The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn 9780801455469

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Watson and the Shark
2. “Oh! Susanna”
3. “Mary Lyon, Massachusetts”
4. William Howard Taft’s Drawers
5. Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt
6. V-J Day, 1945, Times Square
7. The Kinsey Reports
8. The Quiet American
9. That Touch of Mink
10. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965
11. President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Address
Conclusion
Notes
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

THE FAMILIAR MADE STRANGE

THE FAMILIAR MADE STRANGE AMERICAN ICONS AND ARTIFACTS AFTER T H E TR A NS NATI O N A L T UR N

Edited by Brooke L. Blower an d Mark Philip Bradley

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The familiar made strange : American icons and artifacts after the transnational turn / edited by Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5249-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8014-7911-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United States—Historiography. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. National characteristics, American, in art. 4. Transnationalism. I. Blower, Brooke Lindy, 1976– editor. II. Bradley, Mark, 1961– editor. III. DeLay, Brian, 1971–. Watson and the shark. Container of (work): E175.F36 2015 973—dc23 2014035314 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing Paperback printing

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Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction BROOKE L. BLOWER AND MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

1

1. Watson and the Shark BRIAN DELAY

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2. “Oh! Susanna” BRIAN ROULEAU

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3. “Mary Lyon, Massachusetts” MARY A. RENDA

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4. William Howard Taft’s Drawers ANDREW J. ROTTER

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5. Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL

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6. V-J Day, 1945, Times Square BROOKE L. BLOWER

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7. The Kinsey Reports NAOKO SHIBUSAWA

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8. The Quiet American FREDRIK LOGEVALL

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9. That Touch of Mink NICK CULLATHER

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10. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF

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CO N T E N TS

11. President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Address MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

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Conclusion DANIEL T. RODGERS

Notes

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Contributors Index

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Ack nowledgments

This volume had its origins in roundtable sessions at the 2012 conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and the 2013 conference of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). At those meetings participants offered short, suggestive readings of iconic American sources, from Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” to Grant Wood’s American Gothic, that employed various forms of transnational analysis to shed new light on their creation, circulation, and reception. Audience response was so enthusiastic—particularly about the pedagogic potential of using single, familiar texts to elucidate the methodological choices that must be made to write about and teach American history in transnational frameworks—that we commissioned the essays here. Some of them build upon papers presented at SHAFR or OAH. Most are entirely new. We are grateful to our contributors for their willingness to join in the spirit of the project with such fine essays that illustrate the vibrant plurality of topics, methods, and interpretations that inhabit the field. We are especially grateful to Daniel T. Rodgers for his eloquent afterword, to Melani McAlister for her deep engagement with the project, and to Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press for his generous and enthusiastic support of the project from its inception. We also wish to thank Sarah MillerDavenport for her tireless efforts to obtain the permissions necessary for the volume’s illustrations, Cornell University Press for careful copyediting and production expertise, and Boston University’s Center for the Humanities and College of Arts & Sciences for a grant to help fund the book’s images.

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Introduction BROOKE L. BLOWER AND MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

When painter Grant Wood first unveiled his now classic American Gothic in 1930, viewers were not sure whether to read the portrait as an affectionate homage to don’t-tread-on-me pioneer fortitude or as a satirical indictment of farmerly narrow-mindedness. These two Iowans in front of their board-and-batten house, rickrack apron on and pitchfork resolutely in hand, were they “lovable folk”? Or, as one observer said, did the painting belong in a cheese factory, because “that woman’s face would positively sour milk.” Audiences did agree on one thing. Those who saw the work on traveling exhibition or at Chicago’s Century of Progress Fair in 1934 and 1935, where visitors bought more prints of Wood’s painting than any other, regarded it as unmistakably, quintessentially American. That couple “might have come from many parts of this country but no other,” a typical viewer insisted.1 Already by 1941, the painting had become such a well-known and “peculiarly American” icon that Fortune magazine nominated it for use as a World War II mobilization poster. Since then, American Gothic has been lampooned in the New Yorker, enlisted to draw attention to poverty and racism in Gordon Parks’s photograph of the charwoman Ella Watson, deployed in a Coors Light advertisement aimed at gay and lesbian consumers featuring a beefy, overall-clad man wielding a pitchfork next to his male partner, and updated in Brian DeYoung’s painting The Heisenbergs, an homage to Americans’ recent socioeconomic woes as chronicled by the television series Breaking Bad.2 1

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Figure 1. Grant Wood (American, 1892–1942), American Gothic, 1930, oil on beaverboard, Art Institute of Chicago. © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

If late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century audiences have valued American Gothic for its mutability and commercial possibilities, commentators in the depths of the Great Depression instead appreciated Wood’s work for capturing a widespread desire to evoke a hard-fought and exceptional “American way of life.” The United States had been built upon the labors of austere individuals like those painted by Grant Wood, the journalist Albert Shaw offered reassuringly, “men and women

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of stout hearts and firm jaws” who survived hard times before and could again.3 Wood himself encouraged the notion that his painting was in every respect homegrown, claiming that he derived his aesthetic from the old chinaware on his boyhood farm. “Stay at home and paint America,” he told young artists, rather than searching abroad for “Europy” models to emulate. Scholars have often taken Wood’s declaration that he sought an “American way of looking at things” as a starting point for their own readings of American Gothic, tracing the artist’s inspirations to everything from family tintypes, frontier photography, and Currier and Ives engravings to the Sears, Roebuck catalog.4 Viewed through a domestic lens, it is hard not to conclude that Wood’s style and pivotal role in the creation of 1930s nationalist iconography—which has had such a lasting effect on how Americans envision themselves—was born and sustained from a newfound appreciation for local folkways. But what if these approaches obscure as much as they reveal about Grant Wood’s work and the broader political culture to which it originally belonged? Viewed through a transnational lens, can American Gothic take us to very different interpretative places? Wood in fact took multiple trips abroad during the 1920s, which proved more formative than the artist let on, a buried legacy of overseas influences hinted at by the pointedarch tracery in the window behind American Gothic’s couple. Traveling to France and Germany in 1928, for example, exposed Wood to medieval stained-glass craftsmanship and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish portraiture. In American Gothic Wood made flat color blocks, decorative patternwork, and boldly foregrounded subjects his hallmarks just as they had been for Northern Renaissance painters, a change that transformed him from a run-of-the-mill impressionist to one of the United States’ most well-known artists.5 A reading of Wood’s famous portrait that emphasizes what he learned abroad and then brought home presents a different way to conceptualize the invention of American traditions and art forms. It hints at how icons like Wood’s were often created not simply from deep introspection but also through processes of overseas appropriation, reinterpretation, and domestication. Alternatively, tracking Wood’s European itineraries might lead in another direction—to the otherwise obscured relationship between Wood’s art, his sexuality, and his very sense of being in the world. The art historian R. Tripp Evans argues that for the Iowa painter, who long struggled with his attraction to men, it was his sojourn in Weimar Germany that ultimately unlocked his mature artistic vision and style. Simultaneously encountering the tumultuous republic’s Neue Sachlichkeit art and its cosmopolitan gay subculture, Wood

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returned to Cedar Rapids with a set of transformative intellectual and personal experiences. The same year he experimented with Flemish-inspired design and painted American Gothic, Wood also completed the provocatively hypermasculine landscape Stone City, Iowa. Sporting rolling fields of “undeniably erotic curves,” the canvas swells in the upper-right corner into a cleft hill resembling “a pair of rounded, passively upturned buttocks,” writes Evans, and “penetrated at their base by a felicitously placed tree.” Slier and more subversive than commonly acknowledged, the painter’s pristine scenes of small-town Americana played with the possibilities of disguise. They hid the foreign in the familiar and masked considerably more than a borrowed paintbrush technique.6 If transnational readings of American Gothic help to illuminate the longdistance circuits through which Grant Wood negotiated both his painterly style and his sexual desires, they can also shed light on the makings of a broader American cultural nationalism in the 1930s. Turning to rural rather than cosmopolitan motifs as embodiments of the nation was hardly an enterprise exclusive to Wood or his American contemporaries during the economic and political upheavals of the Great Depression. Writers and artists

Figure 2. Grant Wood (American, 1892–1942), Stone City, Iowa, 1930, oil on panel, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, gift of the Art Institute of Omaha. © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

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from the muralists and indigenists of Latin America to the regionalists and Popular Front artists of Europe also sought to revive the organic rhythms of the countryside and hold up the proud industriousness of the Volk as an antidote to the perceived bankruptcy of modern industrial society. Wood and many other American artists, writers, and photographers drew upon these debates and wider field of vision.7 Too often read as distinctly American idioms that bore witness to unique domestic political, economic, and social problems, iconic works such as American Gothic were constituted, sometimes indirectly and at other times directly, in transnational space. They evoke a history of resonances and entanglements—a histoire croisée in which Americans did not always form a vanguard or act alone but instead operated on a shared international terrain. Pausing over a single source, such as American Gothic, presents an opportunity to really view transnational approaches to history at work—to see more clearly the various ways in which choices about scale, angle, and narrative trajectory impact understandings of the American past. The contributors to The Familiar Made Strange center their essays on one revealing text or artifact in order to offer similar entrées into transnational methods, processes, and contexts. Spanning the history of the United States from the 1770s to the 1970s, they employ sources ranging from John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark to Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, the Kinsey reports, and Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address. Some authors focus on well-known icons, such as Stephen Foster’s song “Oh! Susanna” or Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, that have been commonly read through an exceptionalist lens but can offer new insights when analyzed in light of overseas evidence. Others identify sources that did not seem so very important before—such as William Howard Taft’s underpants, a doll in the likeness of the founder of Mount Holyoke College, or a Doris Day film— but reveal new dimensions of American history when situated in international contexts. Still others help us see how texts like the British novelist Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, written far outside American shores, became domestic icons and defined popular perceptions of U.S. wars overseas. What joins them together is a desire to do what Thomas Bender urged in the seminal volume Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002), “to restore some sense of strangeness, of unfamiliarity, to American historical experience” by “deprovincializing” the writing of U.S. history.8 Many modern icons, like American Gothic, have often been imbued with such strong nationalist connotations that they appear at first impervious to transnational readings, making the perspectives here all the more playful, powerful, and revealing.9

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The “transnational turn” in United States history, now more than a decade in the making, took off from a deceptively simple insight: adopting frameworks that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders can upend established stories and generate new interpretive possibilities. Following calls in the 1990s to question the exceptionalism and self-contained nature of the American experience, an outpouring of research, including that of our contributors, has generated a number of exciting historical discoveries.10 The American Revolution has been reimagined in the wider context of an Atlantic world beset by a crisis of imperial administration and swirling with revolutionary ideas, just as the U.S. Civil War has emerged as one node in a worldwide moment of nation-state formation, labor and market reconfiguration, and emancipation.11 Similarly, the quintessentially American New Deal, usually rendered as a patchwork of homegrown reform improvised on the spot during the Great Depression, becomes instead the product of a long, intense age of transatlantic policy competition and exchange. So too the civil rights movement, commonly envisioned as a story about the relationships between high-profile national figures and tenacious local activists, appears just as much propelled by engagements with empire, decolonization, Cold War politics, and tactic sharing across borders.12 Offering a sampling of the range and variety of this transformative scholarship, the essays that make up The Familiar Made Strange also build upon the field’s interpretive perspectives in order to explore, in very specific and grounded ways, how U.S. politics, culture, and society have been made through a complex interplay of local, regional, national, and global dynamics. The results can be surprising, unsettling, even subversive. Copley’s Watson and the Shark, Taft’s underpants, and Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle expose an American world deeply embedded in the ways of empire even as that imperial order’s exploitive powers were often masked by the very images and objects that gave it shape and substance. At the same time, however, these essays do not replace one-size-fits-all national perimeters with equally reflexive “global” ones or an overblown sense of Americans’ “We Are the World” importance, as Louis A. Pérez has cautioned against. Even as they chart movements that are quite far-flung, the authors assembled here demonstrate how certain routes became particularly thick with traffic and meaning. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, for example, takes the common image of the entire world as the backdrop for the United States’ recent immigration streams and chisels that geography down primarily to those regions that have been marked by sustained and violent U.S. intervention, revealing that, like the South Asian or North African populations of Great Britain or France, recent immigrant communities in the United States, too, should be seen in the context

