Results for 20th Century

The Historical Roots of the Evangelical Adoption Boom

October 10, 2013
Arissa H. Oh

 International adoption is in the news almost daily, but its numbers are in decline and the tone of the conversation around it has darkened. Celebrity adoptions and heartwarming stories of orphans finding "forever families" in the U.S. have given way to more skeptical coverage that emphasizes the underside of international adoption: the profit motive that leads to illicit practices and the lack of regulation and oversight in a vast system that shuffles children around the world.

The American evangelical crusade for international adoption has received particularly sustained attention. Since the middle of the last decade, evangelical churches and organizations have encouraged their members to adopt children from abroad, often providing funds to help with the high costs. They have promoted a culture of adoption by publicizing a “global orphan crisis,” a disputed concept in itself. Children—many not actually orphans—are adopted hastily by well-intentioned but ill-prepared parents. Horror stories of fraud and abuse abound.

Much of this is not new. International adoption did not begin in the 1990s, or even in the 1980s. Americans began adopting children from abroad at the end of World War II, mainly from places with significant U.S. troop presences, like Germany and Japan. Systematic international adoption began in Korea after the Korean War (1950-1953) as a way to remove mixed-race “GI babies,” the children born of Korean women and foreign military personnel. It quickly grew to include non-mixed-race Korean children, and then spread to other developing countries: most notably Vietnam in the 1960s, Colombia in the 1970s, Guatemala and India in the 1980s, and China, Romania, and Russia in the 1990s.
   
Nor have evangelicals become focused on international adoption only in the last several years. A central reason why adoption from Korea became systematized was the intervention of American evangelicals. They publicized the plight of Korean children in need of rescue, lobbied Congress for the changes in immigration laws that made these adoptions possible, and promoted the practice among their friends, churches, and communities. American evangelicals considered international adoption a form of missionary work long before the megachurch leaders of the 21st century began to cultivate an adoption boom.

The current reporting on evangelical adoption overlooks the importance of race in international adoption. The vast majority of these adoptions involve white parents and non-white children. In the 1970s, as Americans faced a white baby “famine” at home, a hierarchy of desirability became firmly established in which non-white children from abroad were preferable to African-American children. These children were not white, but they weren’t black either. That they could be rescued from poverty and backwardness heightened their sentimental appeal. Today, Americans cross the color line more readily to adopt black children from African countries. Their blackness is mitigated by their perceived exoticism and victimhood.

Consumerism and humanitarianism have always been uncomfortably entangled in both domestic and international adoption. Regardless of their reasons for adopting, would-be adopters have had to venture into the marketplace in order to obtain a child. Americans long ago declared in principle that children cannot be assigned a market value, but adoptive parents, especially those adopting internationally, engage in what looks like consumerist behavior: selecting children priced according to race, sex, age, disabilities, and country of origin.

These market dynamics explain why the corruption that has captured the attention of many journalists today is not new. Baby-hunting, trafficking, and stealing; document forgery; unclear relinquishments; coercion of birth parents (usually mothers); substituting one child for another—all of these practices have shadowed international adoption since it began. The unintended consequences of international adoption also follow the practice wherever it goes, especially the vicious cycle of orphanage expansion and child abandonment, and foreign governments’ use of international adoption as a substitute for domestic child and social welfare.

Reforms to make international adoption more ethical are decades overdue. The process needs to be more stringent, uniform, and transparent. Americans also need to rethink its purpose. Should international adoption be about finding families for children, or children for families? This all-important question lies at the troubled heart of international adoption, and it demands an answer from all Americans, not just evangelicals.

Arissa Oh is an assistant professor in the history department at Boston College, where she teaches classes on race, gender, and immigration in 20th-century U.S. history. She is in the process of publishing her first book, Into the Arms of America: The Korean Origins of International Adoption.







The Historical Roots of the Evangelical Adoption Boom The Historical Roots of the Evangelical Adoption Boom Reviewed by Joseph Landis on October 10, 2013 Rating: 5

September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments

September 17, 2013
Randall Stephens

In the coming weeks Historically Speaking subscribers will receive the latest issue.  In it we have essays on American political history and reform (John Frederick Martin and F. S.
Naiden), objectivity in the study of history (Judith Walzer Leavitt), Atlantic World history (Trevor Burnard), photography and the Great War (Von Hardesty), an obituary of Pauline Maier (Chris Beneke), and Evangelical Catholicism (Mark Edwards).  Alongside those are interviews with scholars concerning American religious history (Larry Eskridge), and the critical years of 1979 (Christian Caryl) and 1913 (Charles Emmerson).

