When you think of modernism, you think of Joyce, Schoenberg, Baudelaire and Picasso. You don’t think of Ralph Waldo Emerson but you should. Emerson’s writings attack the core of the Western tradition – the Aristotelian notion of dialectic, where questions revolving around polar extremes of right and wrong. Emerson used aphorisms that embodied an intermediate present and wrote sentences like “nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment.”
Emerson then is in the line of philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger who turned back to Heraclitus who built his thinking on ungrounded, primal thinking that is both ancient and modern but bypasses the bulk of Western thought. Emerson’s use of aphorisms isn’t just about a pithy saying in the moment but a method of inquiry that possesses the moment and discards it simultaneously.
Thoughts: This essay is transformational because it plants a flag for modernism with a thinker that I always saw as a great stylist of quaint 19th century thought. More than that, Emerson is depicted as modernist in a way that changes and deepens my thinking about modernism. I had always saw it as a movement breaking with the past but never thought of it as calling for an ancient, anti-Western approach and I had never thought of aphorisms as a philosophical method. I clearly need to read Emerson!
Even now Americans resist and disdain intellectuals. For good reason as we haven’t a great tradition to call our own. We have had great writers and artists but often they too have resisted intellectual traditions, showing themselves to be independent of various schools, proud, rugged individualists. Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted in 1837 to call attention to this situation in his “American Scholar” speech in which he asked for intellectual activity like writing, thinking, analyzing to be fused with American values such as independence, democracy and free speech.
But the speech did more than set out a goal, it identified a danger in the American thinking of those times in which the words used to express American values no longer reflected reality. These words lived in an unreflected bubble of their own creation that failed to advance the very values America was suppose to embody.
Thoughts: I know I am a heretic in my disdain for America in the days immediately after 9/11. Many people felt a coming together, a blurring of partisan lines but many of these same people decried the quick evaporation of that togetherness. Which did so because it rested on a flimsy foundation – the American flag, the rote repetition of, “America is the greatest country on Earth.” These sentiments sprang from an unreflected chauvinism not an embodiment of American values. If America had invoked it values during those times, it could have been to encourage a range of competing ideas that were all treated respectfully and which were nurtured so as to make sense of people who now saw America as the enemy.
Had American gone back to Emerson and Thoreau and William James to question, probe and expand their nationalistic pride, it might have resulted in a healthier, sturdier America. An America that didn’t need to invade sovereign nations to punish perpetrators who honored no such sovereignty.
Fancy pants Richard Dana spent two years at Harvard when his weakened eyesight (really?) made it difficult for him to study so he embarked a journey of self discovery by signing on to a voyage for a couple years. As a sailor he learned how to furl sails and shed his privileged past. But he was privileged and it was money that got him out of serving more than his allotted time on the ship.
His journey took him to Mexican California where he was dubious about the morality and general worth of the residents, questioning their whiteness, believing them to be shiftless and slow, willing to take from the land what it offered them rather than to build it into something monumental. Two Years before the Mast came out in 1840, eight years before the Gold Rush and yet he captures the sense of California as being the ends of the earth, the end-game of manifest destiny.
Thoughts: As a native Californian, I’m always intrigued at what people from outside the State think and say about its people. The stereotype of the flaky, vegan, cultish residents, obsessed with looks and self actualization does exist if not in quite the reductive sense of the stereotype. Dana didn’t see those people as the “white” people attracted to the State came later, they weren’t the Californios that he saw and derided.
Our Spanish heritage now more than a century and a half ago remains a strong subtext, found in the place names, the red tiles, the worship of the missions that are sprinkled along most of the California coast. Is that because Anglo culture never formed its own identity because its people were too busy tending their own self creation to worry about the collective?
Is the myth of the Alamo useful for understanding the complexity of American history? The author of this essay says the Alamo myth is unfair to Mexicans whose country Angelos invaded and it misrepresents who was left behind in the Alamo which included Tejanos, Mexicans native to Texas. The Alamo, like the myth of the cowboy, which derided the vaquero who added much of the richness of the cowboy culture, is a conquerors myth, the reminder that history’s winners write the story that endures in popular culture.