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of longer-standing colonial relationships. In Josephine Baker’s shimmy shake or Cary Grant’s throwaway line about “the untapped resources of underdeveloped nations” in That Touch of Mink, we see not carefree celebrations of circulation and encounter taking place on level, mutually beneficial playing fields—what Frederick Cooper has criticized as the “Dance of the Flows and the Fragments.” We see instead real power differentials at work in the fine details of everyday life.13 In each of these essays people, practices, and objects defy state structures and spill out into the warp and woof of international economies, migration routes, and global imaginaries. The results, however, often highlight rather than ignore the real and imagined potency of the nation-state. As the strange career of “Oh! Susanna” suggests, even globe-trotting icons can prove impervious to being wrenched out of some sense of nationalist ownership. Bringing transnational sensibilities to the study of Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, or Jimmy Carter’s human rights talk likewise draws attention to how thoroughly patriotic remembrance can elide the palpable presence in American society of such problems as sexual violence, the limitations of racial liberalism, or apathy about human suffering. The essays in this volume show how thinking beyond U.S. borders can help us not to disregard borders but to see them in novel ways. In his concluding commentary, Daniel T. Rodgers reminds us that it is often in the smallest of clues—a palm tree on the seal of Mount Holyoke College or a brief conversation between the protagonists of Greene’s The Quiet American—where the power of a transnational lens can be most revealing. Equally arresting is how those clues lead scholars down a wide variety of methodological paths. Just as there is more than one way to reinterpret American Gothic in transnational perspective, historians have embraced multiple optics to rethink American history in broader frameworks.14 Some of the essays assembled here highlight the importance of analyzing representations—how Americans, like Doris Day’s fans, have looked out at the world and how those perceptions have shaped U.S. goals and policies, or, conversely, as Naoko Shibusawa’s investigation of overseas interpretations of the Kinsey reports suggests, how American sources have been received abroad or become international symbols repurposed for political use by others. Another methodological tack emphasizes instead the processes of borrowing and trading—how Americans like Grant Wood have gone abroad and picked up techniques and ideas from others and then brought them home, or how, as Mark Bradley explores, concerns first articulated far beyond U.S. shores gain traction in American life. Similarly, tracing the buying, selling, and appropriation of a single commodity, like

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the troublesome bananas Matthew Guterl follows, can be used to tease out how international political economies have linked the histories of different regions and peoples in unequal ways. Other essays stress the importance of personal networks—how travel, friendships, and intellectual cooperation across borders have created fruitful, if also sometimes fraught collaborations and exchanges, like those of John Singleton Copley, or else, as Mary Renda’s missionaries well knew, how personal connections provided sustenance and momentum for activists and social movements. Finally, these essays suggest the potential for transnationalizing American space—for, on the one hand, reimagining American places, like New York’s Times Square, as part of wider regions, routes, networks, and historical legacies, or, on the other hand, taking the U.S. insular territories, installations, and presence of Americans abroad seriously as factors in U.S. history, and seeing how overseas enclaves have been integral locales for forming ideas about self and nation. Each of these approaches comes with its own interpretive challenges and payoffs. But they share a common, experimental sensibility, and they are by no means mutually exclusive or exhaustive. There are different paths to blaze and more icons to reimagine from other angles and scales.15 As we brainstormed potential sources ripe for a transnational reading, all kinds of possibilities emerged that ultimately could not be included here: Benedict Arnold as an Atlantic world man and symbol; the border-crossing politics of the Underground Railroad; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn swept up in the capitalist and imperial currents of the Mississippi; the Nineteenth Amendment and feminist international networking; Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother in the context of emerging conceptions of global poverty and development; a Deep South drinking fountain situated in a world history of racial segregation; television footage of the moon landing in light of international space law; the Godfather trilogy understood in terms of twentieth-century drugs and arms trade; or the Defense of Marriage Act as an immigration and foreign policy issue. We encourage readers to think beyond our particular selections and consider how other American icons and artifacts might be seen anew in a transnational framework, as well as what such an approach might mean for understanding the American past.

Ch a p ter 1

Watson and the Shark BRIAN DELAY

John Singleton Copley stepped back from the canvas in 1778 and took in the shocking scene. A nude boy floats helplessly in clear water, transfixed before the approach of an immense shark, jaws wide, close enough to touch. Rescuers struggle to bring their small boat closer. Four men row and stare, numbly. Two lean over the water and strain to reach the boy, while an older man, ashen, grips one of them by the shirt and gapes at the shining gray animal below. A black man stands upright, clasping one end of a hopeless rope. A final figure wields a boat hook in his raised hands, poised to bury it in the monster’s back. Anchored ships and quiet buildings rest in the distance, orderly and indifferent to the drama in the harbor. Watson and the Shark is still an arresting sight today, even after two centuries of dulling celebrity. The painting has inspired decades of probing art historical scholarship and is rightly regarded as a landmark of early American cultural production. But the object can be read just as well for the tangled transnational connections that bound both its creator and subject to the broader Atlantic world in an age of revolution. Excavating those connections can help reveal the strangeness beneath this object’s iconic familiarity. The painting raises its own questions, apart from context, and they need to be addressed first. The would-be rescue boat occupies the physical center of the work, propelled by four young men at the oars. Their faces are arrayed along a narrow emotional spectrum. On the far left, at the stern of the boat, 9

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Figure 3. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), Watson and the Shark, 1778, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund 1963.6.1.

the lad with the scarf and the crumpled brow regards the boy in the water with evident concern. A modest reaction given the extraordinary context, but among the four he is far the most expressive. The two mates opposite him look almost unaware or indifferent; indeed, the one in the rear wears a near-lazy expression, impassive, with eyelids down and mouth shut against any emotion. One can even detect a trace of bemusement in the expression of the fourth oarsman near the bow. This character almost seems out of place, an afterthought that does little for the painting as a whole other than belie the action. Why do we not see animation, horror, panic? Why not paint mouths open wide in shock and panic? The attitude, it seems, is important to a studied tension within the painting. These faces impute a sense of fatalism to the work. There is no outrage and little struggle, just observation. Two other boys actually engage the moment, one’s arm wrapped round the other as the pair lean into the abyss, grasping hands just unable to reach. Their struggle, if fruitless, contrasts with the passivity of the oarsmen. All together the boys represent two attitudes toward futility. The oarsmen observe what seems the inevitable, while their determined if hapless mates struggle against it, to no avail. This tension with futility is also at work in the

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figure of the black man. He holds a rope tight in his left fist, but the end he has thrown has failed its purpose. In a hopeless protest against this failure, his right hand reaches out as if to grasp Watson’s upturned palm. The distance is fantastic but ultimately no further than the infinity between Watson and his other would-be saviors. The black man’s head is easily the visual center of the painting, an effect magnified by the contrast of his skin against a white shirt and white sky. His open mouth saves him from the indifference of the oarsmen, but his face is hardly alive with emotion. This slowness of expression contrasts with the speed of the impending event and contributes to a general sense of powerlessness. The central geometry of the painting is a triangle running along Watson’s body and out his upturned hand to the tip of the boat hook, up the shaft to the top of the painting, down again along the line of the black man’s arm, and concluding at the boy’s mysterious right leg. Brook Watson, the inspiration for this painting, lost a leg in this attack, yet the leg simply ends in the painting. If we know what to look for, we can see the water obscured by some subtle, deep reds near the stump. Why did Copley choose to paint the victim nude? Ostensibly Watson had gone for a morning swim in hot and humid Havana, and he might well have gone naked. But the visual impact is more than enough justification. Just as the black man’s head contrasts with the light colors around it, the boy’s pink-white body stands out against the darkness of surrounding waters. The image also suggests a position of complete vulnerability that would be diminished were it hidden with clothes. His position reinforces his helplessness, upside down and prostrate before death, so clearly overcome with fear that he attempts nothing but the impossible—to reach his savior several feet away. Moreover, naked Watson is implicated in the event to a degree impossible if clothed. Were he dressed in shirt and pants, we might think he fell out of the very boat that came to his rescue. As it is, the boy is alone, neither properly at place in water nor the boat. He somehow courts the monster through his nudity and sets himself off from the other men, extraordinary in his need and pointing to his only hope. The man with the boat hook is the figure in the painting through whom Copley breaks with futility. Unlike all the impossibilities in the work—the grasping boys, the black man’s rope, or Watson’s pathetic upturned hand— the man with the hook has a chance. The distances are everything: from the spear to the shark, and the shark to the boy, the span is nearly the same. All the other futilities of the composition, especially Watson’s stretch, lend a powerful negative force to the hero’s impending push. Will it be enough? To appreciate the hero’s power we have to consider his situational twin. The balding boatswain is the only other participant genuinely focused on

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the adversary, and his face betrays more emotion than any other. The older man is beaten by the very sight of the shark surging below him. Copley enhances his inadequacy by unbuttoning his shirt, leaving him as disheveled as he is unprepared for the challenge. The hero, on the other hand, stands above that fear. He is steeled in the presence of the massive beast; though his face is flat, it is flat with determination rather than fatalistic indifference. The key difference apart from his dynamic body is his flashing white eye staring steady at the target. Copley dresses this savior differently from the others. His clothes indicate status, composure; they communicate a natural virtue in the ranking of men: he is the better man in every sense. He is, with his spear, the shark’s only equal. He even resembles the shark with his fin-like blowing hair. The contest is properly between them alone; all the others are victims or impotent bystanders. Copley underlines this through light, glittering off the hero’s buttons, his buckle, his boat hook, and finally off the monster’s incandescent teeth, sparkling in the Havana sun like so much broken glass. The shark is a pure adversary. A monster, attacking from an invisible place, with no logic or warning, allowing for nothing like preparation, only reaction. A clean and instant test, appropriate only to the focused hero in Copley’s boat. But for the boy in the water, the shark is no adversary at all. It is death. For him there is no contending with the animal; he can only succumb or be saved. Watson and the Shark is now such a celebrated mainstay of early American art that it is difficult to appreciate the strangeness, even the audacity of its conception and execution. Copley possessed large ambitions and artistic daring. He took a significant risk in making such a curious entry into the international art world. So the most interesting question to ask about the object is a basic one: why did Copley create this painting? Born in Boston in 1738 and raised in the city, John Singleton Copley received his earliest training in mezzotint portraiture and painting from his gifted stepfather, the artist Peter Pelham. A quick study engrossed by the work, the apprentice soon surpassed his teacher. By his early twenties, the precocious Copley had arguably emerged as the premier artist in British North America. Many of his painted portraits have been burned into the collective American imagination, an indispensable visual component of our founding mythology. Yet the colonies were an unfriendly place for a great painter. To become the artist he aspired to be, Copley had to go to Europe, visit the museums, study the masters, and exhibit his own work in the Old World. He sailed for London in 1774, traveling on to Paris and Rome. Copley returned to London in 1775 to try his hand at history painting. His

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portraiture work remained sought after, but considered somewhat ill suited to someone with designs on being a great artist. Copley himself acknowledged these pressures in a letter to a friend; “I don’t think a man a perfect Artist who on occasion cannot paint history.” A contemporary expressed the same attitude, as well as the nationalistic function of epic works: “History painting and sculpture should be the main views of any people desirous of gaining honors in the arts. These are the tests by which the national character will be tried in after ages, and by which it has been, and is now, tried by the natives of other countries.”1 Copley took inspiration in this most exalted art form from Benjamin West, another American expatriate who had pioneered major innovations in historical painting. While other painters immortalized classical or biblical events, West boldly portrayed more contemporary subjects. Like his celebrated Death of General Wolfe (1770), which immortalized the final triumph of a renowned officer during the Seven Years’ War, his best work assigned a kind of mythical dimension to key events in England’s recent history.2 Once established in London, Copley began searching for the right subject for his own entry into this highest of art forms. According to most scholars, the subject chose him.3 Nearly all studies of the painting assume London merchant Brook Watson commissioned Copley to paint a picture of an event in his childhood when he was maimed by a shark. This could have happened. If so, one can only marvel at Copley’s luck, and at his intuition. On its face this dramatic but relatively insignificant incident seemed categorically unfit for history painting, a genre devoted to pivotal battles and high politics. But the artist recognized an opportunity. Beyond the exciting visuals, Watson’s desperate trauma could be transformed into a reassuring and particularly British moment. West’s great paintings, like historical paintings of all kinds, depended on a general knowledge of outcomes. The Death of General Wolfe was and is a powerful work largely because viewers already knew Wolfe’s story: the man died on the Plains of Abraham before the gates of Quebec, moments after his forces secured one of the most improbable and consequential victories Britain enjoyed over France in the Seven Years’ War. Watson’s tale had none of the national glory, of course, but the painting it inspired likewise harnessed knowledge of final outcomes. The short-term outcome, for those who didn’t already know, was made plain by the painting’s original title when first displayed at the Royal Academy: “A boy attacked by a shark, and rescued by some seamen in a boat; founded on a fact which happened in the harbor of the Havana.”4 Long-term outcomes mattered more still. Many and perhaps most viewing the panting at the Royal Academy would have known that the boy not

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only survived; he went on to achieve improbable economic and social success. Born to modest circumstances in England, Brook Watson had been orphaned at six and shipped off to live with relatives in Boston. He remained there until age fourteen (during which time he may have possibly met young John Singleton Copley, three years his junior), when his uncle sent him off to work at sea.5 And that was the year, 1749, that he took his fateful swim in Havana harbor. In spite of his humble origins, his brush with death, and his resulting disability, Watson had become a wealthy and well-connected merchant in the transatlantic trade by the time of the painting’s execution. So viewers could easily have seen in Watson and the Shark a general message about triumph over adversity. But both the artist’s background and the alarming newspaper headlines in 1778 would have encouraged them to think more concretely, to see in the painting a statement about the ongoing American rebellion. Copley’s correspondence suggests confidence that the insurgent colonists would not only triumph, but go on to construct “a mighty empire.” Upon hearing of Lexington and Concord, the artist shared with his brother a “settled conviction that all the power of Great Britain will not reduce [the Americans] to obedience.” These sentiments have since convinced some scholars to see Watson and the Shark in part as an expression of Copley’s confidence in American victory over British tyranny. Thus one prominent student sees the work “as an allegory of the struggle between the Old World and the New, with monstrous power on the side of the former and barehanded, invincible courage on the side of the latter.”6 But as the artist himself no doubt understood before undertaking the work, his London audience would have been far more likely to see precisely the reverse: a dangerous, unpredictable, and brutal New World, testing the Old but ultimately bending to British courage, power, and perseverance. This would have been to see England tried in the wounded, helpless youth, and England’s impending triumph personified in the hero with the boat hook, a modern-day Saint George with spear about to save the empire from its dragon. Copley’s English viewers surely interpreted the work through multiple lenses, including the religious and the classical.7 But the political reading, inevitable given the artist’s recent arrival from Boston, would almost certainly have been a reassuring one. The theme of English competence and success in the New World would have been welcome relief from the dreary facts of the war by 1778, when the humiliations of battlefield defeat were compounded by the ominous news that France had formally aligned with the Americans against Great Britain. Two secondary images were artificial to the scene but indispensable for Copley’s composition and its deliberate historical effect of an English trial in