The September issue also includes James M. Banner's fascinating essay "The Almost Nonexistent History of Academic Departments."  Writes Banner: "Department histories are almost nowhere to be found."  Why is that so?  Says Banner:

The history of education has never found a strong place in history departments. Those aspiring historians seeking entry to graduate programs, even those with a nascent interest in the history of education, have not been without good sense in defining their interests to graduate program admissions committees as being, say, in the social history of ideas if they are interested in academic culture or, say, in the history of the social composition of academic faculties or student cohorts if they have a general interest in academic institutions. Those of their mentors who might wish it were otherwise, who would like to see students pursue the history of academic departments—and there are a few, even if very few, of these—have found it a losing game to try to attract their students to such subjects. It is thus a distinctive and hardy student who proposes to undertake a dissertation on the history of a university department in any discipline.

Two other forces are at work against the pursuit of departmental histories. One is the simple fact that institutions do not have memories; only their members and employees do. If faculty members fail to take an interest in their histories, academic departments are not likely to be the subject of institutional histories. The histories of departments are carried within their members’ memories, not within the institutions themselves; once their members resign or retire, the history they embody leaves the department with them. Only concerted efforts to capture and preserve those memories can avail.

But a second reality working against department histories is the disposition of most faculty members toward their own departments and colleagues. Academics are practiced in, sometimes champions of, gossip. They nourish themselves on intramural disputes, on information about their colleagues, on battles over appointments. That is generally all to the good, for if kept within collegial bounds, gossip and inside information are constituent parts of the equilibrating mechanisms of all institutions. But in this case, private knowledge gained and imparted through gossip stands in for formal historical knowledge and is not recorded or caught on paper or tape as a resource for formal future histories unless it happens to be set down in personal correspondence or diaries that find themselves into library collections. If not, that knowledge is allowed to vanish into air and thus be of no use to future historians. . . .

Read more by subscribing to the print issue or by logging on to Project Muse.
September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 17, 2013 Rating: 5

Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter

August 28, 2013
Randall Stephens

Today is the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington "For Jobs and Freedom." So, to continue with the theme of Monday's post--concerning history/historians, activism, and civil rights--I excerpt below part of Sheldon Hackney's 2009 essay in Historically Speaking, "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter."

Here Hackney discusses C. Vann Woodward's political outlook, civil rights work, and the parameters of dissent in the 1960s.

Hackney is the Boies Professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993) and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-1997). He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (Transaction Publishers, 2005):

One of the most striking things about the young C. Vann Woodward was his affinity with dissent. It was not just his authorship of Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, the book that launched his academic career in 1938, nor the fact that he approached W. E. B. DuBois earlier with hopes of writing about him, nor his toying with the notion of following his biography of Watson with one of Eugene Debs. Those are important indicators, but it is even more interesting that in every situation he found himself in during his early years, he gravitated toward the most progressive people and places–exploring Harlem when he was a Masters student at Columbia in 1931-32, getting involved in the Angelo Herndon Defense Committee when he was back in Atlanta teaching at Georgia Tech, hanging out at that den of left-wing conspirators, Ab's Book Store in Chapel Hill, when he was working on his Ph.D. and the Watson biography. He was sympathetic to the union organizing movement among cotton mill workers in North Carolina and met Glenn McLeod, who became his wife, because of those pro-union activities. As a young man, he made two trips to Europe, visiting the Soviet Union on both of them, revealing at least a curiosity about communism. When he was teaching at Scripps College, 1940-43, he helped defend a faculty colleague who was under attack for suspected fascist sympathies, an early indication of his devotion to free speech on campus. He was always where the political action was. . . .

As chairman of the program committee of the Southern Historical Association in 1949, he enlisted John Hope Franklin in a successful plot to integrate the program of the Southern Historical Association meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia. Then, in 1952, when Woodward was the president of the SHA, he went to great lengths to integrate the meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. Franklin reports that Woodward did not seem worried or nervous about these radical departures from past practices; he handled all questions and challenges with humor. He seemed to enjoy it. (John Hope Franklin interview with Sheldon Hackney, August 27, 2006. Audiotape in author's possession.)

