 12, 1922. 5. 56. Author Unknown, ‘Soup Kitchen Remains Open at the Demand of 200 Boys’, Boston Sunday Herald. Published: June 13, 1920. B4E. 57. Maud Cuney Hare in Lorenzo Thomas Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 101. 58. No Author Attributed., ‘Negro Singer Has Won Honours: Paul Robeson, who will sing here Next Sunday, Has Had a Remarkable Record in and out of College, Boston Daily Globe. Published: March 7, 1926. P. A53. 59. Ibid. 60. Maud Cuney Hare, 'Girls Page for January'. The Youth's Companion. Volume 85, Part 1. 14. 61. Randle Sandke, Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2010). 95. 62. The Residents and Associates of the South End House, Edited by Robert Archey Woods, The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1898), 185-7. 63. The Residents and Associates of the South End House, Edited by Robert Archey Woods, The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1898), 185-7.

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64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 184-90. 67. The Residents and Associates of the South End House, Edited by Robert Archey Woods, The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1898), 184. 68. Ibid., 184-6. 69. David L. Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). 98. 70. Author Unknown, ‘Maria Baldwin Dies Suddenly’, Boston Daily Globe, Published: January 10, 1922. Page 1 71. Author Unknown, ‘Exhibition at 558 Massachusetts Avenue’, Boston Herald. Published: March 12, 1922. p. C5. 72. Ibid., p. C5 73. Author Unknown, ‘Dedicates Library to Maria Baldwin’, Boston Herald. Published: December 21, 1923. p. 14. 74. Author Unknown, 'Maria Baldwin Library Dedicated at Exercise', Boston Daily Globe. December 21, 1923. p. 7. 75. J. Lection, ‘The Athenaeum’ The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts (July to December 1862) p. 259. 76. Author Unknown, ‘Exhibition at 558 Massachusetts Avenue’, Boston Herald. Published: March 12, 1922. p. C5 77. During the 1940s and 1950s the organisation housed dozens of women at 558 Mass Ave while they attended colleges in Boston. One notable woman was Coretta Scott King, who resided at the League while attending the New England Conservatory of Music and while dating Martin Luther King Jr. 78. Ibid.

AUTHOR

CRAIG DOUGHTY In June 2017, Dr Craig Doughty completed a PhD thesis entitled ‘Constructing a history from fragments: jazz and voice in Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1919 – 1929’. This work applied an interdisciplinary methodological approach that incorporated musicology and subaltern studies. The focus was on the appropriation of jazz music produced by underrepresented blacks in Boston during the period into a form of protest dialogue. This work builds on his previous research that has focused on the social, cultural, and economic dynamics of Latin America, particularly Chile and Venezuela, and the ways in which underrepresented and oppressed peoples utilised cultural forms of expression as a means of establishing voice when conventional forms of dialogue were no longer possible. Dr Doughty's current research, entitled ‘Can the Subaltern Play’ seeks to broaden the scope of his previous research, notably his PhD thesis by focusing on jazz in Boston from 1910 to 1949. In doing so, this research provides a suitable opportunity to advance Dr Doughty’s proposed methodological approaches to historical reconstruction over a longer period,

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and in doing so ascertain to what extent the social and cultural dynamics of black Boston changed from the turn of the century to its mid-point and the causes for these changes.

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American Studies Against Itself

Michael Barton

1 I venture to say that no academic discipline has been criticized more harshly in recent years than American Studies. The objection used to be over the discipline’s lack of discipline. These days the complaint is over its lack of academic common sense. The condemnation of this “pariah of the United States higher-education establishment,” as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it in 2014, comes from both insiders and outsiders. Consider the titles of these disapproving essays: “The People’s Republic of American Studies,” Carlin Romano (2001) “Anti-American Studies,” Alan Wolfe (2003) “Believing in America,” Leo Marx (2003) “The Shame of the American Studies Association,” Gary Kulik (2013) “The Closing of the American Studies Association’s Mind,” Sharon Ann Musher (2013) “The Decline of American Studies,” Richard Pells (2016) “American Studies: A Sad Tale of Academic Decline,” Charles Kupfer (2016)

2 And now we have my colleague Simon Bronner’s studied critique, “The Death of American Studies?” (2018), published lately in this journal.

3 Unfortunately, the gathering storm is warranted. What went wrong with an academic enterprise that formerly held great promise? What went wrong is that American Studies became notorious for its leftist politics rather than respected for its innovative and positive scholarship.

4 My advisor in graduate school told me that if I behaved professionally in the classroom, my students should not be able to guess my politics. I tried to follow his advice throughout my career. But there is no mystery about the politics of the American Studies Association, which claims to be the official face of the discipline. A movement whose name once signaled serious educational reform has been weaponized by radical academics for use in the culture wars. An organization that began by probing the nature of Americanism is now implicitly anti-American. Members who earlier suggested we study diversity now study almost nothing but diversity. They cover race, class, ethnicity, identity, and gender in all its permutations, but the mainstream of

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American life is rarely touched on unless it is to be targeted. American national unity is unmentioned.