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the New World. The first is a classic symbol of England’s empire: an imposing British warship, resting at anchor against the background of Havana’s Morro Castle. This ship is a Copley invention. The large flag at the stern is a traditional red ensign with the Union flag at the top corner of a red field, stiffened by a breeze but nearly transparent. This was the standard identifying national flag of British vessels from 1707 to 1800. The smaller Union flag flying at the jackstaff on the bow, however, was reserved for the British navy. All other vessels had to fly the St. George’s jack: a simple cross on white background.8 Whatever young Watson’s errand in Havana, we can be reasonably certain he hadn’t sailed in with the Royal Navy. Only in times of war would British warships be expected in Havana harbor. This was something Londoners well knew, because their navy had conquered and occupied Havana in 1762 near the close of the Seven Years’ War, some thirteen years after Watson had lost his leg. The improbable capture of the supposedly impenetrable fortress of Havana continued to resonate in Britain during the 1770s, finding its way into high-level historic paintings from the period. Thus the imaginary British warship (and, by association, the fair-skinned sailors rushing to save the day) served twin purposes: to represent England and to ignite in viewers’ minds reassuring memories of a recent imperial triumph. Indeed, contemporaries could be forgiven if, like one prominent reviewer at the original exhibition, they mistakenly assumed that Watson’s mishap occurred during the British occupation.9 The black sailor prominently inserted near the center of the composition signaled not the Old World but the New. There were probably more black sailors in Havana’s port than most others. And it is also quite possible that young Watson sailed to Cuba on a ship partially manned by black seamen. Free black men found the maritime trade to be perhaps the most equal-opportunity and equal-wage employer available to them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 What remains striking is not simply the presence of the man but the way Copley centers him. In an earlier pencil study of the rescue group (now at the Detroit Institute of Arts), the figure throwing the rope is a white man with long hair. Perhaps Copley replaced him with a black man as an afterthought to enhance the exotic American setting of his painting.11 Benjamin West famously did something very similar in his Death of General Wolfe. The painting features the dying general surrounded by stricken comrades, their grief disrupted by a single American Indian sitting on the ground with his chin resting on his fist and a joyful look of wonder and curiosity upon his face. The Indian with the fascinated expression introduces an “exotic” other into the scene, emphasizing the North American setting of Wolfe’s great and final victory. Copley

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not only learned from West’s innovation of painting historical works about contemporary events; it seems he likewise profited from the great artist’s example with the introduction of an alien other among Englishmen as a New World signifier. With a few tactical inventions, then, Copley unearthed in Watson’s Cuban misadventure a most canny and potent subject for his inaugural foray into London’s high art scene. Perhaps Watson did in fact conceive of the work, handing the young painter a commission perfectly suited not only to his artistic ambitions but to the political moment. Watson and the Shark enabled Copley to thread the needle: offering the British art world a history painting of irresistible originality during the American War for Independence—a work that was both distinctively American and deliberately but subtly reassuring to British anxieties. So suited was the episode to the artist’s needs that one wonders whether Copley himself heard of Watson’s ordeal, thought through the possibilities, and initiated the project on his own. Whatever Brook Watson’s role in the painting’s creation, it seems the heroic treatment of the attack somehow transformed the event’s meaning for him. In 1803 Watson received a baronetcy. His new coat of arms featured “a human Leg and erased below the Knee,” as well as Neptune “repelling a shark in the act of securing its Prey.”12 Certainly the event was of singular importance in his life, recalled with the peg-legged thonk of every step he took. But just as the moment seems at first glance wildly inappropriate for high-style history painting, it verged on the absurd emblazoned on a coat of arms. On the face of it Watson’s defining moment—skinny-dipping in a shark-infested harbor—proved a nearly fatal lapse of youthful judgment. Surely the fullgrown man could have summoned other, more creditable episodes from his long and productive life of social and economic ascent. He had served with distinction under Wolfe in the Seven Years’ War, for example. Indeed, Watson later received something of a hero’s welcome in London for swimming across an ice-choked river to single-handedly (and single-footedly) rescue a herd of British cattle from the French.13 Impressive stuff. Yet an aging Brook Watson chose to enshrine the same moment that so fascinated Copley. Of course his choice lacked the audacity of Copley’s, if for no other reason than that the great painting had already become so famous. Between the painting’s exhibition and the baronetcy, the incident came to affix itself to Watson’s public persona. In the 1780s and 1790s, for example, when he assumed a series of prominent commissary positions, wits on both sides of the Atlantic quipped about the affinities between commissaries and sharks.14 Perhaps the piece worked a curious magic not

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only upon Watson’s public persona, but also upon his own sense of self. When the old merchant died in 1807, he bequeathed his copy of Watson and the Shark to Christ’s Hospital in London, since it “holds out a useful lesson” for young people. Presumably the lesson was something more than “don’t go swimming in Havana.”15 Watson’s identification with the shark attack proved so artistically potent, publicly amusing, and personally useful that neither the man’s contemporaries nor later students of the painting paid much attention to his purpose in Cuba. What had he been doing there in Havana, anyway? He hadn’t been present at the city’s reduction in 1762, so he must have been part of a trading voyage. But under the prevailing regime of mercantilism, trade between the empires of Britain and Spain had been tightly controlled throughout the eighteenth century. In the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, British negotiators won from Spain the coveted asiento de negros: an agreement allowing England to send one five-hundred-ton merchant ship to trade in the Spanish Indies each year, and, far more important, granting the South Sea Company rights to import and sell 140,000 slaves in Spanish territory for the duration of the agreement. Moreover, in the 1740s, Spain’s Royal Havana Company occasionally contracted with merchants in British North American ports to ship supplies into Havana. So while most trade remained prohibited, there were important exceptions. It is therefore conceivable that young Watson found his way onto an authorized British voyage to Cuba.16 But it is more likely that he and his employers were smuggling. Despite terms of the asiento and of the Royal Havana Company charter designed to discourage and police contraband trade, smuggling remained, in the words of one cynical Spanish royal minister, “as bottomless as the ocean, and a sea of such breadth that land is never discovered.” Since the seventeenth century, authorities in Havana allowed British ships entry into the harbor in order to shelter from storms, seek repairs, and take on wood and water. Invoking any of these needs gave ship’s captains all the opportunity they needed to pay routine bribes to local officials and offload illicit cargoes of slaves, cloth, clothing, and European manufactured goods. The frequency with which British ships had to avail themselves of Havana’s “emergency” hospitality strained credulity; but, as one royal official put it in 1748, the year before Watson’s memorable visit, “foreigners act like idiots when it is convenient for their business.” However unexceptional their endeavors, smugglers gambled when they traded across imperial lines in the West Indies. Spanish officials were notorious for their “depredations” upon British ships caught trafficking illegally. In Watson’s sorry case, the shark seems to have collected a duty

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where the king had been denied. Put in this light, Copley’s decision to put a British warship in the painting’s background seems even more the clever artifice it was. Though inter-imperial smuggling of the sort Watson seems to have been engaged in carried little stigma in eighteenth-century Britain, Unlucky Petty Smuggler Watson and the Shark would hardly do for a national historical moment. When placed in proper context, then, Copley’s painting immortalizes an economic practice that by its very nature was scarcely documented elsewhere but absolutely crucial to the webs that bound together the early modern Atlantic world. It is too tidy to suggest that Watson’s brush with death reformed him of his illicit trading. But one way or another, he found he could make a fortune in legal commerce. Once fitted with a wooden leg, he sought work in Boston and ended up in Nova Scotia instead. There he became, among other things, an assistant commissary agent for the British army. After nine years of service, including not only his dramatic cattle rescue but also a prominent role in the Acadian expulsion, he recrossed the Atlantic and settled in London. Watson mobilized his New World contacts to establish himself as a transatlantic merchant. By 1773 he had risen to be the leading partner in Watson and Rashleigh, the firm that controlled most of the trade between London and Halifax. The company’s commercial interests included trading fish from the waters of Labrador and Nova Scotia to Spain, and furs from Quebec to Britain. It also engaged in the timber trade and whale fisheries. In 1775 alone, Watson and Rashleigh shipped £40,000 worth of furs and other products to London.17 Just as the cultural currents of the Atlantic world moved John Singleton Copley west to east, the economic currents of that same system washed Brook Watson east to west. Copley left the colonies for the artistic opportunities of the Old World; Watson left England and built a fortune and reputation through the business opportunities of the New. These two men’s lives brush past each other on several levels, and thoroughly tangle together with the politics of the American Revolution, the most important public event of their lives. Copley left Boston because of art, and because of politics never returned. The artist refused to openly take sides in issues leading up to the Revolutionary War, “Political contests being neither pleasing to an artist nor advantageous to the Art itself.”18 But family ties eventually made this position untenable. In 1769 Copley had married Susanna Clarke, daughter of one of Boston’s most prominent loyalist merchants. This connection pulled Copley into one of the central events of the revolutionary era. In 1773, three Massachusetts firms were designated as consignees for a gigantic shipment of tea from the East India

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Company: Richard Clarke and sons, Copley’s in-laws; Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, sons of the governor; and Faneuil and Winslow, Boston’s representative for the London exporting firm of Watson and Rashleigh. That summer Brook Watson met often with Copley’s brother-in-law, Jonathan Clarke, to coordinate the shipment of the tea to America. When the ships finally arrived, Boston’s patriots famously demanded that the consignees return the tea. They sent a letter of refusal to the colonial assembly with their mediator, John Singleton Copley, who presented the message that the consignees would be willing to store the tea until the issue was resolved. The assembly refused. Copley shuttled back and forth, unable to break the stalemate whose finale we now call the Boston Tea Party. A few months later (April 1774), a small crowd caused a disturbance outside Copley’s home, suspecting the artist of housing a royal official. Copley sailed for Europe two months later. When war broke out in Boston, Copley’s loyalist family fled to join him in London, never to return.19 Meanwhile, Brook Watson busied himself with commerce, and with spying for the king. When patriot leaders discovered letters incriminating him in espionage in 1775, the merchant hastened to Canada. He had to depart Quebec, too (in the company of the storied Mohawk leader Thayendanegea, aka Joseph Brant, once the city came under American siege). Watson returned to London around the same time that Copley wrapped up his Continental tour.20 Three years later the artist completed the painting that got members of the Royal Academy buzzing about the remarkable American talent and his inspired immortalization of an Englishman’s trials in the New World. After the war, Brook Watson labored to sustain his trading ventures across the ocean and to collect honors at home. In his capacity as commissary general in North America during the early 1780s he oversaw the evacuation of loyalists to Nova Scotia. In 1784 Watson won election for the City of London to the House of Commons. He became commissary general to Britain’s army in Flanders in 1793, and the first one-legged Lord Mayor of London in 1796. He went on to be deputy governor of the Bank of England and chairman of Lloyd’s of London. From 1798 to 1806 Watson served as commissary general for all of Great Britain. He died one year later.21 Much like the subject of his breakthrough work, Copley withdrew further into England after the war. Watson and the Shark established his reputation as a major painter. Copley went on to do more historical paintings, of strictly English subjects: most notably The Death of the Earl of Chatham (1781) and The Death of Major Peirson (1784). Both earned great acclaim, but not so much as Watson and the Shark had. Copley’s star slowly began to wane in

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his later years, as did his skills. The great painter spent his last days in futile pursuit of former glories.22 While Copley, Watson, and the painting entered the nineteenth century snug in England’s arms, all three would find their way back across the Atlantic in decades to come. Copley may have decamped to enemy country during the Revolution and tactically exploited Britain’s hopes of conquest and dominion through his work. But Americans never renounced the man many regarded as their nation’s greatest artist. His reputation in the United States only grew over the nineteenth century as the self-conscious new republic sought exemplars of the country’s cultural potential. Inexpensive reproductions of Watson and the Shark helped popularize and cement Copley’s national appeal, and, in so doing, accomplished the improbable trick of turning Brook Watson into something of a marketable American icon himself. Traveling showmen charging admission to see historic panoramas in American cities included Watson’s encounter with the shark alongside scenes of ancient glories and revolutionary-era heroism. An advertisement for one such attraction in 1809 promised viewers “representation of the glorious Military Achievements of the American nation, executed in a masterly stile by a celebrated Italian painter.” Scenes included the battle of Bunker Hill; the American bombardment of Tripoli; the burning of the frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor; and “the view of the MORO CASTLE in Havanna, representing the historical trait of Brook Watson, Esq., who lost one of his legs by an enormous shark, was rescued and became some time after, Lord Mayor of London.” All this and more for one-dollar admission, the advertisement continued. “Children half price. N.B. No admittance for coloured people.”23 Finally, today all three of Copley’s original versions of Watson and the Shark reside in museums in the United States. One hangs in Detroit, another in Washington, D.C., and another in Boston, where artist and subject had lived as boys and where their tangled transatlantic lives first crossed.