Shortly after those signal events, Woodward and Franklin were enlisted to provide historical advice and tutoring for Thurgood Marshall and his team of lawyers who were bringing the school desegregation cases to the Supreme Court. The revolutionary result, the Brown decision, was announced May 17, 1954. That fall, Woodward gave the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia, which in 1955 became the book,
The Selma to Montgomery march,
Life magazine, March 19, 1965.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow. With Professor Woodward standing prominently in the audience at the end of the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., from the steps of the Alabama Capitol, described The Strange Career of Jim Crow as "the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement." (C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History [Louisiana State University Press, 1986], 92.) This was hyperbole, to be sure, but Woodward was there, where every good radical belonged.

That was the apogee of the civil rights movement, and of New Deal liberalism in general. The next year, Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and then announced the new slogan of "Black Power" on the continuation of James Meredith's "March Against Fear" through Mississippi in 1966. The antiwar movement soon shifted from "protest to resistance." The New Left dreamed aloud of revolution. All of these leftward lurches were met with disapproval among the public, easing the way for the rise of the New Right, whose organizational and intellectual infrastructure had been growing for more than a decade. Everything changed.

We see this shift dramatically in the life of C. Vann Woodward. When SNCC approached him in August 1966 to join a distinguished group of intellectuals in sponsoring the SNCC Faculty Fund, he demurred:

If I sponsor the SNCC Faculty Fund, I shall be sponsoring a split in the Civil Rights Movement, a split not only between organizations and leaders, but between races within the movement. You force me to choose between Stokely Carmichael on the one hand and A. Philip Randolph and Martin King on the other. By taking one side I oppose the other. I cannot consistently support both. If I let you use my name in this drive, I should have to resign a board of Randolph's and one of King's on which I serve. I cannot do that. I respect both men and their work too much and would not do anything to embarrass or discredit their leadership. If you compel me to choose, I will have to choose their way instead of Carmichael's. I would prefer not to turn my back on any part of the movement, but you leave me no choice. (C. Vann Woodward to Miss Linda Moses of SNCC, August 10, 1966. C. Vann Woodward Papers, Box 52, Folder 623, Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. Hereafter cited as CVW Papers.)

When Staughton Lynd accused Yale of firing him because of his antiwar activities and his trip in December 1965 and January 1966 to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, a trip organized through the good offices of the American communist, Herbert Aptheker, Woodward defended Yale. . . . (Read more at Project Muse.)
Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 28, 2013 Rating: 5

The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington

August 25, 2013
Randall Stephens

From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.
Across the US and around the globe people are marking the 50th anniversary of the "Jobs and Freedom" march on Washington, D.C.  Roughly 200,000 men and women, young and old, black and white gathered to demand justice and equality on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. 

Among the throng who came together around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial were a collection of historians. (How interesting to think how this event so shaped the writing of those in attendance and many more who witnessed it from afar or learned of it years later.)  Some were soon-to-be historians or historians-in-training from the University of Maryland, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, UVA, George Washington, and others. Among the many in attendance were Clayborne Carson, Dorothy Drinkard-Hawkshawe, and Robert Zieger. 

From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.
Zieger, who passed away this year, was Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Florida. He was a remarkable historian, mentor, and all-around mensch.  (Read Paul Ortiz's commemoration here on the blog.)  One of Zieger's last works was For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007). Zieger wrote an essay about his experience of researching and writing the book in Historically Speaking. Here he also reflected on that day in August 1963 in D.C. Here's a brief excerpt from "Jobs and Freedom," Historically Speaking (May/June 2008):

Shortly after I had begun active work on [For Jobs and Freedom], historian John Bracey visited [the University of Florida] campus and gave a fascinating talk to students about the state of black history at the time he began graduate school at Northwestern in the early 1960s. It soon became apparent that Bracey and I were of a similar age. He recounted that in the initial syllabus for his 19th-century U.S. history seminar, there were no works by black scholars or, apart from works that dealt with slavery as a political problem, about the black experience in antebellum America. Bracey and a colleague, with the complete support of an abashed seminar director, soon rectified the omission. Bracey told this story as a way of indicating to his undergraduate student audience how far black history and race history had traveled in the four decades since.

