July 8, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “. . . in cold print, the lyrics of many of the songs look appalling. Then again, the lyrics of ‘Mama Look Sharp’ aren’t much when read on screen, without the music, and neither, for that matter, are the lyrics to Mozart and Da Ponte’s ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro’ or ‘Piú docile io sono, when compared with their power when sung. I have seen Beaumarchais, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Kenneth Clark all credited with the remark that ‘what is too silly to be said can still be sung,’ and it is true.” Let me hasten to the defense of the art of lyric writing in general, without specifically referring to the work of either Sherman Edwards or Lorenzo Da Ponte. I never saw 1776, and my grasp of Italian is limited to ordering dinner in Italian restaurants. Lyrics when read, divorced from the music, often seem banal. But that is a bit like judging a painting from a black and white photograph of it. Lyrics, after all, are written to be sung, and that has consequences. While lyricists use all the literary devices employed by poets, they are far more constrained in their choice of words. Stephen Sondheim, a master of the art if there ever was one, thinks that lyrics are the most restrictive of all literary forms. First, the reader can go back and reread a poem until he understands it; a listener must catch the words of a lyric on one go and through the ear. Thus the words have to be easily understood. Consider the line from “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” Seeing as this line is sung by a cowboy in Oklahoma, Oscar Hammerstein originally wrote “The corn is as high as a cow pony’s eye.” But, meticulous researcher that he was, he walked over to his neighbor’s cornfield and found that the corn, in late August, is considerably higher than a cow pony’s eye. That wouldn’t have bothered him too much; Oklahoma! is a musical, after all, not an agronomy lesson. (Hammerstein didn’t let the fact that the mating season for sheep is in the autumn, not June, stop him from using the marvelous line “All the rams that chase the ewe sheep/ Are determined there’ll be new sheep/ And the ewe sheep aren’t even keeping score!” in “June is Bustin’ Out All Over.”) But the phrase “cow pony’s” did bother him. It reads fine but it doesn’t sing well. Try it, it sounds a bit like the name of some non-existent garden flower, the cowpenny. Another problem for lyricists is that the words have to sing well. Some vowel sounds open the throat—making them easy to sing loudly or at a high pitch—and some close it. The word “sweet,” for instance, no matter how apposite, just can’t be used at certain points in a song. Another problem is with notes that are to be held, such as, usually, the note at the end of a song: A lyricist can’t use words that end with a hard consonant, such as t or p. Hammerstein was convinced that the reason the song “What’s the use of Wond’rin’?” from Carousel did not enjoy the success outside the show that so wonderful a song deserves is solely because of the word on which the lyric ends: So, when he wants your kisses
You will give them to the lad,
And anywhere he leads you you will walk.
And any time he needs you,
You’ll go running there like mad.
You’re his girl and he’s your feller—
And all the rest is talk. Hammerstein knew that he was breaking a rule and that other endings were possible (You’re his girl and he’s your feller—/ That’s all you need to know). He believed, however, that rules should be tested now and then just to see if, in fact, they are breakable. As he wrote, “Sometimes you succeed and this is the way the most exciting things in the theater are done. Sometimes you fail. This time a good and sound rule slapped me down.” I have taken all my examples here from Oscar Hammerstein not because he was a great lyricist, although he certainly was. It’s because he wrote the best thing ever written on the art of writing song lyrics, “Notes on Lyrics,” that serves as an extended preface for his collected lyrics. Anyone who aspires to being a lyricist should memorize it.
July 7, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon responds to Fred Schwarz’s unhappy reaction to watching a film of the musical 1776 (film version, 1972) by noting that most films of musicals are pretty awful. Mr. Gordon grants two exceptions, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (film version also 1972) and their Chicago (film version, 2002). I agree that those are both brilliant examples of musicals surviving adaptation to film, and I can think of some others (Marat/Sade, if that is not cheating, and the film of Guys and Dolls has its pleasures). In any case, Mr. Gordon tactfully avoids judging the question of how bad a musical 1776 is in its unfilmed version. Fred Schwarz notes that it “opened on Broadway in 1969 and ran for several years. . . . I had to wonder how such a pro-war, flag-waving musical could have been so popular. Were audiences supposed to see the plucky, underdog, guerrilla-fighting American colonists in the role of the North Vietnamese?” I have never seen the film and I do not know what I would make of the staged play if I saw it now, but I did see 1776 when it came out, not because it was thought to be a brilliant musical, but because my parents took us to see a fair amount of theater, musical and otherwise; they had both grown up in the city, and although they then lived in one of its suburbs, going to a lot of plays was still something a fair number of New Yorkers did. I do not remember hating the musical—I was much moved by “Mama Look Sharp,” which did not seem to be a gung-ho prowar effusion, since it was sung by a an actor playing a dying teenage militiaman crying out for his mother—but the play was indeed patriotic, and I do not have much confidence in my theatrical connoisseurship at the age of 17. Looking at a Googled list of song titles from the original cast recording, I can distantly recall only a few scraps of five out of the ten songs, nothing at all of the others, and none other than “Mama Look Sharp” with any emotion; in cold print, the lyrics of many of the songs look appalling. Then again, the lyrics of “Mama Look Sharp” aren’t much when read on screen, without the music, and neither, for that matter, are the lyrics to Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro” or “Piú docile io sono,” when compared with their power when sung. I have seen Beaumarchais, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Kenneth Clark all credited with the remark that “what is too silly to be said can still be sung,” and it is true. I have been pondering Fred Schwarz’s wonderment at 1776 doing so well in 1969, and I think one explanation may be that in 1969 antiwar sentiment among the Broadway-supporting classes had not reached a pitch and intensity that would make too many theatergoers sympathetic to the Howard Zinn school’s take on the Founders. There would come attempts to reimagine Americans as the Viet Cong—one such attempt came from the right, in John Milius’s 1984 movie Red Dawn—but 1969 was in some ways an innocent and quite traditionally patriotic era. The early-1970s dorm room political culture I described in a previous post, and to which Fred Schwarz refers, was still a minority political culture, and in most respects it would remain one. What would disappear from our mass culture would be as broad and vivid a memory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political history as is presumed in both The Devil and Daniel Webster and 1776.