Ch a p ter 2

“Oh! Susanna” BRIAN ROULEAU

I come from Alabama, With my banjo on my knee, I’se gwine to Louisiana, My true lub for to see; It rain’d all night de day I left, De wedder it was dry, The sun so hot I froze to def, Susanna, don’t you cry. CHORUS

Oh! Susanna, Oh don’t you cry for me, I’ve come from Alabama Wid my banjo on my knee. 2

I jumped aboard the telegraph, And trabbled down de ribber, De lectrick fluid magnified, And killed five hundred nigga. De bulgine bust, de hoss run off, I really thought I’d die; I shut my eyes to hold my bref, Susanna, don’t you cry. CHO: Oh! Susanna &c. 21

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Figure 4. Oh! Susanna. As Sung by the Ethiopian Serenaders, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

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I had a dream de udder night When ebry ting was still, I thought I saw Susanna dear A coming down de hill; De buck-wheat cake was in her mouf, De tear was in her eye; I says, “I’se coming from de souf, Susanna, don’t you cry.” CHO: Oh! Susanna &c.1 The garage band is not a recent phenomenon. Though many assume the trend traces its origins to the rock ’n’ roll rebellion of American suburbia

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during the 1960s, there was in fact deeper precedent for such youthful experimentation with emerging musical trends. Replace the garage with a nineteenth-century carriage house and rock with blackface minstrelsy and one can appreciate the beginnings of a young Stephen Foster’s career in composition. By 1846, the teenage Foster and his friends had formed “The Knights of the Square Table,” a music act that wrote songs they hoped would both attract girls and earn a little spending money. Circled around a piano, the boys worked to combine the sentiment of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic epics with minstrelsy’s more popular sensibilities. Their instinct was to join elements of high and low.2 Stephen Foster’s songwriting from that point forward remained devoted to fusing multiple influences, and if longevity marks musical success, that strategy must be considered successful. Born on the same day the United States celebrated its fiftieth year of independence, Foster, by the time of his death in 1864, had come to write some of the most enduring tunes yet created. “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” still pervade popular culture in concerts, cartoons, and commercial advertising. Indeed, Foster’s songs have become so omnipresent that many no longer know either their names or creator, but can instantly identify their tunes. But none of those songs remain quite so famous, so immediately recognizable, as “Oh! Susanna.” Yet that 1848 minstrel-show megahit is ordinarily ascribed modest beginnings. As the youngest surviving child of a Pennsylvania politico whose career along the Ohio River’s burgeoning commercial corridors frequently uprooted the family, Stephen, so the story goes, found himself bouncing between his parents’ and brothers’ businesses in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Regular movement along America’s interior wharves and waterways during the 1840s brought an adolescent Foster into close contact with not only the rollicking folk song of white and black rivermen, but also the growing cultural influence of itinerant blackface minstrel troupes.3 Blackface minstrelsy was, after all, the most wildly popular form of entertainment in antebellum America. With its origins as a theatrical form traceable to the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, minstrelsy had, by the 1830s, been transformed into mass entertainment by the likes of men such as Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice. A white traveling actor who worked the developing towns along the nation’s western rivers, Rice reportedly observed and then replicated onstage the song and dance of a crippled enslaved stable hand from Louisville. Using burnt cork to black his face, appearing in the

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garb of a “plantation darkey,” and using dialect associated with peoples of African origin, Rice initially inserted his act as a short accompaniment to longer dramatic productions. That routine quickly became the minstrel megahit “Jump Jim Crow,” named after the song’s chorus where Rice, in affected speech, claimed to “Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do jis so/Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.” Debuted in 1828, Rice’s number grew in scope as the actor responded to enthusiastic audiences by continually adding new verses and steps. By 1830, the flutter of his feet—and a growing army of imitators—ignited a popular cultural wildfire. Traveling troupes of blackface performers soon circulated through America’s vast network of rivers and canals, delighting audiences and spreading their influence as they moved.4 Unsurprising, then, that Foster’s first compositions were comic tunes, written, as he later put it, “alla niggerando,” and meant to be sung behind the burnt-cork mask. “Oh! Susanna,” penned in 1847 for the musician’s family and friends, first found public audience later that year at Pittsburgh’s Eagle Ice Cream Saloon. One of many such establishments that retained their own in-house theatrical company, the Eagle Saloon promised patrons a cool treat and an evening’s entertainment for only twenty-five cents. Foster provided the words and music, and a local blackface quintet performing as “The Sable Harmonists” supplied the show. With sheet music published in 1848, then carried to the New York stage, and from there swept up in the flood of the gold rush, “Oh! Susanna” by 1850 could be heard from coast to coast.5 Observers at the time, witness to the rapid dissemination of “Oh! Susanna” and other minstrel tunes, could not resist reflecting upon the phenomenon. Yet in doing so, their tendency was to see such songs (and “Susanna” in particular) as fundamentally “American” in nature, as an expression of the national character. Famed nineteenth-century travel writer Bayard Taylor, reporting from the California mining camp of Sacramento, confessed to nights spent “watching the curious expressions of satisfaction and delight in the faces of overland emigrants” as “small companies of Ethiopian melodists nightly call[ed] upon ‘Susanna!’” Fascinated by how “universally popular” the tune was, Taylor declared that “Ethiopian melodies deserve to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America.” Another writer, this time for the Knickerbocker Magazine, declared in boldface type that minstrel characters, “the Jim Crows, the Zip Coons, and the Dandy Jims, who have electrified the world,” are “OUR ONLY TRULY NATIONAL POETS.” Meanwhile, E. P. Christy—who managed one of country’s most successful minstrel troupes and often performed songs written by Foster—published blackface sheet music claiming the material as the nation’s singular artistry. Minstrel

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songs such as “Susanna” represented an effort to “confute the stale cant of our European detractors that nothing original could emanate from Americans” by “catch[ing] our native airs as they floated wildly, or hummed in the balmy breezes of the sunny south.”6 What united these assessments of “Oh! Susanna” and other minstrel favorites—not to mention subsequent historical analyses of blackface performance—was their shared dependence on the proposition that the music’s popularity revealed something vital about its origins. Songs such as Foster’s composition, beloved by the nation’s people, must then have derived from and possessed some sort of organic relationship with the country’s essence or spirit. Walt Whitman, opining within New York’s Broadway Journal that the “subtlest spirit of the nation is expressed through its music,” succinctly summarized the relationship musicians and citizens shared. Witness to New York City concerts that eschewed operatic decorum, the young poet enthused that “at last we have found, and heard, and seen something original and beautiful in the way of American musical execution.” No longer would the United States need to stand in the cultural shadow of the Old World, applauding music “made to please royal ears.” In claiming as much, authors such as Whitman channeled the ideas of Johann Herder and other philosophers who had busily documented musical practices of the Volk as a means to Enlightenment-era nation building. To share a song was to demonstrate a common national bond. So it was that one 1849 observer could wonder “if I am putting it too strongly to say that we American people never really got together until now.” Why now? Because “negro melodies never acquired the popularity which is accorded to them here and now . . . and certainly plantation songs, as written, for instance, by Stephen Foster, are the most popular songs among us.” Such pronouncements have led even recent scholarly treatments of Foster to decree both the man and his music “touchstone[s] of American identity” and the “progenitor[s] of American popular culture.” These interpretations insist that Foster’s compositions teach us something about the ways in which a new republic championing ordinary people pioneered the creation of music meant to satisfy common tastes. That popular considerations and calculations entered into the Pennsylvania bard’s cultural productions makes his songwriting career a sort of democratic parable possible only in America.7 But this explicitly nationalistic reading, applied to minstrel music more generally and “Oh! Susanna” in particular, surely possesses its problems. Namely, it fails to appreciate the song’s origins in transnational cultural interchange during a period of political and social instability throughout much of the world. The tune’s beat, for example, was that of the polka. Today, the polka

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style is generally considered staid and antiquated. When, however, polkas first burst upon the European music scene in the 1830s, and the American by the 1840s, they signified a mutinous move against the rigid formality of ballroom waltzes and quadrilles. Indeed, many observers at the time stressed the new craze’s defiant demeanor. To polka was a political act: its freewheeling style proved an appropriate musical accompaniment to civil unrest in Central Europe, Prussia, and France during the revolutions of 1848. When failed European activists fled repression by emigrating to the United States, they brought the polka with them, creating among Americans at the time an indelible association between the quickstep and upheaval.8 Given the song’s wide release in 1848, “Oh! Susanna,” with its pulsing polka beat, seems less indebted to the Ohio River’s gentle current than to a transatlantic torrent of revolutionary rhythm. Foster’s lyrical content, meanwhile, was no less immersed in that larger world. For though “Susanna” was a blackface ditty meant as comic spectacle, that humor might have served only to soften sharp criticism of the socioeconomic disarray set into motion by a burgeoning capitalist world order. Several scholars of the era suggest that blackface’s earliest practitioners darkened their faces to mask protest over the disenfranchisement and exploitation of a protean class of proletarian “wage slaves.” These were individuals who rebelliously identified with black peoples as symbols of displacement and dispossession. The humor of their minstrel shows often mocked the pretensions and power of socioeconomic betters. Blackface became one way that a youthful culture acted out its anxieties during a tumultuous era.9 A labor radical Stephen Foster was not. But we might fruitfully situate “Susanna” within a broader transnational spirit of dissent that in the years surrounding 1848 gave birth to any number of workingmen’s parties, Chartist groups, socialist organizations, and the like. Their complaints echoed those of the characters in Foster’s song. So, for example, the tune’s protagonist protests a painful separation from his lover and—having “come from Alabama” and “gwine to Lou’siana” his true love for to see—sets off on a romantic quest aimed at reunion. This mirrors similar concerns over the rampant dislocation and communal destabilization attended by capitalist development in other corners of the globe. “Oh! Susanna” also grapples with the disorienting pace of change as the era’s technological innovation collapsed all previous reckoning of time and space. The song’s nominal singer speaks of rain that produces dry weather, a hot sun that freezes him, and shutting his eyes as a means of holding his breath. While at first glance comic nonsense, this confusion comes into focus when read as a dazed response to the very real dangers to life and limb posed by mass mechanization. “Susanna,” in the second stanza,

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is warned of a boiler explosion (the “bulgine” bursting and horses running off were vernacular references to steam engines and their horsepower, while the Telegraph was a steamship that plied the Ohio River) and other industrial accidents that have “killed five hundred nigga.” In other words, the song, like so many other minstrel tunes, contrasts a bucolic depiction of southern agrarian life with some of the uglier aspects of economic development. That the chorus chronicles a journey no slave could realistically have made, at least not voluntarily, seems on one level to heighten the absurdity. But within a period characterized by rapid change and constant motion, these lyrics celebrate timelessness and stasis as a bygone time’s virtues. No wonder uprooted easterners bound to seek their fortunes in California so thoroughly embraced the song, even if most could care less about the actual mechanisms by which slave families were regularly broken apart during the Cotton Belt’s maturation. The tune did, after all, express commonly shared apprehensions and yearnings related to prolonged separation from home and family, even if, in the song, the latent menaces of mobility were expressed by the nation’s most immobile class: enslaved people.10 Foster himself was no stranger to modernization’s pitfalls. By the 1830s his rapidly industrializing Pittsburgh was already shrouded in a thick haze of smoke and coal dust, well on its way to becoming the city later travelers called “hell with the lid off.” Meanwhile, a dramatic financial downturn resulting from instability within worldwide credit and commodity markets—the socalled Panic of 1837—ruined and scattered Foster’s family. Yet their travails were no different from those of millions more like them: city directories from the era reveal a moment of unprecedented mobility, much of it less than voluntary. When the “Susanna” singer laments severance from the song’s eponymous woman, he spoke to the concerns of a generation in America and beyond traumatized by economically dictated displacement. Given their simultaneous publication in 1848, it is tempting to posit an indirect relationship between “Oh! Susanna” and the Communist Manifesto. They were by no means mutually influential, yet both evoked the frustrations of those buffeted by the era’s intense economic transformations. Though one was a tune and the other a sophisticated socioeconomic analysis, both are texts rooted in the “practical experience of capitalism,” and, in one historian’s words, represent attempts to “document what was called the ‘hungry 1840s,’” a particularly dramatic moment of industrial development and demographic dislocation, which drew critics on both sides of the Atlantic.11 There was a receptiveness to “Susanna” around the world that might suggest the song’s broader intelligibility within a transforming international economy. After all, confining blackface material within American borders confounds

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Figure 5. American sailors perform a minstrel show for Japanese spectators. “Oh! Susanna” was certainly part of their repertoire. Assembled Pictures of Commodore Perry’s Visit, artist and date unknown. Courtesy of the Tokyo Historiographical Institute and the MIT “Visualizing Cultures” program.