Bracey’s experience resonated with mine, though in a different key. My advisor, Horace Samuel Merrill, and his wife, Marion Galbraith Merrill, were in those days civil rights activists in the suburban Washington, D.C., area where the University of Maryland is located. Even so, however, we read little if any black history or race history in our 20th century seminar. To be sure, some of Sam’s students, notably Thomas Cripps, were beginning to explore themes in black history. And it was certainly true that as the civil rights movement hit its high-water mark in those years, I joined my graduate student colleagues in supporting, and sometimes even in participating in it. Still, it took me far too long to understand the centrality of race to the American historical experience and to begin to incorporate the theme of race and labor into my own work.

I like to think, though, that in some subterranean precincts of my young historian’s mind the seeds of the book I would write in my late sixties were beginning to germinate. At any rate, that’s the way it appeared to me when it came time to write the introduction to For Jobs and Freedom. I chose as my starting point the fact that while I was at the August 1963 march on Washington, I left during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech:

"I still have a hard time confessing that I didn’t stay for Dr. King’s speech. As far as I was concerned, civil rights was a matter of politics and morality, not one of religion. Anyway, I had parked a long way off, it was getting late, and I had to pick up my wife at the Prince Georges County bank where she worked. So I threaded my way back through the throng lining the reflecting pool, across the Washington Monument grounds, up along Pennsylvania Avenue, the speakers’ voices growing fainter. Since I had parked on one of the side streets off East Capitol St. behind the Library of Congress (my normal haunts in those dissertation writing days), I made my way through the Capitol grounds.
From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.

It did occur to me that I should find some souvenir of the March; something to prove to my progeny and to the students to whom I planned one day to teach U.S. History that I Was There. The discarded bright orange-and-black placard lying behind a low hedge would do the trick, even if it did have a slight tear. “The UAW Says Jobs and Freedom for Every American,” it read. Since my ambition was to be a labor historian, it seemed to fill the bill perfectly.

But I will confess that I hadn’t really thought much about the “Jobs” part. Civil rights was about public accommodations, voting rights, and schools. Yes, certainly, demonstrators in southern towns and cities had demanded employment in the stores and shops. But it was the classrooms, the voting booths, and the hotels and restaurants that made the biggest headlines. Of course, an instant’s reflection affirmed, the placard was dead right: without jobs, freedom was a coin of limited value. Jobs were the modern equivalent of the Reconstruction Era’s forty acres and a mule—and we all know what happened when the freedmen were denied title to the land they and their forebears had worked for generations. Yes, it was true: all this was indeed about jobs and freedom."
The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 25, 2013 Rating: 5

From Roosevelt to Roosevelt

August 20, 2013
Jonathan Rees

As a good liberal, I’ve always claimed that my favorite President ever is/was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  After all, his legacy STILL defines what liberalism means and what government does down to this day.  However, as I’ve gotten older, my opinion of Franklin Roosevelt has grown steadily worse.  First, there’s how he treated Eleanor.  Second, there’s the fact that the New Deal didn’t go further.  Lastly, like making batches of wine, some bits of the New Deal have aged better than others.

As a historian, I’ve been drawn to an entirely different, somewhat less liberal President—Franklin Roosevelt’s distant relation, Theodore.  Sure, there’s the whole warmonger thing.  That’s not too appealing.  And as a liberal, Teddy’s presidency was not nearly as charged as his unsuccessful campaign’s platform in 1912.  But as a personality, Teddy Roosevelt has every other President beaten hands down (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, but I’d still give the nod to Teddy there by a smidge).

Let’s look at the biographies.  When I read biographies, the part I usually hate comes right the beginning.  How many historical figures are more interesting in their youth than they are when they’re adults?  If you’ve ever read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback you’ll know he stopped that book in Roosevelt’s early twenties and it still made me cry.  (I’m not telling why if you don’t already know.  You should read the book.)  I’m not a huge fan of Edmund Morris’ three-part TR biography, but unlike say Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson, where the research is the best trait it’s Morris’ subject that makes all three of those books worth reading.