July 7, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker III Posted by Alexander Burns at 07:35 PM EST Like Fred Schwarz, I spent part of my Independence Day watching 1776. I confess that I found the movie charming, in a hokey way. It’s not West Side Story, but then, it’s also not Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and for a movie featuring Ben Franklin in a kickline it never reaches the heights of unpleasantness that it might. I appreciate John Steele Gordon’s point about the difference between film and stage musicals: the former seem strange when they’re stylized; the latter have to be stylized in order to be successful. My own reflection on the film, maybe a less profound one, concerns the fate of minor historical figures in movies like this one. I was surprised to see John Adams represented so favorably, given his reputation as something of a curmudgeon, but in the end I realized that shows such as 1776 have to please their audiences with upbeat portrayals of familiar figures. In a cast of characters that includes perhaps half a dozen recognizable names, it wouldn’t do to demonize or embarrass the few figures people know offhand. Instead, it’s the footnote-in-history types who end up as villains or clowns. In 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee comes off as a total buffoon, answering his fellow founders’ every query with supposedly hilarious puns on his last name: “Certain-LEE!” or something to that effect. I don’t know enough about Lee to assess his intelligence, but I think it’s safe to presume he wasn’t quite such an ass as this. Similar treatment befalls Delaware’s Thomas McKean, an apparently one-dimensional, hopelessly belligerent Scot, and Rhode Island’s Samuel Hopkins, depicted as a perpetually soused lowlife who frequently needs to use the bathroom. Obviously these are constraints of the genre: a two-hour musical or film cannot give nuanced and full portrayals of every second-tier member of the Continental Congress. But among the motivations for public figures to seek greatness, the hope of avoiding future humiliation on the stage might rank higher than it does.
July 6, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 PM EST I wholeheartedly agree with Frederic Schwarz that the practice of digging up the greats of the past to provide political backup in the present should be laughed out of existence. But, alas, I have every confidence that it will continue, with or without our approval, until approximately five minutes before the Battle of Armageddon begins. In 1923, the future conservative Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote an entire book called If Hamilton Were Alive Today. In it he tells us what Alexander Hamilton’s opinion would have been on the great political issues of 1923, which was 119 years after Hamilton died. Strangely, they coincided exactly with Arthur Vandenberg’s opinions on those very same issues. Funny that. But Mr. Schwarz’s less-than-glowing reference to the movie of 1776 and the stage original provides me with an excellent excuse to discuss movie versions of Broadway musicals in general. They are, with a few glorious exceptions, awful, regardless of how good the stage original was. The stage is a highly artificial medium; no one confuses it with reality. So a cowboy walking onto a stage singing about what a beautiful morning it is, with a full orchestra coming in to back him up, doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. We are trained to more willingly suspend our disbelief in these circumstances. But the movies are a highly literal medium, easily confused with reality, so a cowboy riding past a cornfield singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” with a full orchestra apparently lurking unseen in the corn, seems, well, a bit silly. So does a bunch of cowboys and farmgirls at a train depot breaking into an elaborate dance that only highly trained professional dancers could possibly execute without making total fools of themselves. Oklahoma!, as a matter of fact, offers a beautiful means of comparing the stage version vs. the movie version. The 1955 film I find unendurable, despite one of the greatest of Broadway scores. In fact I’m not sure I’ve seen it since it first opened half a century ago. The reason, I think, is that Rodgers and Hammerstein, geniuses though they were with stage musicals, never really understood the nature of cinema, and so the film version is simply the stage version shot in front of real scenery. (Well, almost real; the movie was filmed in Arizona, not Oklahoma. There is even the occasional glimpse of a mountain range, not a geographical feature with which Oklahoma is richly endowed.) I would recommend getting the DVD of the 1997 London stage revival of Oklahoma!, which works wonderfully and really gives you the feeling of being in the theater. It starts off with a terrific device, shamelessly cribbed from the Laurence Olivier version of Henry V, which shows London from a helicopter flying up the Thames until it reaches the actual theater where the show was being performed. You then zoom down, join the crowd, and enter the theater. The signal is unmistakable: we’re going to the theater, not a movie. If your knowledge of Oklahoma! comes entirely from the 1955 film version, I promise you that you will find this version a revelation. It’s as close as we will ever be able to come to what it was like to sit in the St. James Theatre on the opening night of the most influential American musical ever written. Unless you just hate all musicals, you will love it. Almost all the other Rodgers and Hammerstein movie versions I think are equally awful for exactly the same reason. (I realize that The Sound of Music has been seen by everyone on the planet ten times and that trucks back up regularly to the Rodgers and Hammerstein office in order to dump vast piles of cash into their coffers because of it. I still don’t like it.) The one artistically successful movie of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in my opinion, is The King and I. I suspect the reason is that the setting is so exotic—the royal court of 19th century Siam—that we don’t mind an English schoolmarm and an oriental potentate dancing a polka together (and, of course, what a polka!). A great example of a great Broadway musical reconceived for the movies is Cabaret, which opened the same year as the movie of 1776 and won best actress (Liza Minnelli), best supporting actor (Joel Grey), and best director (Bob Fosse). The stage version is a brilliant conventional musical, where people break into song in living rooms and elsewhere. In the movie version, every song in the film is sung on the stage of the cabaret around which the show is built, with one exception. While the songs comment on the plot and characters, they stand apart from them as well and thus “work” for the audience. The exception is the utterly chilling scene in the biergarten, where the angelic looking boy begins to sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and is then revealed to be wearing a Nazi uniform, and nearly the whole crowd joins in by the end of the scene. It is something that could have happened in real life (even though the song was, of course, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret’s creators). The scene is reminiscent of another great scene from a non-musical movie, Casablanca, where the French in Rick’s Café break into the “Marseillaise.” Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2002, is another perfect example of a stage musical brilliantly reconceived for the movies in much the same way. So my advice is to never judge a Broadway musical by the film version, any more than you would judge a classic novel by a film version of the story. Some make the transition beautifully (Cabaret, Tom Jones) and some do not (Oklahoma!, Barry Lyndon).