its more global reach at the time. Professional troupes had arrived in Europe by 1836, while American seafarers, wherever they traded and traveled, seemed willing to “jump Jim Crow”—that is, perform minstrel shows—for indigenous audiences. For example, Commodore Matthew Perry’s flotilla, charged with the task of “opening” Japan, relied in part on the blackface antics of the squadron’s white sailors to conduct cultural diplomacy. The men performed popular tunes by Foster and others in what a playbill printed for the occasion heralded as an exhibition of the songs and dances of “the plantation ‘niggas’ of the South” as well as “Colored ‘Gemmen’ of the North.”12 With music moving along the nineteenth-century world’s increasingly interconnected commercial highways, more forthright commentators noted that “Oh! Susanna” and its sister songs had quickly found voice and audience far beyond American shores. For example, the very same Bayard Taylor who in California had suggested that Foster’s popularity among overland emigrants made songs such as his the “national airs of America” later found cause to temper that possessive prose. Subsequent sojourns, it seems, brought Taylor to India, where a Hindu troubadour struck up a litany of the era’s minstrel favorites, including “‘Oh Susanna!’ and other choice Ethiopian melodies, all of which he sang with admirable spirit and correctness.” Spanishspeaking boatmen along the isthmus of Panama seemed no less familiar with the tune: Taylor recorded several who “struck up ‘Oh Susanna!’ which [they] sang to a most ludicrous imitation of the words.” Chronicler of the British underclass Henry Mayhew reported Punch-and-Judy puppeteers in London singing “Susanna” by 1851; Putnam’s Monthly Magazine wondered to hear it

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“whistled by a yellow-headed Somersetshire lout, under the broken noses of battered saints in the antique archway of a Norman church hidden in the green heart of western England.” John Dwight, an American traveler at the seaport of Southampton, wrote to describe the “street music that was in all forms rife here, from the barrel organ to the small German band of brass or almost orchestra with fiddles . . . [all] employed to play evenings in front of the principal hotels.” But “the strangest thing about it,” Dwight thought, “was to hear familiar Ethiopian melodies!” Published alongside Dwight’s account were the reflections of William Thackeray on blackface minstrel music sweeping through Britain. Having “heard a humorous balladist, a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad,” Thackeray confessed that the show “moistened these spectacles” with a torrent of tears. He was surprised by his own reaction, but admitted that to “behold a minstrel with a corked face and a banjo [who] sings, strikes a wild note which sets the whole heart thrilling with happy pity.” A range of emotionally charged reactions awaited the journey of “Susanna” around the world.13 Thus when journalist James Kennard marveled that “at no time does the atmosphere of our planet cease to vibrate harmoniously to the immortal songs of the negroes of America,” he spoke to a much larger reality. After all, he wondered, “are not snatches of their songs in everybody’s mouth . . . from Labrador to Mexico?” Even as “James Crow and Scipio Coon were quietly at work on their master’s plantations, all unconscious of their fame, the whole civilized world was resounding with their names.” The speed with which audiences around the world embraced “Oh! Susanna” suggests that the tune served not simply as an embodiment of a unique American zeitgeist but also, perhaps even more significantly, as a tracer of global capital flows and the new cultural transfers they were making possible. These commercial accretions that wove the United States deeper into the world’s economic fabric were accelerated by the same gold rush “Susanna” supposedly anthemized, and evinced by the same international cotton market, the fluctuations of which may have separated the song’s protagonists to begin with. “Susanna,” then, was something of an artistic cannibal, a self-consuming critique of the very means by which she gained such rapid fame. The gold rush and the cotton trade were not, however, merely the song’s subjects or context. Rather, these enterprises themselves were international conduits for the broader dissemination of Foster’s melodies.14 So, it is demonstrable that “Susanna” crossed borders. Music more generally, long before “Satchmo blew up the world,” may be a useful tool for historians seeking, in scholar Ian Tyrrell’s phrase, “a new kind of history,” one

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that centers on “transnational phenomena and their material and mental circulation rather than any particular national circumstances.” Songs and singers as they slip across borders can attune us to the processes and mechanisms that facilitated transnational movement and cultural dispersal. They can reveal deeper connectedness between far-flung events and peoples, while at the same time exposing the artifice of nation-centered paradigms that would attempt to box cultural products in during a time of accelerating international interaction.15 Tracing the intercultural linkages fostered and exploited by minstrel songs raises interesting questions about how historians have typically told the story of the first two-thirds of nineteenth-century U.S. history. Scholars often see the period as defined by continental expansion that stands in stark contrast to the heady global engagements of the late eighteenth century and late nineteenth century. But the spread of “Oh! Susanna” helps explode this so-called “hourglass formulation” that sees wider, internationalized ends preceding and following an otherwise narrow, insular period in the nation’s past. Foster’s melodies—and the blackface minstrelsy of the 1840s and 1850s more generally—are persistently presented as both a prelude to the American Civil War and a domestic cultural codification of black inferiority. That story would seem to change given the regularity with which “Susanna” and other minstrel tunes escaped the lips of black boatmen in Panama, Hindu buskers, or, as a member of Commodore Perry’s Japan expedition reported, Shanghai street sweepers. Songs nominally derisive of nonwhite agency were taken hold of by those very same peoples and repackaged for local use, as work song, entertainment, or a source of income that preyed on homesick Americans longing to hear what famed New York minstrel proprietor E. P. Christy inaccurately saluted as “our native airs.”16 Yet one need not look as far afield as Shanghai to expose the fundamentally flawed aspect of Christy’s claim to American ownership of Foster’s refrains. The traffic of fugitive slaves crossing into Canada provides unexpected evidence of the transnational—maybe even counter-national—implications of “Oh! Susanna.” For while Foster’s song playfully winked at the virtual immobility characterizing bound labor, and minstrel tunes more generally often mocked abolitionist agitators—Foster himself was a lifelong Democrat suspicious of antislavery appeals—black peoples managed to appropriate “Oh! Susanna” as an expression of their desire for liberty. As early as 1849, one year after its original release, the tune, retitled “The Northern Star,” found its way into an abolitionist songbook published by ex-slave and author William Wells Brown. “Oh! Star of Freedom/’Tis the star for me,” the chorus went, “’Twill lead me off to Canada/And there I will be free.” Harriet Tubman

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also led fugitives into Canada while singing another variant: “Farewell old master/Don’t think hard of me/I’m on my way to Canada/where all the slaves are free.” Meanwhile, black abolitionist Martin Delany refrained within the pages of his first novel: “O, righteous father/Wilt thou not pity me/And aid me on to Canada/Where fugitives are free?” For a free black diaspora traversing the northern border, “Susanna” signaled an abandonment of the nation rather than evidence of its cultural genius or cohesion. After all, as Delany’s version of the song had it, Queen Victoria promised liberty “if we would all forsake/Our native land of slavery/And come across the lake.”17 Conceptually anchoring to the nation something so interpretively unstable as a song does the disservice of obscuring its many meanings to multiple causes, some subnational, others antinational, all transnational. It is not a coincidence that black leaders such as Brown and Delany, who sang “Susanna” as rejection of the country that had rejected them, became some of the earliest advocates of colonization plans meant to allow freedpeople a space apart from the racist scheming of Western nation-states. Indeed, Delany’s repurposing of the song seems particularly revealing, given that he and Foster grew up within a few blocks of each other in Pittsburgh and yet appeared to inhabit different worlds. Foster sold his music to troupes performing the blackface theatrics that were coming to be acknowledged by nationalists as a uniquely American art form; Delany transformed those tunes into protest lyrics aimed at delegitimizing racist dogma and detaching black peoples from a country in which they could not hope to realize their fullest potential. His masterwork—The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States—was nothing if not his repudiation of the very prejudices that in other quarters Foster’s melodies helped reify. Jingoes believed that Foster’s tunes represented “a true expression of the national character, [seeing as how] they follow the American race in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests as certainly as the fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” But black activists proved otherwise, with individuals like Delany using them as music to march “the colored race” out of America before “the slave may become a lover of his master” as “the lofty-soaring Eagle may be tamed to the cage.” In other words, while some sang “Susanna” to feel more American, others intoned it to feel less so.18 But let us not overindulge in the self-congratulatory subversiveness some have justifiably ascribed to the transnational turn. There are real limits that must be acknowledged in the rereading of these texts. This is certainly true in the case of “Susanna,” given the interpretive inescapability of “the nation” when assessing the song’s impact. Music might ultimately resist transnationalism, even as it evokes such an analytical framework. For while songs

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themselves may cross borders, their adoption by any group of people usually appears to reify some sense of national distinctiveness. That process might take the shape of something concrete such as the various positive assertions that Foster’s music embodied the spirit of the American nation, or something more chimerical, such as Delany using Foster’s composition to assert a transcendent “black nationalism.” It might even assume a more comic form. Such was the case in West Germany in 1950, where an Americanthemed radio program found itself inundated with complaints after using “Oh! Susanna” as the show’s theme song. The objection had nothing to do with the tune itself; Germans loved “Susanna.” Rather, their gripe was that an American-themed show ought to play American music, and “Susanna,” after all, was a German song.19 At its inception, then, Foster’s melody traveled far and wide. Yet, in doing so, and even as it was adopted by more and more people, and recited within more and more countries, the tune never seemed capable of dispensing with its nationalistic baggage. The tenacity of those associations is itself an object lesson. Music is in some ways an excellent avenue through which to produce transnational history: it reveals not only the crosscurrents of cultural influences coursing through the United States and elsewhere, but also undermines simplistic narratives of cultural imperialism by demonstrating how localities resisted intellectual sterilization by repurposing and repackaging such material to suit their own needs. Yet the promises of utilizing music as a transnational tool are matched only by its perils. Moving beyond the national paradigm may simply run us in a circle. What other conclusion can be drawn when, in revealing how “Oh! Susanna” is not an “American” song, we come to find that it was “German” all along.

Ch a p ter 3

“Mary Lyon, Massachusetts” MARY A. RENDA

Rendered in artist’s plaster and wearing a white, stringed cap and simple dress stands Mary Lyon, twenty-six inches tall. Big eyes seem to take in the full measure of the world, and rough hands evoke the hardscrabble culture of the early nineteenth-century New England hill towns where her namesake was raised on hard work and prayer. This is one of a number of dolls representing the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, later College, who is recognized as one of the foremost leaders in the field of American women’s higher education. The foremost, some have said, and they have worked to exalt her memory and establish her image as iconic of, variously, American women, American character, American progress, and more. The doll itself has fallen into obscurity (if ever it had a measure of fame), but its maker or makers constructed it out of a range of cultural markers whose meaning accrued from the regional and national languages they spoke, telling of American pluck, simplicity, ruggedness, self making, and success. The doll seems to have been prepared for an exhibit of American pioneers. It is identified by a label near the hem of its skirt—“Mary Lyon, Massachusetts”; another, affixed to the underside of its clothing, explains, “Purpose as Pioneer: To secure opportunities of higher education for women.”1 To “secure” those opportunities was indeed Mary Lyon’s lifework. “The Castle of Science” was the informal moniker one student gave to the institution she opened in 1837, in the town of South Hadley, just south of the Mount 33

Figure 6. Mary Lyon doll, Mary Lyon Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Mount Holyoke College.