Now, there’s even a subgenre of books that cover only short periods of Teddy’s life.  Candace Millard’s River of Doubt is one of the best books that I’ve ever read, and it only spans a very short period of the man’s life AFTER he left office as President, namely his trip to Brazil.  Other than John Quincy Adams, which President deserves a book-length treatment for any part of his post-presidential career?  A few months ago, I read Richard Zacks’ Island of Vice.  The book only covers TR’s two years as New York City’s Police Commissioner, but it’s absolutely superb—not just because of the
Robin Williams as TR in Night at the Museum (2006)
vice, but because the prude who wanted to stop it was just so darned interesting.  I hope nobody does the inevitable “TR in the Badlands” book before I can get around to it, because I want a good excuse to visit Harvard and rummage through his papers someday.  They must be marvelous to read.

While I think I’m still closer to FDR politically, Theodore Roosevelt would definitely now be my answer to the old chestnut, “Which historical figure would you like to eat dinner with if you had the chance?”  Barring that, he’s also the President whose biography I’d most like to see come to the screen.  Even now, I’d pick Robin Williams in “Night at the Museum” over Bill Murray in “Hyde Park on Hudson” any day of the week.  Williams can be serious and funny at the same time, while Murray just looks uncomfortable.
From Roosevelt to Roosevelt From Roosevelt to Roosevelt Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 20, 2013 Rating: 5

The Greatest Migration of All

May 14, 2013
Eric B. Schultz

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from
A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.
World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

Still, there has been another kind of Great Migration in America, less dramatic, but in some ways the steadiest and perhaps most influential. It also has great bearing upon one of today’s hottest political issues, immigration policy, and helps explain why Silicon Valley is so vested in the bill currently making its way through Congress.

"The Puritan Migration to America, 1620-1640."
From Bedford/St. Martin's MapCentral.
Brooke Hindle (1918-2001) was the historian emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History when he, along with (current) Brown University’s Steven Lubar, authored Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860. It’s a beautiful book that emphasizes the material aspects of innovation (later reinforced in Hindle’s excellent Emulation and Innovation). It also answers in a very simple way a very profound question: How did a nation of farmers stage their own Industrial Revolution and by 1851 stun the world with their technological prowess at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition?

One answer, of course, is theft and industrial espionage. If good ideas can be stolen and copied, from Samuel Slater’s work in duplicating an Arkwright-type spinning factory at Pawtucket, to Francis Cabot Lowell’s study of English power looms, then revolution is possible. Indeed, even Eli Whitney—who all good Americans know invented the cotton gin—relied upon a millennium of global cotton gin technology (and not very well, Angela Lakwete’s Inventing the Cotton Gin tells us). One wonders if the talk in 19th-century Parliament about Americans wasn’t roughly akin to that of today’s U.S government and its recent indictment of China’s military for stealing industrial technology.

A second answer is that Jefferson’s virtuous farmer also just happened to be conversant with machines of all kinds; a healthy farm required that cams, ratchets, escapements, pistons, and even (or especially!) whiskey stills be in good working order. Lubar and Hindle quote one New Jersey farmer-tavern keeper, who told an astounded visitor not long after the Revolution, “I am a mover, a shoemaker, furrier, wheelwright, farmer, gardener, and when it can’t be helped, a soldier. I make my bread, brew my beer, kill my pigs; I grind my axes and knives; I built those stalls and that shed there; I am barber, leech, and doctor.” 

Finally—and here’s the Great Migration aspect—America (with a few notable decades excepted) has long been a welcome destination for skilled artisans. Dutch and Polish glassworkers, Italian silk reelers, and German sawyers arrived in Jamestown, the authors tell us, at the invitation of the Virginia Company. England, itself a destination for German miners, Flemish weavers, and French glassworkers and horologists, in turn transferred those technologies to America as skilled artisans crossed the Atlantic.

As early as 1754, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a pumped and piped water supply courtesy of Moravian Germans. The famous Pennsylvania rifle and Conestoga wagon evolved from German prototypes. The sawmill, so important to America’s growth, was brought by artisans from Hamburg. England passed along navigational and mathematical instruments, clockmaking, gunnery, and coal-fuel industries. In the 1830s and 1840s when the steam engine pushed the geographic center of industry from New England to Pennsylvania, it was English, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish miners and ironworkers who brought their skills to bear. “The leading cities—Philadelphia, Boston, and New York—received a continuing stream of artisans,” Hindle and Lubar write, “most of them from London, quickly making available the skills and newer developments of the British metropolis.”
Occupational portrait of a skilled worker,
ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

There seems more than a casual relationship between the fact that, from 1824 to 1831, more than 1,000 Englishmen classifying themselves as “machinists” immigrated to the United States, and by 1860 American machinists were among the best in the world.