July 6, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:00 PM EST I guess we can all be thankful that Daniel Webster did not inspire Fred Smoler strongly enough to make him become a lawyer. As it happens, I also used this Fourth of July to check out a corny work of patriotism: The movie version of 1776, a musical about the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. My first reaction was to agree with Wilfrid Sheed that Broadway lyricists are the spawn of Satan. As released to cinemas in 1972, after a long Broadway run, 1776 was a shade over two hours long, but the “director’s version” I saw contained lots of material that was cut from the original, and it clocked in at a hefty 2:40. My parents got a bit drowsy as midnight came and went, but I managed to stay awake by counting the historical solecisms (which were numerous but mostly minor and, I’ll concede, excusable in the interests of dramatic necessity). As the movie wore on (and on), I found myself wishing that the musical interludes could have been replaced by anything else, even commercials. While the scenes with dialogue are quite brisk, every 10 minutes or so the characters break into a profoundly unmemorable song*, and the movie stops dead until it’s over. 1776 is an example of why the old-fashioned musical has gone the way of the Volkswagen van: It must be done well to work at all, and first-rate composers and lyricists now have better (or at least more lucrative) things to do than write for the theater. But initiates into the Broadway-musical cult think that setting any story to music somehow sanctifies it, like a priest blessing a suburban community’s motorboat fleet. The Turner Classic Movies host said that Jack L. Warner, the producer of 1776, screened the film before its release for President Richard M. Nixon, who suggested numerous cuts. Warner followed the President’s directions, and the slimmed-down result moved along much better than the uncut version. As would be true with the Watergate transcripts a year later, Nixon showed a deft editorial touch. (Now there’s an alternative-history premise for you: Smoler becomes a lawyer and Nixon becomes an editor.) Anyway, the musical opened on Broadway in 1969 and ran for several years. Given the political climate of those times, as Fred Smoler describes in his recent entry, I had to wonder how such a pro-war, flag-waving musical could have been so popular. Were audiences supposed to see the plucky, underdog, guerrilla-fighting American colonists in the role of the North Vietnamese? Perhaps. It’s easy to romanticize revolutionaries indiscriminately, like the guy in the bottom picture on this page, a pro-democracy demonstrator in Hong Kong who is burning a Communist flag while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. What struck me most in watching 1776, though, was one specific line that probably made little impression on 1960s audiences but would create quite a stir today. During the debate over whether to risk a ruinous war with Great Britain, Benjamin Franklin quotes a line of his that we’ve all been hearing a lot lately: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Now, after reading Allen Barra’s latest entry, I am extremely wary of attributing quotations to Early American figures. This is especially true for Franklin, who is the Yogi Berra of the Revolutionary Era, except more so: Not only did he never say half the things he said, but as I brilliantly pointed out a few years back, many of the things he did say were stolen. Sure enough, according to the infallible Wikipedia, which links to this rambling but informative piece, the attribution of this quote to Franklin is dubious—though, ironically, the actual author of record may have lifted it from Franklin to begin with. Authenticity aside, Franklin speaks this line in 1776, and if the show were being performed on Broadway today, one can imagine the handful of New Yorkers in the audience giving it a tumultuous ovation. But what was Franklin really saying? The opposite of what that quotation is interpreted to mean today: He was saying that sometimes you have to go to war instead of appeasing the enemy.** It’s essentially the same slogan as “Give me liberty or give me death.” Shifting connotations attached to the words “liberty” and “security” (which is the usual modern paraphrase for “safety” in this quote) have had the result of reversing the original meaning. Indeed, as a diligent but plodding American Heritage staff member once wrote, Franklin showed little respect for our modern notion of privacy when he purchased stolen personal letters and published their contents to advance the Revolutionary cause. Not that it matters. The debate over civil liberties and national security will not hinge on whether Franklin did or did not say something fallaciously apposite-sounding in an entirely different context 230-odd years ago. One could cite the same quote, or many similar ones from equally impressive sources that were spoken during the debate over independence, to support today’s War on Terror, and it would mean just as little. History has many functions besides its main one, which is simply to be interesting. It provides perspective, makes us re-examine our beliefs, suggests contingencies we may have overlooked and possibilities we should consider, reminds us of fundamental truths about human nature, and in many cases shows us how lucky we are to live in the present day. But all these things apply only in a broad sense. Once you start making direct substitutions between past and present, like “King X equals President Y” or “poor people in 1789 equal poor people today,” the result is as weak as when a freshman literature major writes “shooting victim = Jesus” or “banker represents capitalism” in the margins of the books on his Introduction to the Novel reading list. Franklin was a very smart man, but he was not clairvoyant. There’s no telling what he (or Lincoln or Emerson or any other frequently misquoted American) would have thought or said about anything in our modern world. And in cases like this where the attribution is uncertain at best, the wording is deceptive, and the circumstances to which it applies are vastly different—reducing a historic quotation to a bumper-sticker slogan sets back the cause of reasoned debate instead of advancing it. -------------------- * The songs are occasionally amusing for the wrong reason, as in one number where John Adams and the spirit of his wife (who is at home in Massachusetts) sing about how much they yearn for each other, mentally and physically. Mrs. Adams sings that she feels like “a nun in a cloister,” whereupon John replies that he feels like “a monk in an abbey.” Considering that his wife’s first name is Abigail, I consider this a poor choice of words. ** Nor has history borne out the suggestion that lost national security is temporary but lost civil rights are permanent. Every one of this country’s major wars has been accompanied by large-scale civil-rights violations, which have always been reversed when the crisis ended.
July 5, 2007
White Knights Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:15 PM EST During the last month, this blog has hosted several exchanges concerning the American Presidency and the proper limits of its power. Over the course of these exchanges, a string of Presidents have been criticized for exercising their authority inappropriately. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan were among this group. Fred Smoler has remarked in the past on the tendency, among some writers, to tear down the reputations of public figures after they have died. There’s probably a little of that impulse in play here, with “imperial” Presidencies being discussed and disapproved of on the basis of their most shameful hours alone. One can go too far in disparaging the accomplishments of past leaders, and it can be problematic to let a handful of reprehensible actions define a whole Presidency. One can also go too far in praising old Presidents, though, especially if one praises them imprecisely. I noticed a recent cover of Time magazine featuring the story “What We Can Learn From J.F.K.” This caught my attention because it reminded me of an April cover story in National Journal, “Learning from Ike.” These two articles consider the foreign policies of the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth Presidents. Both are capably written and both contain some solid historical information. Despite the differences between the leaders they consider, both draw similar conclusions. According to the authors of these articles, these Presidents were laudable for advancing American interests while recognizing the boundaries of American power. National Journal praises Eisenhower’s “cold-blooded” realism in foreign policy, which led him to make what biologists call “threat gestures” against China, even as he was forcing the British and French to jettison the Suez. The key to such divergent policies was Eisenhower’s conviction that immediate circumstances, rather than ideology, should drive a nation’s actions. In a realist foreign policy program, says this piece, “we manage evil. We minimize, mitigate, and manipulate evil. But efforts to pre-emptively eliminate evil are prone to end in overreaction and destabilization, with consequences that are often worse than the original problem.” Of the lessons Eisenhower might teach us, this is not necessarily a bad one to learn, that sometimes an imperfect status quo is better than a chaotic policy shift. Time emphasizes similar aspects of the Kennedy Presidency. “The United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient,” the authors quote Kennedy saying in 1961, “We cannot impose our will on the other 94 percent of mankind [and] we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity. . . . There cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” The attitude expressed by these words, says Ted Sorensen, would have produced a policy of détente with the Soviet Union a decade early, if Kennedy had not been killed. Because of Kennedy’s nuanced outlook on foreign affairs, and his refusal to treat the Soviets as irreconcilable and unambiguous foes, this article speculates that he and Khrushchev might have partnered to maintain an acceptable, peaceful global situation. Kennedy’s public positions on Communism were expressed in very tough language—but his uncompromising toughness did not extend too far beyond word choice. Instead, his comfort with complexity and distrust of military force guided him down an altogether more moderate course as President. Or so we’re told. These two articles draw some interesting conclusions about Kennedy and Eisenhower, but I’d suggest that they actually tell us more about the times we’re living in than about the Presidencies they consider. There appears to be a concerted search afoot these days to find historical models for the productive use of American power. In the midst of Iraq’s unending frustrations, and, I think it’s worth adding, little more than a decade after our disastrous inaction in Rwanda and unconscionable shilly-shallying over the Balkans, writers are looking toward the beginning of the Cold War for examples of successful, forceful, and temperate Presidents. On the left, there’s been a rediscovery of Harry Truman by writers like Peter Beinart. In some sectors of the right, there’s been a resurgence of Churchill worship, as well as a newfound interest in once-damned figures like Joseph McCarthy It’s in the context of this larger review of history that this pair of articles has emerged, and it’s in the spirit of a search for foreign policy heroes that they’ve chosen to consider Eisenhower and Kennedy. The trouble is, some important questions go unasked in order to find good historical lessons. On Eisenhower, one might question just how successful his “reptilian” realism was. Did we really get the best possible settlement in Korea? Was the government that emerged in the South truly the most effective one American influence could produce? Was it a good idea to topple Third World leaders like Mossadegh and Lumumba, or to creep furtively around Southeast Asia, unsure whether we had more to fear from angering Indonesia’s Sukarno or from leaving him unsupervised? On Kennedy’s administration: Was Kennedy clever or careless to make big promises (“bear any burden”) that he had no intention of keeping, but that his successor would treat with extreme gravity? Was JFK really so temperate, or did he have a more ruthless, unrestrained side, evidenced in his use of covert assassinations in South Vietnam? And furthermore, is it really honest to say he would have ended our involvement in Vietnam and manufactured détente, or is this a fiction of enduringly loyal former aides? These are only a few of the complications one hits in the process of beatifying either Kennedy or his predecessor. There are accomplishments to admire in the foreign policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. But the actions both men took abroad resist easy simplification under the label of “realism” or “keeping the peace.” It’s too easy to find a President from the past and, as the blogger Matthew Yglesias has alleged of Truman-boosters, use him as an icon for “a foreign policy that’s not too hot and also not too cold.” The trouble with this approach is that no modern President has been hot at all the right times and cold at all the right times, and the search for a prudential middle course on foreign policy can’t be quickly resolved by the leaders of the past. To pretend that it can leaves Americans waiting for a white knight who won’t come.
July 5, 2007
Stephen Vincent Benét Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST Stephen Vincent Benét wrote “The Devil and Daniel Webster” in 1937. I was thinking about that short story yesterday, because I once celebrated the Fourth of July by reading it aloud to some undergraduates the summer after I’d graduated from college. In that time and at that place, patriotism was not a fashionable political or moral posture, and my initial impulse was not love of country but injured pride. One of the other people present had for some reason remarked that Benét was a Popular Front hack, and I wanted to rebut the part about hackery. I had no idea whether Benét had sported any affiliation to the Communist party, but I’d loved the story since hearing it read aloud around a fire at summer camp, hearing its author patronized was irritating, and I was surprised to learn that neither the fellow condemning Benét nor anyone else in the room had ever heard of it (or of anything else the man had written). Their ignorance was in fact a mark of their sophistication—I had a more middle-brow background than those people did, and much less exalted taste. In any event, a friend who admired the poem “John Brown’s Body” and liked some of the fiction had just lent me a book of Benét’s collected short stories, which meant the evidence was readily at hand, and I let rip. My memory of the occasion is that the others conceded that the story provided authentic if modest pleasure—they thought it low, but oddly appealing. Googling it, I discover that the thing is available on-line, and any reader of this blog ignorant of the story may decide the question for her- or himself. I am sufficiently uneasy about its merits to have refrained from re-reading the story, for this event took place well over thirty years ago, and I make no promises; it is very possible that “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is like Tolkien or Edgar Rice Burroughs, wonderful if read (or heard) young enough, unendurable if first encountered thereafter. Having just Googled not only “The Devil and Daniel Webster” but also Benét and the Popular Front, I was intrigued to get an awful lot of hits on the latter subject, so maybe my college friend was right, at least in part of what he said. If so, it is intriguing to compare the sensibility and successes of the Popular Front to those of the New Left of the early 1970s, or for that matter the Left of today. Making someone like Daniel Webster into a folk hero for school children does not seem like the kind of thing many (if any) people on the Left have attempted since the 1930s, and I am not sure the Left has done too brilliantly from this abstemious choice. And as it happens, I do not think that an initially uncritical enthusiasm for Webster, contracted at a tender age, bars a citizen from critical thought for the remainder of his life. At the height of the anti-war movement of the early 1970s, I remember a Fourth of July on which I asked a pretty militant friend “Neighbor, how stands the Union?,” and got a prompt and enthusiastic “rock-bottomed and copper-sheathed, one and indivisible!” Both the question and the answer are from Benét’s story. By the time I finished high school I had encountered Samuel Eliot Morison’s witty and deflating remark on Webster (his joke went something like “two eyes like live coals, under a precipice of brow; no man was ever so great as Daniel Webster looked”), which gave me a sense of Webster pretty directly opposed to the one I’d gotten from Benét’s story a decade or so earlier. But I am grateful to have gotten that earlier sense first.