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Holyoke range in the western part of the state.2 In the first decades of the nineteenth century the country had hundreds of female academies; and, indeed, other educators, including Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, and Zilpah Grant, had worked to strengthen women’s education in the years prior to the founding of Mount Holyoke.3 But in the prevailing pattern, schools for girls and young ladies lasted only as long as a particular woman presided over her classroom. Lyon dreamed of a new institution to be established on a permanent basis, hewing to the intellectual standards of the most renowned colleges and universities for young men, and accessible to the daughters of middling farm families.4 She laid her plans, finding models in kindred institutions designed to cultivate minds and mold character; she recognized the desires of her countrymen and women and translated those desires into material support for the institution she planned—six cents here, a coverlet there, furniture and larger donations where possible; and she tended the feelings of influential men whose support would be essential to the success of her enterprise.5 Under her care and guidance, her students would help to build, among other things, a world in which women could take their places in the fields of astronomy, botany, geology, and chemistry—the last which she herself taught.6 Here indeed was the stuff of success. In years to come, myriad women’s colleges would take Mount Holyoke as their model or grow from the labors of Mary Lyon’s students—across the United States and abroad as well.7 Yet Mary Lyon “as Pioneer” materialized a success story crafted out of a domestic, even isolationist history of the nation. In the 1930s and ’40s, historical dolls such as this made their way from state to state in traveling exhibits of history and handicrafts, or graced museum halls and classrooms, before finding homes in historical societies, archives, and private collections.8 This handcrafted version of Mary Lyon would have fit nicely into the narratives on offer at the time: a nation composed of proud local traditions and distinctive regional variations on American themes; one that grew from the particular genius of its colonial forebears, prime among them New England settlers who established traditions of civic engagement and literacy; a nation whose greatness came from hardy white pioneers whose fortitude and labor made possible transformations known popularly as “westward movement” and “national expansion.” Considered in this light, the doll’s rough-hewn plaster hands, knobby and gnarled, evoked not only humble roots but also a connection to the white women who carried New England values to the West.9 And while the doll’s physicality connoted hardy farm women who helped to make America, its emphasis on the intellectual reinforced the pioneer theme, for the doll came equipped with a quotation attributed to the woman it represented. “It is one of the nicest of mental operations,” reads the

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inscription, “to distinguish between the very difficult and the utterly impossible.”10 With this the doll placed Mary Lyon on the outer edge of known territory, at the border between what no woman or man could do and what would simply take grit and determination to accomplish. The way in which Mary Lyon “as Pioneer” placed Mount Holyoke’s founder in New England and in a heroic national narrative, while setting aside the world beyond the nation’s borders, points to gendered and geographical tensions that would at times bedevil those who sought to secure for Mary Lyon a place of reverence in the hearts of Americans. The remainder of this chapter takes up a range of efforts to represent Mary Lyon as a great American, to establish her image, her story, and the institution she founded as touchstones of American virtue, progress, and leadership, and considers them in light of Lyon’s own gendered and geographical disposition, as well as in relation to changing racial and class dimensions of American nationalism. In the century following her death, Lyon came to be honored in books, prints, dolls, ships, and in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Each such effort contested the meanings of gender, geography, race, and class, as Lyon’s champions engaged in struggles over the bounds of female propriety and the boundaries of the nation, over the contours of female identity and the shifting coordinates of national identity and ambition. In the quarter-century immediately following her death, those who wished to have Mary Lyon a symbol of female self-reliance and success had to walk a fine line, as is evident in the work of William Makepeace Thayer. Lyon, he wrote in 1857, “had justly earned a place in the affections of the wise and good” and “deserved the nation’s tribute of respect.”11 He penned his tribute in the form of a book of advice, titled The Poor Girl and True Woman; or, Elements of Success Drawn from the Life of Mary Lyon and Others. A companion volume to The Poor Boy and Merchant Prince, which he had based on the life of New England industrialist Amos Lawrence, Thayer’s book for girls lauded Lyon for qualities “indispensable” to success, whatever one’s station in life, among these industry, punctuality, frugality, purpose, self-possession, mental culture, and influence.12 Thayer endorsed the view of Edward Hitchcock, president of Amherst College, who proclaimed in his own tribute to Lyon, “very few females have done so much for the world while they lived, or have left so rich a legacy when they died.”13 For Thayer, who would go on to become a popular nineteenth-century American biographer for young readers, Mary Lyon’s power was a specifically female variety of influence, molded from modesty, humility, usefulness, and amiability, controlled by piety, and consistent with domesticity.14 “Mary Lyon was not a perfect woman,” Thayer cautioned. But she was a woman of great achievement who nonetheless

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knew the ways of a household. She was patterned after “Mrs. Washington, the mother of the General,” who “even in the presence of distinguished guests” took up household tasks. Indeed, Mary Lyon’s success, in Thayer’s telling, lay as fully in her readiness for the matrimonial state as in her educational accomplishments. He was sure that “she would have presided with dignity and success over a household of her own. As the wife of a farmer or a merchant, of a legislator or a minister, she would have excelled.” If she was to be lionized, then, it would not be in the mold of “Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, who buckled on the soldier’s armor” and whose “remarkable prowess and brilliant victories” could not “atone for her breach of female delicacy.” For a truer heroism, Thayer urged his young readers instead to take Mary Lyon as their model: “Follow her from year to year in her noiseless way of doing good, content to perform a woman’s mission in the humblest walks of life. How noble and queenly she appears in the contrast!”15 Such were the terms of popular recognition for a woman of achievement. If Thayer seemed to contain Mary Lyon within the bounds of bourgeois female propriety, he did so while celebrating the global scope of her influence, acknowledging the ways her global reach brought honor to the nation, and framing her within a proud Euro-American cultural tradition. The Good Girl and True Woman, as the book came to be known in later editions, mapped Mary Lyon’s influence with a tour of the grief that ensued as news of her death traveled by telegraph and post to her beloved students, now teachers and missionaries spread far and wide. “In almost every state of the union,” he wrote, “there were some to weep over the sorrowful intelligence.” Leaving the United States, Thayer took his readers first to Montreal. There, from a vantage point outside the nation, but nearby to New England and within the cultural space of Western civilization, a woman wrote of the wide circle of grief that extended to “the hunting grounds of the Sioux and the villages of the Cherokees,” where missionary tears were falling, ostensibly within the borders of U.S. national territory. From that deft navigation of the ambiguous boundaries of mid-nineteenth-century American nationhood, Thayer moved outward to other racialized realms of missionary endeavor, following the letter-writer from Montreal to the Sandwich Islands, to Africa, to the “cinnamon groves of Ceylon and the palm trees of India,” to “the base of Mount Olympus” in Persia. Thayer explained that the woman who was mourned was “founder of the first thorough female seminary in the land.”16 “The land” was a nation whose reach extended, with the reach of Mary Lyon’s seminary, far beyond the states as well as deep into the foreignness within. Thayer’s tribute to Lyon moved easily across time and national boundaries, from ancient Greece and Rome to modern France and England, to limn the

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cultural borders of the American nation in line with the best of a putatively Western cultural heritage. In keeping with this gendered geography, Thayer’s “other similar characters” included Hannah More, Florence Nightingale, and even Madame de Staël, while among his anti-heroines were the “infidels” Mary Wollstonecraft and Fannie Wright and the aristocratically dependent Marie Antoinette, for whom death brought not grateful tears but a coffin worth merely seven francs.17 William Makepeace Thayer and Mary Lyon were participants in the same transnational evangelical project to renovate the world in service to Christ, but for Thayer that project was oriented toward renovating the nation itself, whereas for Lyon, national concerns had been distinctly subordinate to the wider and higher goals of education and evangelism. Lyon saw the importance of the nation and drew upon national resources and ambitions as she worked to establish her seminary and to promote the fortunes of her students.18 Yet her teachings and her work to establish a sound institutional basis for Christian women’s higher education grew from a geographical imaginary rooted in New England as a region and in its connections to mission work farther afield on the continent and abroad.19 In her most national moments, she understood her country to be an agent of God serving a wider purpose. “We wonder why we are made to differ from others,” she wrote to her sister on Independence Day, 1826, surrounded by semicentennial celebrations of the nation’s founding. But the connectedness of God’s people seemed to trump such an emphasis on difference, even as she accepted the conceit that America was exceptional. Perhaps God, she ventured, “has designs of mercy on all the nations of the earth, through the unparalleled blessings which he has bestowed on this great people.”20 If this was an early articulation of manifest destiny or an assertion of her nation’s singular moral stature, it was a quiet one. Whereas the term “national” could signal the greatness of an undertaking, Lyon preferred humbler locutions. In contrast to Catharine Beecher, who championed domesticity as a work of feminine grandeur, Lyon emphasized quiet piety and benevolence.21 She did not invoke the popular theme of republican motherhood, though Zilpah Grant did so, on her behalf, calling for funds to support her friend’s work. “Considering the qualifications which the mothers in our land now possess,” Grant wrote, aid was needed to fit “their daughters to exert such an influence as is needed . . . on our infant republic, on our Christian country.” Grant asked for aid for Mount Holyoke, “not for the sake of an individual, not for the sake of the female sex, but . . . for our country, nay, more, for the world.”22 For both Lyon and Grant, the evangelical project had upstaged the founders’ Enlightenment, republican arguments. “It is true that Washington, and almost all Americans who lived in the days

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of Washington, hoped for independence,” Lyon wrote. “But did they look forward to this time, and anticipate such a nation as this?”23 A nation where, she seemed to say, the Lord’s blessings answered Christian efforts? What was distinctive about America was the prominence given to evangelical Christianity and to the priority of evangelizing the whole world, exemplified by the formation and work of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, and by the departure of Ann and Adoniram Judson for Burma in 1812, both of which signaled to a young Mary Lyon that she was living not first and foremost in a great nation, but rather in a marvelous age.24 Mary Lyon’s transnational geography of salvation was rooted in a Christian imaginary focused on the Holy Land, but also in a set of historical developments and material circumstances that facilitated connections across oceans and cultural divides in the nineteenth-century world. From one side of the Atlantic, whaling and trade connected New England to Asia and the Pacific as well as to Africa and the Caribbean. On the other, British imperial ambition formed a crucial frame for the growth of the missionary endeavor, not necessarily because missionaries shared official British colonial goals, but at least because imperial transport ships made it possible for missionaries to carry their own spiritual and institutional purposes along the routes of empire to the Pacific, Asia, and Africa.25 Lyon recalled the impression made by William Carey, the British missionary leader who had been to India and whose work inspired New England followers.26 Other crucial circumstances emerged from indigenous histories. Among these were late eighteenth-century social and political changes in the Hawaiian Islands, resulting in the unification of Hawaii under King Kamehameha in 1810, and in the king’s wish to make use of resources available through his connections to traders from Europe and North America. Depopulation resulting from the arrival of European diseases with Captain Cook in 1778 contributed to the course of events, but longer-standing Polynesian cultural patterns, including the seafaring traditions of an ocean people, also helped foster connections that would inspire enthusiasm in New England for missions and underwrite the advent and growth of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, which was, in turn, so crucial to Mary Lyon’s bid for permanence in women’s higher education, one link to the authority and resources of New England’s evangelical ministerial brotherhood.27 The resulting coordinates of Christian transnationalism, from Oceania to the Fertile Crescent, showed up in the iconography of the seminary Mary Lyon founded. For example, Lyon’s invocation of Psalm 144 at the laying of the cornerstone of the seminary building, “that our daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after the similitude of a palace,” inspired the pattern for the institution’s seal, sketched by her friend Orra White Hitchcock, with

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workers hewing stone from a quarry on one side, a finished palace on the other, and a stand of palm trees at the center of the image.28 As the design was revised over the years, the palace disappeared first, and eventually the stones as well, but the palm trees remained at the center, linking the seminary, and later the college, with a decidedly more temperate landscape than that of South Hadley.29 In popular culture as well as official iconography, transnational connections were also evident—sometimes too evident. Nathaniel Currier—who would later be joined by James Ives to form the partnership of Currier and Ives—set out in the 1830s to reach wide audiences with cheap prints of news stories and popular settings.30 Idealized scenes of New England life and culture became part of his firm’s stock in trade, in keeping with an emerging view of the region as a repository of the truest American values. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was one of the New England institutions featured in Currier’s prints.31 Given the regional fame of the seminary, Currier had reason to imagine that the print might well find a worthwhile market. But when he produced his print on the basis of a drawing by one of Mary Lyon’s first students, who had gone on to become the seminary’s drawing instructor, it turned out to have a curious feature. In front of the seminary building was a row of trees, in just the place where a row of elms had indeed been planted. Yet these trees had a distinctly tropical look about them. The artist whose work Currier used had been none other than Persis Thurston, born and raised in Hawaii, the daughter of the first American missionaries to settle there.32 On second thought, Currier (or perhaps it was Ives, with his keener eye for salable images) had the print revised. The addition of human figures personalized the scene, with pairs and groups women in front of the seminary building. But another striking change was the erasure of those very unusual trees. In place of palmlike elms, the newer print featured a more typical row of New England trees as well as a lower border of native plants.33 Traces of Hawaii, and the seeming transnational confusion they betokened, had to be scrubbed from the scene for a purer, more quintessentially New England—and American—image. By the end of the century, the marriage of New England’s regional selfimage as the hearthstone of pastoral American values and a national sense of the United States as a great Christian nation rising to prominence in a world of competitive empires brought new resources and possibilities to advocates for Mary Lyon and her beloved institution, which had officially joined the ranks of colleges in 1888. When fire razed the original seminary building in 1897, alumnae and representatives of the college appealed to New England’s Congregational ministers for aid. Hailing the work of educated Christian women as “one of the glories” of the nineteenth century, they proposed that the centenary of Lyon’s birth be the occasion for recognizing her legacy

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Figure 7. Nathaniel Currier, Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, South Hadley, Mass., c. 1845–47. Archives and Special Collections Digital Collections, Mount Holyoke College.

and raising funds for the erection of a new building in her name. “Doubtless it is yet too early,” they argued, “for the world to fully understand Mary Lyon’s place in history or to apprehend the force she evolved.”34 Their appeal resonated with the progressive embrace of evolutionary progress as well as with American Protestant principles and aims. The ministers responded, and inspired other leading Christian men to take up the cause of Mary Lyon. They deemed her “one of the greatest benefactors of our nation” and a woman of “prophetic vision” who called forth a better, stronger Christian civilization.35 Ministerial enthusiasm garnered donations sufficient to erect Mary Lyon Hall. A few years later, it also helped fuel the campaign to make Lyon the first woman in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans—New York University’s monument to the “great personalities” of American history.36 Mary Lyon had arrived. Once again, gender and geography—animated by racial and class ideologies—laid out her path to recognition, this time on a grander scale. On the heels of the United States’ victory over Spain in Cuba and the Philippines and acquisition of its first overseas colonies, including Hawaii, patriotic pride fed the rage for monumental commemoration and national celebration. Helen Gould Shepard, philanthropist and founding member of the Young Women’s Christian Association, having supplied a