Like a modern CEO warning his engineers that they will surely fail if they adopt a “not invented here” mentality, George Washington told his countryman in his first address to Congress that “the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad” could be as valuable as those created by the “skill and genius” of Americans. Those kinds of “foreign entanglements” were ones that the Commander in Chief appeared to welcome.

While Hindle and Lubar focus on cutting edge technology, we also know that sometimes the sort of “artisan talent” that migrated to America came in the form of incredible persistence and sheer ambition. In The Maritime History of Massachusetts, Samuel Eliot Morison tells us that conditions on whaling vessels became so abysmal that American citizens refused to serve; this left opportunity for “Kanakas, Tongatabooras, Filipinos, and even Fiji cannibals like Melville’s hero Queequeg” to make their way in America. By taking jobs that Americans would not, these hearty immigrants supported an enormously profitable global trade and enriched their adopted country.

It’s a powerful historical reminder that this Great Migration of skills that advanced America’s innovation economy over the last 300 years sprang from both the most advantaged and the least advantaged immigrant groups.

Once again we are embroiled in a great debate about immigration. (For two sides of the coin, see Howie Carr’s piece here and David Brooks’ here.) I don’t pretend to know the best policy, nor do I suggest that three centuries of this Great Migration of talent and technology should be the only thing considered in the debate. I just hope, given the impact of this extraordinary gift, that it is at least one of the factors considered by those who might otherwise close our borders.
The Greatest Migration of All The Greatest Migration of All Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 14, 2013 Rating: 5

The Role of Money and Timing in Culture: The CIA and Abstract Expressionism

April 30, 2013
Heather Cox Richardson

I have heard talk of the exportation of modern American art during the Cold War as a means of proselytizing, but I’d never considered the mechanics of that propaganda. It seemed to me a wing of art theory, and while that’s a subject that always entertains me, it’s something for which I have very little brain space during the school year.
From Life magazine, August 8, 1949.

A recent article by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Independent explains exactly how the CIA promoted American abstract expressionism worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. Their goal was to highlight the openness and experimentation possible in America’s capitalist system, contrasting it with the rigid conformity of state-censored socialist realism (some of which, to my Philistinic eye, seems worth looking at even if Soviet state officials thought so, too.) At first, the CIA tried to promote work by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko at home. Quickly, though, abstract expressionism ran into the conformism of the 1950s. Even President Truman announced: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.”

So CIA operatives set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which salted art magazines praising abstract expressionism and sponsored exhibitions that toured European cities. They worked closely with Nelson Rockefeller, president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (which his mother had founded), to showcase “free enterprise painting.” When museums eager to show the new art could not afford the cost of exhibitions, the CIA tapped American millionaires as ostensible sponsors, then provided the necessary money from government coffers. After World War II, abstract expressionism became the symbol of modern America.

This story opens many fascinating avenues for historical exploration. It also touches on a subject dear to my heart and the hearts of intellectual historians everywhere: the relationship between art and money. Today we recognize abstract expressionism as one of the great cultural developments in history. And yet, the CIA stepped in to underwrite it after one congressman called it “trash.” Would Motherwell and Pollock—both of whose works I find mesmerizing—have become Motherwelland Pollock without a propaganda campaign on their behalf? Would they have had to quit experimenting and start painting advertisements instead? What might have taken over the cultural future in that case?

How much is cultural significance dependent on being in the right place at the right time? Everyone knows that Renaissance masters had patrons, but how much have things changed? Patti Smith’s Just Kids suggests that Robert Mapplethorpe’s fame was underwritten by his wealthy mentor and partner. The Timoney Group has mapped forty years of Bruce Springsteen’s tours and made the case that his access to huge audiences in New Jersey and New York determined his meteoric rise. Would Mapplethorpe have become Mapplethorpe if he had not attracted a rich patron? Would Bruce Springsteen have been The Boss if he had grown up in Nebraska?

It seems to me that the question of cultural significance and money remains a crucial one for study.
The Role of Money and Timing in Culture: The CIA and Abstract Expressionism The Role of Money and Timing in Culture: The CIA and Abstract Expressionism Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 30, 2013 Rating: 5

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42

April 22, 2013
Chris Beneke

In a famous photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.*

Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense  and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ: “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century. 