July 4, 2007
American Mythbuster: A July 4 Interview with Ray Raphael Posted by Allen Barra at 12:05 AM EST Paul Revere didn’t make that ride—except in Longfellow’s poem. Patrick Henry probably didn’t say “Give me liberty or give me death!” The words were likely put into his mouth by a biographer several decades after his death. Washington’s winter at Valley Forge really wasn’t that bad compared with other winters during the Revolution. Molly Pitcher probably never existed, and the colonies most definitely did not offer slaves their freedom to fight against the British. These are just a few examples of the misinformation corrected by Ray Raphael in his cult favorite book Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past (New Press, 368 pages, $15.95). Founding Myths doesn’t merely debunk popular stories in American History, it shows how they were created and why they persist, and why their persistence is blocking the path toward a true understanding of American history. Just in time for the Fourth of July, Mr. Raphael shot off some fireworks for us in this interview. One of the most enjoyable things about your book, Founding Myths, is that you skewer treasured legends of America history, or perhaps folklore would be a more appropriate term, while providing the context in which their stories grew. Paul Revere, for instance. Is the story of Paul Revere’s ride one that was popular after the revolution or was it a creation of a later era? The legend of Paul Revere’s ride was a long time in the making. Revere himself, in his official deposition shortly afterwards, devoted only one sentence to the ride that would someday make him famous. When he died, 43 years later, his obituary made no mention of it. Still, locals remembered this and other rides made by Paul Revere, and they played up his heroic deeds by word of mouth. This was not unusual. For generations after the Revolution, Americans told tales of their local heroes during the War for Independence. In the mid-nineteenth century, the historians George Bancroft and Benson Lossing collected over a thousand such stories, each featuring some local star. Paul Revere was among these, but only one of many. That’s where matters stood when the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his famous poem 86 years after the fact, in January of 1861. The Civil War at that moment seemed imminent, and Longfellow wanted to wake up the nation to the threat, so he composed the lines that millions upon millions of American school children would have to learn and recite for the better part of a century: “Listen my children, and you shall hear/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Longfellow meant well, but he gave himself so much poetic license that he distorted the ride beyond recognition. Revere never waited to see the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns, for instance, and there were hundreds of alarms sounded that night, not just one. Subsequent generations of Americans grew up thinking that a lone rider from Boston awakened the sleepy-eyed farmers, and this effectively suppressed the amazing, patriotic story of how those very same farmers, seven months earlier, had risen up in a body to overthrow British rule, and how they had been arming themselves and training ever since, knowing full well that the Regulars would soon march out against them. Legend, with an assist from beer commercials, has granted Sam Adams a greater role. You write: “Based on the word of his Tory foes, we have granted Samuel Adams superhuman powers. This one man, we say, set Boston all ablaze—but the historical record tells a different story.” Why has Sam Adams’s role in the conflict been overinflated? The Sam Adams story imbues the tumultuous crowd actions in Boston with design and purpose. The mythic Sam Adams, our favorite rabble-rouser and the alleged mastermind of independence, writes and directs the script, keeping the Revolution on cue. The problem is, there was no mastermind of independence. Samuel Adams (he did not answer to the name of Sam) spoke out firmly against independence until late in 1775, when many others were also starting to entertain the notion. Before that, he was fighting for the rights of British subjects living in America. That’s how he and nearly all other patriots viewed themselves for the first decade of unrest. Nor were “the body of the people” (as they preferred to call themselves) a mindless rabble, incapable of acting without orders from above. That was a Tory fabrication, because Tories did not want to believe that common people could think for themselves. Unfortunately, we buy into the Tory way of thinking every time we say that “Boston was controlled by a trained mob and Sam Adams was its keeper.” That’s a direct quote from the most influential biography of Adams written in the twentieth century. This suggests a question regarding what you term “founder chic.” You write, “Founder chic authors depict political leaders as causal agents who are personally responsible for all the major events of the times. . . . Since the importance of their stories is determined in part by the importance of their protagonists, biographies have a vested interest in endowing their subjects with as much historical significance as the record will bear—and sometimes more.” You take particular exception to David McCullough’s view of John Adams: “‘It was John Adams,’ wrote McCullough in his Pulitzer prize-winning biography, John Adams, ‘who made it [the Declaration of Independence] happen.’” What’s your main point of contention with McCullough’s view? According to McCullough, John Adams acted the role of a lonely hero, willing to buck the will of the people. If Adams had been “poll-driven,” he would have “scrapped the whole idea,” McCullough claims, since there was little popular support for independence in 1776. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Twenty-one months earlier, people throughout rural Massachusetts had declared in favor of independence, but John Adams tried to talk them out of it. Later, after Lexington and Concord, Adams came around to their opinion. But he was hardly alone. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense sparked a nationwide conversation of unprecedented proportions. In every tavern and meeting house across the land, people argued the merits of the case, and by spring the results were in: an overwhelming proportion supported independence. More than 90 towns, counties, and states issued formal declarations urging Congress to take action. The largest state, Virginia, declared independence on its own. It took a while for Congress to catch up with the groundswell of popular opinion. Delegates from Maryland, for instance, were opposed, but then the county conventions met and issued specific instructions: Change your vote, they said, and do it immediately. “See the glorious effects of county instructions,” a Maryland patriot wrote to John Adams. “Our people have fire if not smothered.” The sweeping, deliberate debate over independence resulted in the most productive outpouring of patriotic sentiment in our nation’s history, but McCullough takes the honor and glory away from the people and bestows it on a single individual. Ironically, John Adams knew better, and he said so at the time. On July 3, the day after Congress voted in favor of independence, he boasted to his wife Abigail that the population at large had considered the “great question of independence . . . by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets, by debating it in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection, in town and county meetings, as well as in private conversation,” and in the end “the whole people, in every colony of the thirteen, have adopted it as their own act.” I was crushed to hear that the famous words attributed to Patrick Henry—“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”—were not his. You write, “Nowhere in any of his speeches, as rendered by later writers, do we see even a hint of pandering to instincts less noble than the love of liberty. His speeches, quite literally, have been whitewashed.” Can you give us a brief summation of the whitewashing of Patrick Henry’s image? Patrick Henry may or may not have said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But if he did, it was no big deal. Patriots had been using that particular refrain ever since the Stamp Act resistance ten years earlier. It is improbable, however, that Henry delivered the 1,217-word speech that William Wirt attributed to him 42 years later. Nobody had recorded the speech, and Wirt’s sole informant provided him with distant recollections for only one fifth of it. Wirt, incidentally, was quite an orator in his own right. He delivered the official commemorative address in Washington on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So what did Patrick Henry say in his call-to-arms that aroused such emotions on March 23, 1775? Only one firsthand account has survived, but it gives some idea of the tone: Henry called the King “a tyrant, a fool, a puppet,” and he “said there was no Englishmen, no Scots, no Britons, but a set of wretches sunk in luxury, that had lost their native courage.” In other words, Henry appealed to people’s lowest instincts by calling his enemies names and labeling them cowards. Most likely, he also played the slave card. White Virginians were terrified