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stately sum to the federal government to help prosecute the war, now chose to finance the university’s project with a founding donation of $100,000, which she more than tripled by 1904.37 Director Henry MacCracken characterized the process of nominating honorees, which was open to all citizens, as a form of democratic civic engagement that would call Americans to serve humanity and heal the nation from the wounds of Civil War—cast as “only an episode and an accident, merely blasting out a barrier in the course of the great stream of national development.”38 If William Makepeace Thayer’s Mary Lyon was content in her “noiseless way of doing good,” the Hall of Fame seemed instead to trumpet her success. The monument’s founders called for “a colonnade five hundred feet in length” overlooking the magnificent cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades and the Hudson and Harlem River valleys, such that the landscape could mirror the grandeur of the undertaking, the nation, and the individuals honored.39 Designed by Stanford White, the building embodied the neoclassical Beaux-Arts style of Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. White, his colleagues, and the cultural critics who lauded their work saw themselves as part of an American Renaissance that was the direct cultural heir to the humane grandeur of the Italian Renaissance.40 Earlier works by White, such as the Washington Square arch, the second Madison Square Garden, and Newport’s Rosecliff Mansion (dubbed a “cottage”), which he based on Versailles’s Grand Trianon, give an idea of the way the movement sought to craft a triumphant American culture out of European forms.41 When Ida Pond Sylvester, the Mount Holyoke alumna who championed Lyon’s cause with the Hall of Fame electors, spoke before thousands at the unveiling of Lyon’s bronze tablet in 1907, she presented Lyon’s success first and foremost in racial and evolutionary terms.42 “It is not because Mary Lyon founded Mt. Holyoke College that we are here to give her name honor today,” she began. “It is because . . . she seized upon the fact that the greatest benefit which she could confer upon her race was the raising of the intellectual status of women.”43 In an important sense, she was right—not about Mary Lyon, but about the salience of race in 1905. In an editorial on the new monument, one commentator described “fame” as depending on “a man’s . . . capacity or opportunity for saying at the right moment the thing which expresses what his contemporaries and those who follow desire to see known, conspicuous, and effective.”44 At the turn of the century, that thing, for northeastern elites, was the racial and evolutionary ascension of America, a project that called for leading American women to stand alongside men as exemplars of their nation’s liberality and progress. In a way, Sylvester’s invocation of “race” functioned like Thayer’s deft navigation of national borders in 1857. When she spoke of Lyon’s “race,”

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she could have meant the white race, the Anglo-Saxon race, the American race, or the human race. “Race,” used in this way, could both blur national boundaries and elide hierarchical meanings with a seeming democratic and humanitarian inclusiveness. Reaching for such inclusiveness, Mount Holyoke professor and missionary supporter Anna Edwards, another champion of Mary Lyon, invited her fellow members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, assembled in San Francisco in 1900, to consider the true breadth of their ancestry. “Not Briton, Saxon, Latin, Greek alone, but Hebrew, Chaldean, Egyptian, also have left distinct traces on our thought, feeling, and action,” she told them, and the connections extended further, even to “Persia and Hindustan.”45 But even if there was slippage in the term “race,” Sylvester’s comments bore the marks of the prevailing sense of civilizational hierarchy. “As we unveil her name in this place of honor,” she continued in her salute to Lyon, “so did she with steady and efficient hand lift the veil which darkened the vision of her age and made it possible for men and women to see that upon the education of women depended as perhaps upon no other deed, the progress and happiness of her race.” As supporters of women’s missions, Sylvester, Shepard, and others present would have been well acquainted with the ethnographic reports sent to missionary publications by women working abroad, reports on the educational degradation of women outside the Christian world and on the nature of their domestic oppression, of which the veil stood as a prominent symbol.46 The image of the veil could thus evoke the world beyond the nation’s boundaries as a degraded other serving to reflect U.S. national greatness. And if Lyon lifted the veil from her darkened “age,” Sylvester acknowledged nonetheless the relative advancement of New England as a place. In contrast to the veiled world, Sylvester hailed “that educational movement which dominated the descendants of our New England colonies,” thereby celebrating the regional germ of future greatness that would become national. Thus, racial and evolutionary language could seem to reach out beyond the borders of the nation and its Anglo-Saxon elite, but no less did it reinforce civilizational hierarchies and, ultimately, national boundaries. Despite the combination of tireless lobbying and fortuitous circumstances that favored Mary Lyon’s election to the Hall of Fame, some remained unconvinced of her worthiness for such an honor. “As to the women who won honors at last week’s election,” one newspaper reported, the members of patriotic organizations—who feel keenly that a slight has been placed on the name of Washington by the ignominy of thirtyone votes cast in favor of Mary, the mother of the general, and the insignificant thirteen which were voted in favor of Martha Washington, the first “First Lady” in the land,—are the most indignant at the

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election of Mary Lyon and [astronomer] Maria Mitchell. Mrs. Ferdinand P. Earle, former regent of the Daughters of the Revolution and active in a score of patriotic movements, voiced the sentiment of hundreds of her sisters when she said: “I never heard of Mary Lyon. . . . Is there any woman in American history who is better entitled to live in the memory of our people forever than Mary Washington, the mother of the father of his country?”47 Conservative rejection of Mary Lyon, and of the cosmopolitan liberal project of the Hall of Fame, highlights the contestation embedded in the making of national icons. The liberal, progressive stand, with its emphasis on racial progress and cosmopolitan artistic and intellectual breadth, made room for openings in the boundaries around women’s activities and their place on the public stage. The “patriotic” stand, on the other hand, defined American culture in more narrowly national terms and drew stricter boundaries around prescribed ideals for woman’s role in the nation. Both revealed anxiety about the porousness of national boundaries represented by the influx of large numbers of immigrants and the potential influence of organized labor, but they presented different strategies for managing such challenges.48 And both saw women as properly influencing public life, but in one case women might do so from the public stage itself, whereas the other favored the private domain of elite households where leading women might influence leading men. Thus, Mrs. Earle continued her complaint over Mary Lyon’s election, hailing Martha Washington, Mary Washington, and Dolley Madison as “real women of affairs, women who wielded a real influence in public life.” “Perhaps,” she mused, after the “fads” of the moment have passed, “there may be a return to first principles and the real women of America [may] receive the honors due them.”49 As intertwined struggles over the boundaries of gender and nation, and over the relation of the nation to the world at large, continued in the twentieth century, women, too, continued to register their interpretations of U.S. history through patriotic organizations and historical societies, and—to return to our starting point—as makers of historical dolls. To be sure, Martha Washingtons outnumbered Mary Lyons in that world. But the Mary Lyon dolls that did appear in the twentieth century are suggestive of the ongoing negotiation of gender, race, class, and geography. Rebecca Smith made her Mary Lyon dolls in the early 1920s as a fund-raiser for Mount Holyoke. An alumna and a lifelong South Hadley neighbor of the college, whose grandfather had supported Lyon in her plans to establish the seminary, Smith was a church stalwart and committed supporter of Christian missions.50 “The story of ‘Miss Rebecca,’” wrote a minister, “has been written many times in the annals of our best New England life. . . . Never seeking public office, she found many ways of serving her generation, quietly and without

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ostentation.”51 Fittingly, hers were traditional rag dolls, plain and simple, made with old kid gloves and other stray materials, depicting Mary Lyon as a child with blue eyes and blond hair.52 A few counties to the west, just over the border into New York, Mrs. Charles Lent and Miss Jessie Fox collaborated in making a rather more genteel Mary Lyon for an exhibition of costumed dolls sponsored by the Columbia County Historical Society. They chose to depict her in “the year 1832, when she was collecting the college funds by a house-to-house canvas,” for which, they specified, she “carries a reticule matching her charming gray corded silk dress” and “wears white silk mitts and a fichu and mouche cap of organdie.”53 Given how famously inattentive Lyon had been with regard to fashion, this was a signal reinterpretation. The press release for the exhibition noted, without a trace of irony, “One of the most exquisite details of her costume is the miniature cameo brooch which she wears at her neck.”54 The Brooklyn Museum displayed the collection from 1928 to 1932, and there Mary Lyon stood with, among others, Martin Van Buren, Washington Irving, and Susan Warner, author of The Wide, Wide World.55 The Columbia County doll contrasted sharply with the ruggedness of Mary Lyon “as pioneer,” with which we began, but both linked regional to national histories, with nary a mention of the significance to Lyon of the “wide, wide world” beyond the nation. While such dolls continued to celebrate Mary Lyon’s regional virtue and character as essential elements of a national story, sometimes with and sometimes without reference to the transnational Christian context that mattered to Lyon herself, wider changes in the history of the nation and its relationship to the world at large would set the stage for new interpretations of Mary Lyon’s place in the national story. With the coming of World War II, Lyon’s name would travel the world again, not, this time, on the lips of missionary women following their own idea of God’s purposes, but rather in the mouths of sailors enlisted to carry out the official aims of the state. “She was home for a time,” wrote one, years later, recalling his service aboard the USS Lyon, a “Liberty ship” launched in 1942, which would bring U.S. troops to battle in French Morocco, Italy, southern France, and Okinawa.56 Of all ironies, the USS Lyon—named for a woman who was always strategic and measured in her claims for women’s power, who took care not to appear too much like a Frances Wright or a Mary Wollstonecraft—was assigned to none other than the Elizabeth C. Stanton class of liberty ships, alongside the USS Susan B. Anthony and the ship named for Stanton. In this context, Mary Lyon was cast in the role of an American feminist foremother of whom the nation could be proud. Trumping, but also building on, earlier interpretations, the USS Lyon once again remade Mount Holyoke’s founder as a well-traveled symbol for the nation.

Ch a p ter 4

William Howard Taft’s Drawers ANDREW J. ROTTER

Just after the New Year in 1901, William Howard Taft, who had arrived in Manila the preceding June as the president of the U.S. Philippine Commission, sent a brief request to the John Shillito Company, a large department store in his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. “I write to ask you,” he wrote, “to send me a dozen suits of undershirts and drawers of very thin French balbriggan; size No. 50 for the drawers and 48 for the undershirts, ‘short and stout.’” Taft received the garments some weeks later. They evidently lasted for over a year and a half, for the next request for underwear that appears in Taft’s papers came in October 1902. This time he wanted just the drawers, a dozen pair, of the same light cloth—and, surprisingly, “as large as possible, from 50 to 52 in the waist.” It was the unusual American who gained weight in the Philippines, but Will Taft was unusual, weighing over three hundred pounds at a time when the average American man weighed less than half that. And, while Taft and other members of the new American civilian government in the Philippines were at pains to present a respectable appearance, wearing daily white linen suits and dressing formally for solemn public occasions in starched shirts and dark wool, Taft’s concern for his underpants had nothing to do with what anyone but he himself would see: he sought comfort, the soothing feel of material against his skin.1 Balbriggan was once virtually synonymous with undergarments and stockings, iconic in its status. The name comes from the town in Ireland 46

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Figure 8. Sears, Roebuck & Co. offers men’s extra-size balbriggan drawers in its 1897 catalog. Page 238.

where the garments were made, from the late eighteenth century to the 1980s. Originally the drawers were wool, and during the Victorian period these developed a number of refinements, including, according to historian Daniel Delis Hill, “adjustable waist bands, fly fronts, button closures, and drop seats.” Empire may have brought innovation in fabric. Refined white linen connoted civility, suggesting sharp difference between refined colonial officials and their darker, rougher-skinned subject. British soldiers in India and the Americans in the Philippines wore light wool underwear, or sometimes none, but the garments Taft ordered from Shillito’s were made of woven Egyptian cotton. The undershirts were collarless and of “fine soft silky finish,” while the drawers were also “soft finished,” with sateen waistbands and buttons made of pearl. The 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalog advertised balbriggan undershirts and drawers at thirty-nine cents apiece in sizes that ran up to 42, as well as more expensive fifty-eight cent options in sizes 44 to 52. Vogue magazine proclaimed in 1903 that these new “open mesh” undergarments were “among the most healthful and sanitary of all kinds.”2

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Taft had come to the Philippines at the request of President William McKinley. His job was to take from the U.S. military responsibility for governing the islands, creating a civil administration of laws, government, public services, a judicial system, schools, and hospitals. The United States had been deeply involved in the Philippines since mid-1898, when the islands became a second front in the war against Spain, which had started in Cuba. Admiral George Dewey had quickly eliminated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, then made a deal to dislodge the Spaniards from the city proper. That autumn, McKinley decided to annex the islands in the name of “benevolent assimilation.” Thereafter American soldiers poured in, twenty-six thousand by February 1899, when they provoked conflict with Filipino nationalist forces commanded by Emilio Aguinaldo who were seeking independence. The conflict surprised the Americans in its intensity and its length. The American soldiers and their officers had little regard for the “natives,” whom they dismissed with epithets suggesting their immaturity (“babies of the jungle”) or racial inferiority (“niggers” or “gooks”), and whose capacity for self-government they did not take seriously. Though the Americans forced the Filipinos to retreat with nearly every battle, shelled the Filipinos from boats and burned their villages, and took and tortured prisoners, they had not altogether pacified the countryside when Taft arrived in 1900. The capture of Aguinaldo in March 1901 reduced but did not eliminate the fighting. But the civilians in Washington decided that the time had come to call the war finished, and the U.S. military slowly and grudgingly gave way to Taft’s commission and a growing legion of civil servants. Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the presidency following McKinley’s assassination in September 1901, declared the official end of the conflict on July 4, 1902.3 Historians have long debated the reasons why the United States decided to annex the Philippines, in a seeming departure from its tradition of avoiding the formal capture of overseas territory (though many have noted that American westward expansion through the nineteenth century looked a good deal like imperialism, however contiguous its reach). Some have argued that McKinley reluctantly endorsed annexation because of pressure to do so from his Republican Party colleagues, who thought the American people would support a bold policy and punish them for seeming weak. Kristin Hoganson has contended that an aggressive policy was undertaken by Republican men, who felt their masculinity in jeopardy during a time of rapid urbanization and industrialization, the increasing confidence of women, and their own growing distance from the Civil War and frontier conquest that had made men of their fathers and grandfathers. The strategic case for taking the Philippines is, in the view of historians, that all naval powers were by 1898