There’s no getting around the fact that the latest retelling of Robinson’s epic first season, Brian Helgeland’s film 42, succumbs to Hollywood sentimentality. It’s certainly not a great film, arguably not a good film, and definitely not a subtle one. It aims at a high-level of verisimilitude and mostly achieves it, but too often at the expense of dramatic effect and historical significance. The awkward conflation of events (Dodger scout Clyde Sukeforth appears to apparate, Harry Potter-style, into a Missouri gas station where Robinson has just negotiated his way into a segregated bathroom) and a syrupy musical backdrop (including an Olympian trumpet fanfare to accompany one of Robinson’s exultant trots to home plate) will surely disappoint viewers who were lured by the gritty, thumping Jay-Z-scored trailer.
Yet critics like the perpetually outraged Dave Zirin who see here nothing more here than a pious melodrama that idolizes a cigar-chomping, penurious white man (played with gruff, endearing self-righteousness by Harrison Ford) and an overly deferential, assimilating black man (played arrestingly by a stoic Chadwick Boseman), will miss something themselves.

Among other things, they will miss the fact that the script for the enterprise of baseball integration was originally conceived by Rickey and originally dramatized by Robinson. The plan this pair executed was both conspicuously Lincolnian and unapologetically Christian. It required Rickey’s pragmatic liberal management, which proceeded in measured strides, and the transcendent suffering of Robinson, who sacrificed for the larger good of racial redemption. Rickey tempered expectations while moving ahead resolutely, shaping an environment that allowed Robinson enough space to develop as a player without depriving white fans and players of the time they needed to adapt as human beings. Robinson endured uncomplainingly and then succeeded spectacularly in a heroic combination of personal restraint and athletic brilliance.

These unmistakable Lincolnian and Christian themes may elude progressive critics who desperately want to see broad-based social movements in action against institutionalized racism. Eric Foner’s influential critique of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln—that it ignores the work done “at all levels of society, including the efforts of social movements to change public sentiment and of [African Americans] themselves to acquire freedom”—has already been leveled against 42. It is demonstrably true that baseball integration was the product of larger forces which Rickey capitalized upon. And 42 does elide the political pressures that were mounting in Harlem and Washington D.C., while slighting the work of civil rights activists such as Wendell Smith.**

But 42’s protagonists, Robinson and Rickey, really did matter. The defining historical role they played may be gauged by remembering that Rickey originally considered signing a number of other exceptional African-American ball players, several of whom possessed baseball potential surpassing Robinson’s. But Rickey saw something else in Robinson that exceeded his ability to play baseball, something intimately related to Robinson’s Methodist faith. Helgelend briefly evokes that other thing when he has Ford utter one of the film’s better lines, expressed with Lincolnesque economy and wit: “Robinson’s a Methodist. I’m a Methodist. God’s a Methodist! We can’t go wrong.” A teetotaler who neither smoked nor womanized, with a well-established commitment to racial justice and Christianity, Robinson was precisely the person Rickey wanted for the job. The fact that he had Hall-of-Fame baseball talent also helped. After all, Rickey, the dogged pragmatist, intended to win on the ball diamond as well as in the contemporary moral universe.
Poster from the 1950 Jackie Robinson Story. See full film here.

Robinson repaid Rickey’s faith with humble Christian expressions and herculean acts of self-control. The things Robinson refrained from saying during his witheringly difficult rookie season often made the difference. He would eventually have plenty to say about his experiences and about civil rights, but in these early years he deployed his words carefully, sticking to Rickey’s script and gaining tens of thousands of admirers in the process. After his first, harrowing game in the majors, Robinson told an inquiring reporter that he’d thanked God the night before, adding that he belonged to a Methodist church in Pasadena and had taught Sunday school. “[T]hey gave me the bad little boys,” Robinson recalled, “and I liked it.” Robinson also repaid Rickey’s Lincolnian aspirations by suggesting in his autobiography that while Rickey’s hero, “Mr. Lincoln,” had ended the institution of slavery, that institution had survived into the twentieth century in the form of segregation and discrimination. With Robinson’s entry into major league baseball, the second emancipation commenced.

Like Lincoln in the nineteenth century, Rickey and Robinson drew on untapped reservoirs of decency and inchoate conceptions of fair play among their fellow Americans. They demonstrated, more than a decade before Martin Luther King, Jr., that the perpetrators of injustice in a democracy may be worn down by dignified and well-publicized suffering. 