that British officials would soon declare freedom for all slaves who fought against their masters, and eight months later Virginia’s royal governor did just that. To recruit soldiers, Patrick Henry at that point waged an intensive propaganda campaign based on the British offer to free the slaves. Henry also speculated extensively in Western lands, and to promote his interests he of course was a rabid Indian fighter. One of his main complaints against the British was that they had closed off settlement in the West. Henry’s personal perspectives—fearing slaves, hating Indians, craving expansion—were shared by most white Virginians, and it is highly unlikely that these did not figure in his thundering speeches intended to arouse anti-British sentiment. One of the American Revolution’s most cherished myths is that of the patriotic slave. I suppose we have the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot to thank for perpetuating that myth, particularly the scene when someone reads a fictional order from George Washington that “All bound slaves who give minimum one year service in the Continental Army will be granted freedom and be paid a bounty of five shillings for each month of service.” Your comment is, “The document . . . which is seen on screen and appears visually authentic, contains more historical errors in a single sentence that at first seems possible.” Could you briefly enumerate them for us? First, George Washington regarded the presence of slaves in the Continental Army as a total embarrassment, and he did everything in his power to keep them out. One week after assuming command, he ordered that no “stroller, negro, or vagabond” be allowed to enlist. The British Army was much more welcoming. Four months after Washington’s decree, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to all slaves who left their masters and fought against the patriots. Over the course of the war, tens of thousands of slaves fled to the British in search of their freedom, including at least 20 men and women enslaved to George Washington. Next, even if Washington had wanted to enlist slaves, he never would have offered them freedom for only one year of service. He insisted on longer enlistments, three years or the duration of the war. Had he promised freedom in return for such a short term, his recruiting officers would have been instantly overwhelmed, and the Continental Army would have become predominantly black. Further, who would have compensated the masters? To seize “property” from patriotic slave owners without compensation was unthinkable—but how could Congress afford to pay for slaves when it couldn’t even afford enough food to sustain the soldiers it had? Plus, Washington was simply not the one to do the recruiting. That was left to the individual states. Later in the war some states did permit slaves to serve as substitutes for whites who had been drafted, but even so, not all of these were granted freedom in the end. In South Carolina, the setting for The Patriot, John Laurens, the son of the president of Congress, proposed arming some slaves to fight alongside the patriots, but Washington opposed the idea, and the South Carolina government rejected it outright. This is not to say South Carolina did not make use of slaves to bolster the army. To induce whites to enlist, Southern states offered special bounties—not to slaves, but of slaves. Near the end of the war, when manpower was scarce, any white who signed on would receive a special bonus of one slave. The worst myth propagated in The Patriot is that slaves were so devoted to their masters that they would risk their lives on the battlefield. The truth is, slaves tried to use the Revolutionary War in whatever way they could to gain their own freedom. A few enslaved African-Americans in the North managed to bargain for their freedom by fighting for the patriots; a vastly greater number in the South thought their prospects were better with the British. In either case, slaves struggled to achieve freedom from a tyranny far more acute than “taxation without representation.” In your chapter “March of the American People,” you write, “The Revolutionary War looks very different if we stand on Indian lands and look back east.” This is a particularly interesting point since most Americans seem to feel that the Indian Wars really took place on the Western plains. You remind us that “the American Revolution was by far the largest Indian war in our nation’s history.” Why do you feel this very important point has been all but forgotten by writers of American history textbooks? While other conflicts between Native Americans and Euro-Americans involved only one or two Indian nations at a time, all Native peoples east of the Mississippi became directly involved in the Revolutionary War, most fighting with the British, a few with the Americans. For a decade after the Revolution, various pan-Indian confederations continued to pursue their own wars of independence. Finally, after two decades of fighting, Euro-Americans managed to expand their effective domain from east of the Appalachian Divide clear to the Mississippi. Previously, it had taken a century and a half to conquer an equivalent amount of territory along the Eastern seaboard. The American Revolution, in short, was at least in part a war of conquest, but we don’t like to view it that way. In our texts we learn about white-Indian conflict during the early settlements in the seventeenth century, and we pick up the story again with the struggles for the West in the nineteenth century, but we ignore the critical moment at the time of our nation’s founding, when the groundwork for westward expansion was established. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for instance, is always portrayed as the crowning achievement of the Articles of Confederation, because it paved the way to the West. Rarely during our discussions of the founding era do we treat the impact on Native populations, because it’s simply too embarrassing. If we view the American Revolution as a simple conflict between the United States and its former rulers from across the seas, it’s easy to see who stands on the moral high ground. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge the persistence of white-Indian struggles, that moral high ground is quickly surrendered. We—the American nation that was created in the late eighteenth century—lose our definition, our purity. Our core national narrative can admit that “we” were not always the good guys, but please, not at the time of our birth. That remains sacred, and so we continue to push the agonizing aspects of the American saga forward or backward in time. This is a shame. Americans, from the beginning, were both democrats and bullies. Despite the hesitancy of elites, most patriots at the time of our nation’s birth believed people should govern themselves, and that is why they threw off British rule. They also believed they had the right, even the obligation, to impose their will on people they deemed inferior. These two core beliefs are key to understanding American history and the American character, and we do an injustice to ourselves and to our nation when we pretend otherwise.
July 3, 2007
Kyuma’s Fate Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:25 PM EST A New York Times story reveals that Fumio Kyuma, Japan’s defense minister, has been forced to resign over what the Times calls a “gaffe.” Wikipedia defines the word gaffe with admirable clarity: “A gaffe is a verbal mistake made by a company or individual, usually in a social environment. The mistake comes from saying something that is true, but inappropriate.” What inappropriate truth did Fumio Kyuma utter? According to the Times, “In a public appearance on Saturday—the unofficial start of the campaign for the upcoming election—Mr. Kyuma said that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ‘ended the war,’ adding, ‘I think that it couldn’t be helped.’ Otherwise, Mr. Kyuma said, the war would have dragged on and the Soviet Union would have ended up occupying northern Japan.” It is possible, although unlikely, that Mr. Kyuma, a politician on Japan’s right, was simply sucking up to Japan’s chief ally—unlikely because the former Minister did not apparently make a habit of saying things Americans wanted to hear. For example, according to the same article, “Mr. Kyuma himself also once called America’s war in Iraq a mistake, angering Vice President Dick Cheney, who pointedly refused to meet him during a visit to Japan in February.” It is also possible that Mr. Kyuma’s misfortune indicates a certain convergence between some American and most Japanese views of the Second World War. The Japanese have long focused, to a degree Chinese and Koreans find maddening, on a view of Japan as the Second World War’s chief victim; in this narrative, the uniqueness of being the target of nuclear weapons has a very conspicuous role in establishing Japan’s moral purity as supreme victim nation. On the evidence of Mr. Kyuma’s fate, this view is not about to change anytime soon. So I think convergence with (some) American views of the war may have arrived by a different route: I am afraid that I just about can imagine an untenured American academic imperiling his or her job by insisting that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was crucial in ending the war, and probably unavoidable.
