Category Archives: Legends in the News

AP History, Wilson, and Tubman

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A few things have come across my desk recently that may interest you:

Any one of those things might be good fodder for one of the optional assignments you could do if you want more opportunities to demonstrate mastery of the rubric.

Legends in the News

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Today, I noticed two different opinion pieces mentioning “Legendary Americans” we have studied (or will soon discuss).

First, in tomorrow’s New York Times, the founders of the Women on 20s campaign argue that Harriet Tubman still deserves a spot on a bill, despite a statement released today that says Hamilton will stay. They write:

If, as Mr. Lew states, the images on our currency reflect what we value as a nation, then Jackson, a slave trader and Native American oppressor, should be removed from the ubiquitous $20 bill and replaced by the freed slave and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, the choice in our online survey that polled more than half a million people. And we should continue to preserve and celebrate the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant who did so much to shape our democracy, not to mention the monetary system that Andrew Jackson worked so hard to discredit.

Also today on The Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses recent controversy over the movie Nina Simone, in which the actress playing the lead character was asked by producers to darken her skin. Critics of the move have argued that the film ignores the fact that Simone herself often lamented the unique oppression suffered by dark-skinned, as opposed to lighter-skinned, black women. The biopic’s distributor replied by citing someone we will be reading about next week: “You think Rosa Parks’ pain was less than Nina’s when she had to endure not sitting on a bus?”

Finally, today I saw a spoken poem called “History Reconsidered” that touched on some of the topics that we’ve discussed the last two weeks. It begins: “Letter to Five of the President who Owned Slaves when They Held Office.”

Just more evidence of the ways that contemporary Americans continue to find “usable pasts” in the lives of legendary Americans.

Slavery in Children’s Literature

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In class last Thursday, one of questions we discussed had to do with how slavery itself is often depicted in children’s books about Harriet Tubman. One book described the young Tubman as “happy” even though she was a slave, which reminded me (I suggested) of the idea of “paternalism” discussed in Furstenberg’s book. On the other hand, as one of you pointed out, the books about Tubman do at least spotlight the brutality of slavery by focusing on the injuries she sustained and the separations from family she endured.

cake-for-washington

This discussion made me think of another recent controversy in the publishing world over a children’s book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, which was published by Scholastic. The book, which tells the story of the President’s enslaved chef named Hercules, is summarized with screen shots here.

After several prominent school library journals criticized the book for giving a misleading, “even dishonest” picture of slavery, Scholastic ultimately decided to withdraw the book from circulation, though not before publishing a response from the author and editor. You can follow the whole debate by following the links at the end of this blog post, which also includes some interesting points about the ways that Native Americans are portrayed in children’s books on Thanksgiving.

Since I was familiar with Furstenberg’s book already when this controversy broke, the whole debate made me immediately think of his discussion of paternalism and the myth of Washington’s happy slaves. I wonder if the fact that Washington himself was portrayed in this book as a strong admirer—even a friend—of Hercules contributed to the controversy. (On the last page of the book, Washington throws his arm around Hercules and delivers this line: “‘Hercules,’ the president says in his soft voice that is like a whisper…’You are a magician, a master chef. You have outdone yourself again. Good man.'”)

On the other hand, this book—like the Tubman literature we discussed—also raises the broader question of how books aimed at children should treat slavery. Columnist and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty argued that what is desperately needed is complex children’s literature that makes space for the humanity—and even the smiles—of the enslaved, but without sugar-coating slavery and its brutal dangers. The real Hercules, Twitty notes, eventually ran away from George Washington—an act of explicit dissent that mystified and angered the president.

What do you think about the debate over A Birthday Cake for George Washington? If Sernett is right that our children’s literature reflects what an adult society wants to remember, then what do books like this reflect? I’d be interested in your thoughts, either here or in class.

Woodrow Wilson at Princeton

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wilson

UPDATE: Read the recently released report explaining Princeton’s decision to keep Wilson’s name on University buildings.

Woodrow Wilson, one of the figures you have been reading about this week, made the news last semester when students at Princeton staged a protest demanding that his name be removed from the campus’s buildings and schools.

Their protest won the approval of the New York Times editorial board, and for some writers the event (coming in the wake of larger discussions about Confederate memorials in the South) raised larger questions about which figures should be honored in the public square and on college campuses.

Others, including a historian at Princeton, argued that the focus on Wilson’s racist policies at home was obscuring his problematic foreign policy. To put it in terms that Crisp and Trouillot might use, he suggested that in correcting one “silence,” the conversation about Wilson at Princeton raised the danger of creating another, different “silence.”

Happy Presidents Day

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I hope you are all enjoying Presidents Day. I’ve spent a part of it thinking about how presidents often become “legendary Americans” of the sort we have been studying. As we saw when we discussed Francois Furstenberg’s book, Americans often turned to George Washington, above all, as a symbol of the nation’s highest ideals. And I think we’ve seen that this continues even today, especially at moments of high partisan conflict of the sort that Parson Weems and Federalists like Washington himself often deplored.

Consider, for example, the recent cover of the New Yorker magazine, which depicted a number of presidents (Washington most prominently) expressing chagrin about Donald Trump:

ny-presidents-cover

That cover reminded me of a discovery I made a few years ago, which is that searches for Washington’s Farewell Address on Google still peak in October and November: in other words, around elections. You can see the trend for yourself. The popularity of that search seems to have been highest in October and November of 2004, a moment of extreme political division.

Perhaps, then, the patterns that Furstenberg noticed in the ways that Washington and presidents were used in the early republic to address fears of political division have not gone away. Indeed, there may be a whole host of ways in which Weems’s work in deifying Washington continue to influence us, as historian Joseph Adelman argues in an article for The Atlantic today.

What about you? Have you noticed past Presidents or Washington being cited today to speak to the concerns of this election cycle?

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Usable Pasts

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I hope you have all had a good Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! On Thursday, we briefly talked about the ways that stories about King are often used to make political points in the present. On the one hand, commentators like Wolf Blitzer and Armond Budish have cited King’s example of nonviolence to criticize or warn black protestors. On the other hand, others have used different words of King’s to explain that he was more radical than mainstream memories of him allow, and that he would have understood or even joined protests like the ones in Baltimore and Ferguson.

Arguably, both of these arguments exemplify the tendency of Americans across the political spectrum to turn to larger-than-life historical figures in search of a “usable past.” That’s a term and a concept that we’ll be returning to over the course of the semester. And the search for a “usable past” in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., was also on full display again today.

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