5 Prof. Bronner has provided us with an expert overview of the state of the field. His references are international as well as American, which is unusual. This is our most contemporary and experienced commentary on the state of American Studies and the ASA. I agree with his observations and complaints almost entirely, but on some points I would like to elaborate.

6 I agree with Prof. Bronner that American Studies ought to produce research that is more scientific, an approach that he and others would call “Americanistics.” My guess is that the term will be slow to catch on, and I further expect that few humanists will adopt a scientific approach to the field. And I would be surprised if many social scientists migrated to American Studies. I continue to believe that multidisciplinary approaches—using whatever methods fit the problem—can organize our research effectively. Better than that, multidisciplinary teams of researchers could work together on scholarly problems. That approach would be highly unusual in American Studies, which has typically relied on heroic intellectuals acting single-handedly. Still another approach would be to create multidisciplinary anthologies of our findings across a range of topics. The American Quarterly Bibliography Issue aimed to be that kind of publication, but higher authority shut it down. The AQ then began reprinting ASA presidential addresses, a dubious improvement. The Encyclopedia of American Studies was another effort at compiling scholarship, but that has been shut down, too. Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson’s doorstop of a book, Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (2008) is an impressive anthology that should serve American Studies well. Why not commission more such anthologies that can summarize the state of our knowledge of the USA and propose new work to be done? That would be a proper project for a reformed ASA.

7 I agree with Dr. Bronner that more ethnography would improve American Studies. A variant of ethnography is local history research, or microhistory, and a variant of that is biography, a mainstay of many disciplines. More of this kind of work should be encouraged and rewarded. We might even hope for a revival of national character research, the original mission of American Studies. The earliest work was provocative, and flawed, but the systematic data produced recently by social psychologists can transform our understanding of our typical traits and their distribution.

8 There are no villains named in Prof. Bronner’s essay, but there could be. I decline to identify them because he might have a list different from mine. In any case, the crisis in American Studies is not theoretical. It was deliberately planned and executed by academic saboteurs working for the ASA and the AQ.

9 A sense of “exhilaration” used to typify American Studies, Prof. Bronner writes. Nowadays I find exhilaration lacking at the national meetings, as they have become rallies for dissidents and pessimists, not showplaces of Whitmanesque openness. For this loss of exhilaration, I say damn their hides

10 In contrast, I have observed how Europeans take to American Studies. While I was a Fulbright professor at the University of Copenhagen, my Danish students every day proved to me their curiosity about my country. I have taken many Penn State Harrisburg students to a half-dozen American Studies conferences in Europe, and there we were always welcomed and stimulated. I have given papers on national character at more than a dozen American Studies conferences around Europe, and I had considerate

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audiences every time. From these experiences I have concluded that the Europeans’ scholarly perspective on the United States is usually a model of civility and sobriety, compared to radical Americans’ harsh portrayals of their countrymen. That is a turnaround from Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that Americans displayed an “irritating patriotism.” I challenge anyone to find any conventional patriotism in American Studies today.

11 Two incidents of American Studies in Europe I remember vividly. In Poland a young American professor was doing his best in his paper to scold his country’s foreign policy. A much older Polish professor who had more relevant experience with international relations leaned toward me and whispered, “Doesn’t he realize what he’s saying?” In Germany I was giving a paper at a conference on religion in American culture. A German businessman, I learned, had paid all of the American participants’ expenses. I approached him after the conference to thank him for his considerable kindness. He replied, “I wanted to show my gratitude for American generosity.” Those two memories, although a small sample size, lead me to wonder if American Studies might be better off in your hands than in ours.

12 ***

13 I think that an American Studies curriculum using the theories and methods of the social sciences, particularly ethnography, could be productive and attractive. With all due respect for the provocative interpretations produced by the founders of American Studies using literary and popular texts, I prefer plain-spoken social science accompanied by comprehensible quantification. At the University of Pennsylvania, formerly the home to the American Studies Association and the American Quarterly, I watched Prof. Murray Murphey work magic (perhaps the wrong word) with rigorous statistical analysis and air-tight philosophical reasoning. The scholarly apparatus required for this work can be cumbersome, but its findings are less likely to be as politicized or as unverifiable as results in the humanities have become. The application of , for example, virtually assures interpretations that will be antagonistic to America. Such theory stacks the deck, and that is illegitimate in scholarship as well as card play.

AUTHOR

MICHAEL BARTON Michael Barton, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Social Science at Penn State Harrisburg, received his Ph.D. in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. He taught at Penn State for over four decades, where he was also Director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies. His teaching and writing deal with the experiences

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