July 2, 2007
More on Imperial Presidencies II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:40 AM EST Joshua Zeitz’s post this morning raises some concerns about so-called imperial Presidencies, and also places recent events concerning the Office of the Vice President in a broader historical context. He cites both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon as examples of Presidents who sometimes overstepped the bounds of propriety and legality in their use of presidential powers. Dick Cheney’s more immediate use of “unchecked executive authority” is especially troublesome to Mr. Zeitz. His basic point: “There’s a distinction to be drawn between an enhanced executive branch—one with the flexibility to respond to national security threats—and an imperial Presidency that knowingly flouts the law, administrative codes, and the Constitution.” I’d generally concur, but with a few points of clarification and elaboration. The first is the observation that Vice President Cheney’s escapades over the last six-and-a-half years have been alarming, but that I’m not sure they really fall in line with the earlier examples of Kennedy and Nixon. The key difference, of course, is that while those old rivals of 1960 both overstepped the bounds of their authority, the authority they exercised was still the highest in the land. Cheney, on the other hand, is using a basically ornamental office as that of a pluripotent minister without portfolio. In my judgment, the most surprising and disconcerting information that emerged from last week’s Washington Post series, “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” was the fact that Cheney has occasionally employed his vice presidential prerogatives to undermine President Bush’s agenda. In 2003, he helped scupper one of Bush’s favorite tax initiatives in order to advance one of his own. More subtly, but also more insidiously, he has been a master of promoting policy ideas, like coercive interrogation, without identifying himself as their author. If George Bush is an imperial President, I’m not sure what that makes Dick Cheney. But the notion that the Vice President has a set of powers totally distinct from those of the President is incompatible with the American tradition of a unitary executive. Indeed, it’s hard for me to think of George Bush as a truly imperial President, given that he’s apparently unable to rein in his own sidekick. Looking at the White House’s official statements from last week concerning Cheney’s assertion that he’s not a member of the executive branch, it is notable just how little the President’s office actually tried to stick up for the V.P. One wonders whether President Bush is a little tired of putting up with the most inconveniently meddling Vice President since John Calhoun. Given the apparent cleavages within the executive branch, it seems to me that the Bush administration has been less effective at unleashing the powers of the imperial Presidency, as previously exercised by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, et al., than it has been at destroying Washington’s customary mechanisms of balancing authority. Compliant Republican congressional caucuses have neutered the governmental processes that would normally check someone like Cheney. President Bush’s much-vaunted respect for personal loyalty has left characters like Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales in office long beyond the point when any earlier President would have canned them for being incompetent or politically inconvenient. The consequence of this has not necessarily been a hugely empowered Oval Office, à la Kennedy and Nixon, but rather an executive branch whose members (even reluctant ones like Cheney) aren’t effectively accountable to anyone, including the President. The second point I’d make in response to Mr. Zeitz is that while his distinction between muscular and extralegal presidential action is intellectually sound, I am not convinced that this categorical division plays out in practice. In his post, he notes the executive excesses of Kennedy, Nixon, and Bush. By even a conservative assessment, one would have to add Lyndon Johnson, with his lying, fiat-based approach to war making, and Ronald Reagan, with his patently illegal clandestine policies in Latin America and Western Asia, to any list of inappropriately overbearing Presidents. Even if one stops there and doesn’t try to indict any other leaders, that means half the White House occupants in the last 50 years have abused the office while reaching for imperial security powers. Those who have not, including Ford, Carter, and Clinton, have largely been unremarkable and unassertive leaders and have hesitated to engage in anything resembling imperial behavior. Given this moderately strong correlation, I wonder whether there isn’t reason to suggest that even necessary expansions of presidential power are, to some extent, corrupting. I’m inclined to agree with Fred Smoler that it’s good for Presidents to have a wide range of options open to them when it comes to the use of force. I’m also pretty convinced, though, that the abuses that usually attend such presidential prerogatives are inescapable. They are necessary failings that Americans must accept if we want a flexible and extremely powerful President. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether this is a good tradeoff, but it is in any case part of a dilemma that has long resisted any satisfactory resolution.
July 2, 2007
More on Imperial Presidencies Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Last month this site hosted a brief exchange on the idea of the “imperial Presidency,” a term coined by the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who viewed with considerable skepticism the expansion of the executive branch’s authority from the 1930s onward. I argued that Richard Nixon’s administration “was less an aberration and more an extreme culmination of trends that had been on the build for several decades.” My larger point was that “if history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.” In response, Fred Smoler offered a conditional defense of the imperial Presidency, proffering that “if [George] Bush gets us into a war with Iran, imperial Presidents will get an even worse name, but if Bush fails to use force and Iran one day launches nuclear weapons at Israeli, European, or American cities, opponents of imperial Presidencies will be widely execrated. . . . History has shown us more than one thing.” On June 30 The New York Times published an op-ed by Egil Krogh, a former deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon who served as one of the chief “plumbers” of Watergate fame. Krogh’s op-ed related the story of the administration’s decision to conduct an illegal search of the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who had been treating Daniel Ellsberg, the source behind the Pentagon Papers leak. As Krogh explained, “At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.” In effect, Krogh and his colleagues anticipated by several years the line that Richard Nixon would famously deliver in his televised interview with David Frost: “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” Last week the Washington Post ran a remarkable investigative series on the role that Vice President Dick Cheney has played in the Bush administration. With his combination of ideological rigor and administrative background—Cheney has served as White House chief-of-staff, GOP House whip, and Secretary of Defense—the Vice Vresident has managed to short-circuit established operating procedures and thereby exert enormous influence on defense, environmental, and fiscal policies. Though he is now advancing the bizarre claim that he is not part of the executive branch, arguably Cheney stands as an example of the potential dangers of the “imperial Presidency.” By proxy, he has enjoyed unchecked executive authority that Congress and the Courts will spend the next decade reviewing. In a separate item, documents released last week reveal that President John Kennedy authorized the creation of an extralegal unit affiliated with the CIA to investigate Pentagon leaks to The New York Times’ defense correspondent. In effect, JFK created his own plumbers unit, almost a decade before Nixon did the same. While I appreciate Fred Smoler’s point, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between an enhanced executive branch—one with the flexibility to respond to national security threats—and an imperial Presidency that knowingly flouts the law, administrative codes, and the Constitution. In the case of JFK and Nixon, neither President could (or should) have used the CIA to spy on domestic political adversaries. In the case of George Bush and Dick Cheney, there is something remarkably troubling in the insistence that the White House operates beyond the boundaries of congressional or administrative oversight. If history has shown us more than one thing, certainly, it has shown us that such abuses seldom contribute to anything but the political security of those currently occupying the West Wing.