Thoughts: Although I agree with the politics of this essay, I found its discussion full of assumptions, generalizations and a failure to both explore the myth and counter-evidence. We are too believe what is written because of the wrong that was done to Mexicans in Texas rather than because of the power of the essay to make the case. My other thought is about how the power of the Alamo myth, based on the idea of the underdog whose courage and heroism in the face of certain defeat is one that obscures the real American story we don’t tell ourselves which is that we are conquerors and tramplers of other people. Maybe what disturbed us about the Iraq war was that it was a war of choice, like our wars of choice that we waged across our continent under the name of manifest destiny.
How is it that Native Americans and African Americans who are both despised as white man’s inferior came to represent such different mythologies in the American experience? William Glimore Simms a mid-19th century writer of historical fiction provides a glimpse at how this difference operated most illustratively in “The Yemasee.”
First, the Native American was seen even by the noble Indian chief Sanutee, a character in “The Yamesse” as inevitable historical losers. That while the native people were noble keepers of the wildness of the American continent, they were incapable of understanding or managing its necessary transformation into an agrarian and then industrial civilization.
Next, the book is concerned with the fear both of Indian and white slavery and the dread is that will make them black. African Americans to the extent they exist at all as characters, are seen as appreciating the benefits of civilization slavery affords taking them away from the barbarism of their native continent.
White people define the roles of both native people and African Americans from the perspective property – the natives were on the continent first and must be negotiated with, in bad faith, as it turned out in order to expand the American nation. With African Americans they were property and therefore no negotiation was necessary.
Thoughts: American is more diverse than it was in 19th century and there is much greater appreciation and sensitivity to other people. However, the concept of the “other” is still a subject of demonizing – fear, disrespect, stereotypes, paranoia and hubris. After World War II, it was the “communist” who was the same whether Russian, Cuban, Chinese or Vietnamese. He was a hypocrite bent on depriving everyone of their freedom in exchange for a gray and censored equality. Now its the “terrorist” who is so scary that we shudder at the idea they might shake the bars of their maximum security federal prisons. In all these cases, there is desire to close off any discussion of these “enemies” as people. We don’t want to understand who they are, what they want and why they might hate us in order to feel morally superior. Our guarantee of free speech is no guarantee of free thought.
Jackon’s veto of the bill to renew the Second Bank of the United States was based on his suspicions that private, moneyed interests would hold too much sway over the America’s economic future if the bank was approved. But it wasn’t so much the veto that has stirred political passions up unto this day. It was the way Jackson framed the argument, that the rich would be given too much power and were misusing government for their selfish ends. He worried that the “farmers, mechanics, and laborers” would not have a seat at this table. No wonder the Democratic party harkens back to Jackson and this idea of the being the working man’s champion.
Thoughts: I’ve never really understood whether this U.S. bank was a good thing or not. Would there still be private banks would they compete against it? How does the Federal Reserve Bank resemble or differ from this previous federal bank? Maybe it doesn’t matter because what is important is that served as a watershed when the country and its President first recognized the crucial role of labor in the American economy and the vital need to protect it.
In 1828, gold was discovered on land in Georgia. As a result, the Georgia legislature passed a law making Cherokee territory subject to Georgia law. The following year Georgia went further annulling “all laws and ordinances made by the Cherokee nation of Indians.” Chief Justice John Marshall held in Worcester v. Georgia that American Indian tribes were separate nations with their own sovereignty and the Cherokee homelands guaranteed by federal treaties invalidated Georgia’s claim of sovereignty over the Cherokee homelands.
But Georgia didn’t adhere to the Supreme Court’s ruling and the Andrew Jackson’s White House refused to enforce the decision so Indian removal went ahead despite the avowed law of the land guaranteeing native American sovereignty. Only in the 20th century as the Native American plight and sorry treatment became too much for white guilt to ignore did this ruling of sovereignty bear fruit. Alas, we have it to thank for the glittering neon of reservation casinos.