If 42 neglects the bigger picture, if it privileges a couple of extraordinary individuals at the expense of the collective movements that enabled them to do their work, it also reminds us of the good that morally grounded pragmatists can accomplish.

___________________

* The signing took place on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday. In another staged photo, only Lincoln’s portrait hangs above Rickey, the picture of Rickey’s daughters and manager Leo Durocher having been removed, though you can still see the nail that may have held Durocher’s photo. Rickey, who claimed to have read every biography of Lincoln, was sometimes called the “Second Great Emancipator.” 
 
** Smith, played by Andre Holland has a large supporting role in the film, but we don’t see the behind-the-scenes campaign for desegregation in which he had been engaged for several years. 

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42 The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42 Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 22, 2013 Rating: 5

The Long Career of Immigration Control in America

April 01, 2013
Hidetaka Hirota

A detail of Carol M. Highsmith's aerial view of the Ellis
Island immigration station. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.
The recent publication of books on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in California—Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford University Press, 2010)—reminds us of aspects of the American immigration experience that cannot be overlooked.

At these landing stations immigrants were inspected and often detained under the provisions of federal immigration law. Those of undesirable character, such as paupers, people “likely to become a public charge,” and “feeble-minded persons,” were denied landing and ordered to return to their countries of origin. To Chinese immigrants, a separate set of exclusion and deportation laws applied between 1882 and 1943. 

Where did these federal restriction laws come from? While episodes of immigration control at the federally run landing stations might sound familiar to people interested in United States history, immigration policy before Ellis Island and Angel Island is not so well known, even to American historians.

Some of the roots of American immigration control can be traced back to earlier immigration laws in seaboard states. Since the 18th century, coastal states adopted policies for preventing the landing of destitute passengers and foreign paupers. While New York and Massachusetts were most successful in institutionalizing immigrant exclusion (denial of admission), the Bay State went further by implementing policies for deporting immigrant paupers already in the state. These state policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law that developed from the late 19th century onward.

As important as the succession of law from state to federal levels was how state officials enforced immigration control. In Massachusetts, for example, officials made little distinction between noncitizens and naturalized citizens in deporting Irish immigrant paupers. Immigrants were also deported without necessary court warrants, thus illegally. In criticizing the manner of removal in the state, a Boston newspaper declared in 1855 that humans were being sent from Massachusetts to the other side of the Atlantic with less formality and documentation than “the sending of a tub of butter, or a barrel of apples, from Fitchburg to Boston.”

The deportation of citizens, the coercive treatment of undesirable foreigners, and the inhumanity associated with removal proceedings all characterized the implementation of later federal immigration law, especially when it came to Asians and Mexicans.

Hidetaka Hirota is a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College. He is the author of “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99 (March 2013), winner of the 2012 Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award.
The Long Career of Immigration Control in America The Long Career of Immigration Control in America Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 01, 2013 Rating: 5

“If We Must Die,” A Poem We All Should Know

March 12, 2013
Heather Cox Richardson

Claude McKay. Courtesy of the
Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Recently, I found myself telling history students which poems they must know as part of their rock-bottom basic understanding of American history. There is Anne Bradstreet’s “Epitaph for her Mother," exploring what it meant to be a good woman in colonial America; Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in theDooryard Bloom’d," linking Lincoln’s assassination to the natural world; and Claude McKay’s 1919 “If We Must Die."
  
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

McKay penned his famous lines after riots in the summer of 1919 left dozens dead and thousands homeless. In Chicago at the end of July, when a black boy drifted toward a whites-only beach, white youths stoned him to death. Ten bloody days later, 38 people were dead and more than 500 wounded. Riots in Nebraska, Texas, and across the South continued to claim American lives.

“If We Must Die” was a howl of resistance, but it also marked the rise of a new American cultural movement. In the North’s new black ghettos, created as African Americans left the South to work in the industries that fed World War I, culture thrived. Jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington experimented with new rhythms and keys; writers like Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston celebrated the black experience as a human experience, rejecting old stereotypes to make fictional black characters realistic.

McKay’s poem is a work of art that reflects both an era and a revolution. It belongs in everyone’s lexicon.
“If We Must Die,” A Poem We All Should Know “If We Must Die,” A Poem We All Should Know Reviewed by Joseph Landis on March 12, 2013 Rating: 5
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