July 1, 2007
From Superman to Übermensch Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:35 PM EST When the upcoming United Artists film Valkyrie was announced a few months back, I was thrilled. The subject matter, Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler, has long struck me as the kind of cloak-and-dagger episode ripe for cinematic interpretation. Valkyrie’s director, Bryan Singer, has distinguished himself in recent years as one of the better architects of big-budget pictures, including The Usual Suspects, X-Men, and Superman Returns. There probably aren’t more than a few people capable of turning this fairly obscure bit of history into a major motion picture, but Singer is certainly one of them. But according to Saturday’s New York Times, he may have a bit of trouble doing so, thanks to his leading man’s religion, and larger disputes about the ownership of the past. Germany’s ministry of defense has been making things difficult for Singer and his crew, denying them filming permits at important locations like the site of Stauffenberg’s execution. The internal dynamics of the ministry’s decisions are a little unclear, but the basic gist of it seems to be that Tom Cruise is not exactly the person German central casting would have chosen to play Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg’s son, Berthold Graf von Stauffenberg, also opposes Cruise’s casting, and tells the Times why in no uncertain terms: “Scientology is a totalitarian ideology. The fact that an avowed Scientologist like Mr. Cruise is supposed to play the victim of a totalitarian regime is purely sick.” The opinion of Stauffenberg fils is expected to be influential with the government officials who will ultimately decide how to treat Singer’s project. This budding standoff over filming rights could be a good case study for a debate on religious freedom. One could discuss whether it is legitimate for Germans to object to Tom Cruise’s casting on the basis of his religion, since they feel his religion embodies politically objectionable ideas. More interesting, though, and more relevant to the subject of this blog, are the questions this situation raises about the artistic representation of history, and about who can rightly try to control that representation. Is it acceptable for the German government to influence Singer’s film in the interests of protecting Stauffenberg’s status as a national hero? How seriously should Valkyrie’s director take Berthold Graf von Stauffenberg’s objections to his casting choices? Should his preferences, as Colonel Stauffenberg’s son, be treated with special sensitivity? Speaking instinctively, my answers to these questions would probably be no, not very much, and no, in that order. While I would personally love to see Tom Cruise booted from this project and replaced by a more talented actor (say, Clive Owen), a director portraying a historical figure of Stauffenberg’s stature has a larger obligation than the one to the character’s family, or even to his country. If Singer thinks Tom Cruise is the actor most able to truthfully portray his protagonist, and the man most capable of participating in an effective assessment of Stauffenberg’s place in history, that should be his decision to make. If Cruise’s acting skills fall short, or if his religious affiliation compromises his effectiveness as an artist, there’s an easy solution to the problem: Make another movie. This whole affair sort of reminds me of the 2003 controversy over CBS’s miniseries The Reagans, in which James Brolin, Barbra Streisand’s husband, was selected to play the Gipper. Conservative outcry over the casting choice, as well as other aspects of the series, led Viacom to relegate it to the premium cable netherworld of Showtime. The objections people raised back in 2003 are similar in some ways to the ones being raised in Germany now: The hero of this film is a national icon, the actor’s beliefs make him unsuitable for the role, the script might compromise this person’s revered place in history, etc. But with Stauffenberg, as with Reagan, these objections are self-defeating. If Stauffenberg, like Reagan, is such a cherished national figure, couldn’t he hypothetically withstand one mediocre portrayal? And in a free country like the United States, or present-day Germany, wouldn’t it be a better demonstration of anti-totalitarianism to support artists you find distasteful, while also producing other art more in line with your own tastes? I hope Valkyrie is a worthwhile movie—but if it isn’t, I expect I won’t have to wait more than a decade or two for a better version.
July 1, 2007
The Somme Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted about an item in today’s newspaper: “Today’s Times obituary page has another entry in the ‘In Memoriam’ section that refers to a far larger tragedy, one that began 91 years ago today. It reads: “The British Expeditionary Force
The Somme
1 July 1916
0730-2130 hours
54,000 KIA/WIA” The Somme was a ghastly ordeal for the British Army, especially the first day; many of July 1’s 19,240 British fatalities may have occurred in the first minutes of that day. The Battle of the Somme has come to stand for absolutely futile slaughter, but over the last generation, British specialist historians of the First World War have come to understand that the Somme was also a ghastly ordeal for the German Army, which thought it had come close to being destroyed there (one German officer described the battle as “the muddy grave of the German field arm,” and something like his opinion was common among Germans who fought on the Somme). The first hours were the worst, but the battle lasted until mid-November, with few if any other moments of it resembling that first day. A significant school of thought now considers the battle’s long-run effects a crucial victory in a merciless war of attrition, a war Britain won, an outcome for which we should be grateful. This is not an indisputable view, but it is a respectable one, although almost unknown outside of specialist circles. Most of what non-specialists think they know about the Western Front of the First World War consists of a generalization extending the first and unrepresentative hours of the battle to the whole of the war; there is also a case that what most modern Europeans (and many Americans) think of war generally is a projected universalization of the first day of the Somme. Some of the British historians who have developed the new view are John Terraine, Gary Sheffield, and Brian Bond. Terraine’s best essays on the subject are contained within his The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War, 1861-1945; Sheffield’s most relevant book is simply titled The Somme; and a brilliant short essay by Bond is The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History. Bond describes what he and other specialists now think happened on the Western Front, what he thinks ordinary people (including other academics) instead believe, and why he thinks that startling discrepancy developed. It is a very impressive little book. It has just come into paperback, and while it will run the buyer $20 for 138 pages, I think Bond’s heretical, irascible, and very learned essay, originally three lectures given at Cambridge, is very much worth the money.
July 1, 2007
In Memoriam Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:20 AM EST I rarely read the obituaries unless I’m looking for a notice that I’m sure will be there. But I sometimes look at the “In Memoriam” notices that come at the end of the New York Times obituaries. These are not notices regarding people who recently died. Rather they refer to people who died earlier but are remembered on this day, often the anniversary of their death or birth. Some are touching, some sad, some full of the memory of a life well lived. And some touch upon history. I remember particularly one I saw a few years ago. It gave the birth and death dates of a young man, say, 1965 and 1997. It was signed by another man’s name and simply quoted one of the lesser-known songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein: “You are never away from your home in my heart.” I’ll never know for sure, but it is hard not to imagine that here was one more promising life snuffed out by AIDS. Today’s Times obituary page has another entry in the “In Memoriam” section that refers to a far larger tragedy, one that began 91 years ago today. It reads:
The British Expeditionary Force
The Somme
1 July 1916
0730-2130 hours
54,000 KIA/WIA
|