Thoughts: Never over-estimate the immediate power of the Supreme Court to overcome social, culture or economic injustices when the popular will won’t support the law. Marshall’s decision to grant sovereignty to the Cherokees was ignored then and for decades. But that’s the power of the Supreme Court: its not about now, it about the future, about the idea of the America to come
We know Jim Crow from the era after slavery where the South enact in law and custom segregation and severe restrictions on the participation of blacks in society. However, the character Jim Crow came from the minstrel world where a white man put on black face to become a slippery character whose creepy dancing and strange, threatening singing and gesticulating made him a magnetic figure to blacks and a nightmare to whites.
Jim Crow entered literature in the form of gingerbread cookies in Hawthorne and in a famous shaving scene in Melville. ”Jump Jim Crow” was a way to name political instability and an image that makes sense as one you would want to reign in, to cage and control.
Thoughts: First, this essay is critically important in understanding the mythology of the black male in American society and yet the writing while engaging is often opaque and frustrating. Tell me what this means for example: “To act Jim Crow was to knot together extand strands of song and sass, dance and dialect that excited and merged with those ideas of fraternity lurking in Atlantic performance traditions for more than a century.” This is far too academic in tone to conjure up an image which from the start of the sentence, “act Jim Crow” seems to be the goal.
Worse, our understanding of Jim Crow, to the extent white Americans have one is of the Jim Crow laws and that doesn’t even get addressed so we have to guess to the relationship between this character and the laws. My guess is that Mr. Lhamon finds the subject so slippery and loaded that its better to hint rather than confront the tangle issues of race, sexuality and power that Jim Crow evokes.
David Walker was a free born black man born in 1796 and in his travels around the South, he learned a thing or two about slavery. The result of his education was his notorious publication “Appeal” which stated that blacks had a duty to defy their oppressors and use violence if necessary. The Appeal didn’t stop there but insisted that black ignorance was a critical reason why black hadn’t been able to unify in their resistance to white oppression. On top of that, the Appeal uncovered the way white Christians perpetuated the system of slavery and Mr. Walker exposed the plan to remove free blacks back to African would only make it harder for the slaves to be freed.
Thoughts: With Pat Robertson’s comments about blacks in Haiti making a deal with the devil in their slave revolt that resulted in their 200 years of bad luck, its clear that successful revolt scared white people plenty. Its difficult to defend violence and particularly brutal killing which happened in Haiti. However, if you are denied your basic humanity, sold into slavery, unable to ever be free and your family is broken apart and you given a new name, its hard to see how someone would refuse any means necessary to become free. Wasn’t that what the American revolution was about?
Even more, how can America take pride in its freedom when it had an economic system that structurally denied millions freedom? Isn’t there an argument to be made that where there is slavery for some, there can be no freedom for all.
In 1821, Sequoyah, the Cherokee artist and artisan demonstrated his new writing system containing eighty-six characters that represented a particular sound in the complex Cherokee language to Cherokee leaders. Sequoyah’s syllabary was used by Cherokees for record keeping, preserving information about traditional medicine and general communication. Sequoyah was also celebrated beyond his tribe as a native genius.
This was significant because this was the time of the U.S. government’s policy of Removal, forcibly moving natives tribes beyond the Mississippi. Here was this highly educated Cherokee who created a written language for his people and the government was trying to categorize native people as incapable of such civilizing accomplishments.
Thoughts: What is the difference between White America’s attitude towards native people and African Americans? Clearly native people had to be negotiated with which wasn’t true with African Americans. Was that a product of native people being here first? The fact that they had a recognizable culture? Or simply that not being slaves they automatically weren’t stripped of their dignity. What about the Christian strand of abolitionism that understood slavery was wrong even if it could quite confront what to do with black people? Did they have no compunction about native people because they weren’t slaves?