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gobbling up every undefended territory they could in Asia and Africa, and that if the United States, having defeated Spain, had left the Philippines to its own devices it would have been taken quickly by Britain, Germany, or Japan. The economic case holds that the Philippines would provide a coaling station and “stepping-stone” on the way to the lucrative China market, particularly desirable at a time when the United States was just emerging from a damaging depression.4 There is truth in all these arguments. But let me suggest another, having to do, obliquely, with William Taft’s cotton drawers. Empire is not just a decision by a powerful nation to take charge of a less powerful: it is an encounter of people, and it includes their bodies. More specifically, imperial interactions were in significant ways mediated by the five senses, perceptions of others formed through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching or feeling. All human relationships, including imperial ones, are shaped by the senses; how we understand others, even more how we feel about them, emotionally, and thus how we act toward them, have a good deal to do with how we apprehend them through every sense. “The project of imperialism . . . could not be effected by sight alone,” the historian Mark M. Smith has written. The entire human sensorium was involved in the process of making and accommodating and resisting empire.5 This is no trivial matter. Americans, along with their European counterparts, convinced themselves that their annexation of foreign places was meant chiefly for the good of the people over whom they exercised control. Westerners felt obliged to spread the benefits of civilization to those they considered their benighted wards. They were moved by their imaginings that civilization included a list of traits held by them and generally not by their subjects: whiteness, to start, but also Christianity (preferably Protestantism), the use of English or a Romance language, masculine men, feminine women (as they understood these categories), democracy, and free enterprise. And, significantly, civilization meant, as defined by Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language in 1841 (the latest edition at the turn of the twentieth century), “the state of being refined in manners, from the grossness of savage life, and improved in arts and learning.” Civilization was decorum, politeness, respect for the everyday habits of social intercourse. Civilized people did not offend or affront the senses—such is the essence of manners. People who looked shabby, were noisy and smelly and ate strange foods, were uncivilized and thus unfit for self-government. So too were those in places that literally felt wrong, because these places were oppressively hot and moist, because the land itself was unstable or rough, or because the people in these places had coarse skin and clothed themselves (if they clothed themselves) in abrasive

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fabrics that would have been intolerable to those whose skin was decently refined. It was the duty of more sensorily advanced westerners to put the senses right, to make their subjects mannerly—pleasing to the eye, quiet, clean smelling, consumers of good food, and smooth and healthy of skin— before withdrawing the full apparatus of their power.6 Like empire, the senses have a vigorous historiography. This is true because, despite the obvious biological basis of the senses, not everyone at all times and everywhere senses things in the same way. Not all people like the same art, music, perfume, food, or underwear. Though sight is generally recognized as the highest sense, it was not always so—before the widespread use of print and the advent of literacy, hearing mattered more—and some cultures continue to value smell highly. The senses are entangled in historical categories of analysis. Race, for example, is an invention not only of vision but of the other four senses. In New Orleans in 1892, a light-skinned black man named Homer Plessy fooled a streetcar conductor into letting him ride in a “whites only” section of the car. When Plessy later disclosed that he’d got away with this he was arrested, and testimony used against him at trial had it that even if whites couldn’t always see blackness, they could hear or smell it. The senses are gendered, with the “higher” senses of seeing and hearing associated with men (men “see” and listen to “reason”), the lower with women (who “sniff things out”). And the senses are used to make class distinctions. “That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell,” wrote George Orwell; and Iris Macfarlane, an Englishwoman in colonial India, confessed to thinking that “the lower classes and the coloured races didn’t ‘feel’ things the same way, having simple nervous systems, like lobsters.”7 I am interested here in exploring hapticity, the sense of touch or feeling through the skin. This is an underrated sense. The common saying “seeing is believing” originally continued, “but touching’s the truth.” Touch, writes Constance Classen, “lies at the heart of our experience of ourselves and our world.” It certainly did in medieval Europe, where entire families shared one bed and people packed in close for warmth. The feel of one’s clothing signified standing: the roughness of the cloth worn by peasants was emblematic of their alleged coarseness, while the silk that encased the skin of the wealthy “signaled the life of ease to which they were entitled, as well as their supposedly more refined and delicate natures.” By the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans were washing their bodies frequently, in part to smooth their skins. By then, however, touching other bodies was increasingly viewed with suspicion: it suggested a dangerous intimacy, effeminacy, or the necessity, born of poverty, of crowding, skin against skin—which in turn suggested indolence or depravity. Experts on child rearing scolded mothers who

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held their children too much, for this created “emotional dependency” and denied youngsters the ability to achieve emotional distance and thus independence from their parents. Yet the denigration of touch hardly reduced its apparent power, at least its power to do harm. And if vision supplanted the other senses in importance in the Western sensorium, there remained much concern about the texture, permeability, sensitivity, and exposure of the skin. Its treatment and condition denoted the level of civilization of its inhabitant. No respectable person would allow his or her skin to stay rough or dirty, to be needlessly exposed to the eyes of others, to contract disease, or to be encased in clothing that might abrade or irritate or overheat. Those who allowed such abuses of their skin—or whose skins allowed such abuses—were coarse or primitive.8 With William Howard Taft’s drawers in mind, let me suggest that there were, broadly speaking, three critical sites of haptic contact between the bodies of the American agents of empire and the environment, both natural and human, of the Philippines. All of their experiences of these areas of contact convinced Americans that the Philippines, and Filipinos, needed revision— smoothing out, cooling and drying, curing, refining—so as to relieve the friction between the parties and allow the Filipinos to achieve a level of civilization necessary for their self-government. The first of these sites of contact concerned the land itself. Wherever they went in the Philippines, Americans complained about the roughness of the terrain and their difficulty in getting around. They got stuck in swamps, entangled in the jungle, turned back by rough water, jolted by earthquakes and volcanoes, and detained by the jagged, rocky surfaces of the mountains. Efforts to subdue Aguinaldo and his army were constantly frustrated by the landscape: when, in 1899, Brigadier General Henry Lawton tried to crush a Filipino force between amphibious and land-based units, his gunboats ran aground in the shallows and his troops wandered into a swamp and deep jungle in a futile search for a road indicated on a Spanish map. After the Americans deemed the islands pacified, Taft and his civilians turned to the task of taming and smoothing the land, improving transportation across it for the comfort of travelers and to speed the movement of goods and people. Progress was slow. When the Americans arrived, the chief forms of transportation on land were walking, riding horseback, or riding in horse-drawn carriages or carts, the most notorious of which was called a carromata. Built of wood and with iron wheels, the carromata was viewed with dismay by Americans forced to use it. “There may be vehicles which jar one more than a carromata . . . but they have not come under this writer’s observation,” wrote John Patrick Devins in 1904. American officials tried to address this

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problem by adding or improving existing roads and building a railroad into the hinterlands beyond Manila. Their ambitious goal was to modernize the islands with infrastructure. “Roads are the great civilizers if history is any guide,” asserted Charles Henry Brent, the Episcopal bishop sent to oversee the moral lives of the Filipinos.9 William Cameron Forbes, who became governor of the Philippines in 1909, made improving transportation his leading objective. “The difference between American and native administration is nowhere more evident than on the roads,” he wrote. “In the center of towns, where the municipal presidentes [mayors] are supposed to maintain the roads, and where they are most used, there were puddles and holes, no ditches, and generally a mess. We had to slow up and still got jolted towards the sky. Upon reaching the outskirts of town, the fair, white-crowned, and ditched road would begin . . . and jolting and jarring ceased, and the world flew or flowed by.” Forbes set to work with concrete, and between 1907 and 1913 road building (outside of Manila and the far-flung Moro province) increased in total mileage by 400 percent. New railroad track meant that in 1928 shippers sent seven hundred thousand tons of sugar by boxcar—a vast improvement over the fifty-two thousand tons shipped fifteen years earlier. There were of course functional reasons to improve roads and railroads, but it cannot be distinguished from the desire to ease the discomfort of those, Americans, Filipinos, and others, who traveled the archipelago. Taming the harsh feel of the land was an American priority and a prerequisite for civilizing the colony.10 The second area of contact between Americans and Filipinos, the United States and the Philippines, was not the ground but the air. It was terribly hot and humid in the Philippines. The atmosphere seemed an enemy, sapping the energy of white interlopers, rotting their possessions and their skins, making it hard to sleep. “It is so hot in this country,” complained James M. Smith, “that a man has to keep his mouth shut to prevent the sun’s rays from warping his teeth.” Fans required electricity, seldom in steady supply in the archipelago, and then hardly adequate; Americans complained that fans simply moved the stifling air around a bit and provided little actual relief. The air was thick with insects, annoying and destructive, and the legs of wooden furniture had to be placed in cans of kerosene to prevent ants from chewing them to powder. Underwear especially, and all clothing washed in the river by servants, imparted what the British and Americans called “dhobi itch” to its wearer. Scientists made studies of the effects of the tropical sun on westerners, and while some concluded that light-skinned Americans suffered no more than did the “natives,” others found that Filipinos, and other people with dark skin, began to sweat more quickly than whites did and thus stayed

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cooler; “it seems to me,” wrote one scientist, “that the brown man in superior to the white in this economy of sweating.” The military experimented with using red-orange underwear in the hope, apparently, of encouraging white U.S. soldiers to sweat more freely and thus remain cooler. (This experiment failed, not least because, one of the lead scientists wrote, “after a few washings its bizarre coloring could not fail to outrage the sensibilities of the wearer.”) Or worse, the sun impaired Americans’ capacity for decision making and inclined them to battlefield atrocity. So said, or so seemed to say, General Arthur MacArthur, who commanded U.S. forces in the Philippines 1900–1902, when he later testified in Congress: Under the influence of the far-eastern sun the heated imagination had a boundless scope for indulgence of the boldest assumptions. Discrimination and sound judgment were taxed to the limit in order to reach anything like a conservative conception of the situation, which was filled with paradoxical suggestions and apparently hopeless conclusions. Visible indications manifested themselves which were incongruous with each other and irreconcilable with facts regarded of reliable record and which were generally accepted as the bases of important deductions in the premises.11 Filipinos apparently coped easily with the discomforts of the air that perplexed and seemed to threaten the Americans. Like medieval European peasants, the “natives” crowded together in joint households, despite the small size of their homes, and Devins observed that even on the hottest nights the Filipinos “close their windows to keep out the night air or the evil spirits, whichever way one views it.” Maddeningly to the Americans, the Filipinos confined their sick to enclosed houses, which were then filled “with sympathizing neighbors at all hours of the day and night,” a practice almost certain to spread disease. A Filipino obstetrician claimed that Filipino women tended to “cling” to their families even during difficult childbirth, and were thus reluctant to go to clinics or hospitals where their lives might be saved. Filipino clothing could be starched and rough, at least as Americans imagined it feeling against their own skins; piña cloth, Taft wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, whose wife had requested some, “is like a coat of armor.” Perhaps sensing the effect of their haptic habits on Americans, a group of Filipinos said they hoped to convince visiting U.S. congressmen that they were civilized “beneath the rough dress and skin browned by the sun.”12 Finally, and most significantly, Americans feared the bodily contact with Filipinos that might make them sick. Germ theory was beginning to have influence in the United States at the onset of the twentieth century. Scientists

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and sanitation engineers suspected that diseases were caused by microscopic organisms, not noxious currents of air rising from polluted ground (miasmas) or extremes of temperature. Yet this view of things—which had not in any case fully taken hold—made Americans even more worried about touching substances that they feared might be carrying microbes or getting close to people who seemed chronically ill and were indifferent to the rules of social space. The historian Warwick Anderson has written about the “insistent contrast” made by American medical discourse between the “closed, ascetic American body” and the “open, grotesque Filipino body,” one isolated and pristine, the other teeming with disease and unbounded by concerns over transmitting it. “The tropical environment,” writes Anderson, “called for massive, ceaseless disinfection; the Filipino bodies that polluted it required control and medical reformation.”13 A number of debilitating diseases seemed to greet Americans in the archipelago, and they ascribed virtually all of them to contact with the inhabitants or their products. The Americans had inspectors police the markets, “checking regularly to ensure that the stallholders wore clean clothes, kept their hands spotless and their nails trimmed, and used only clean white wrapping paper,” and placed barrels of mercury bichloride at the entrance, requiring all patrons to dip their hands in it. Inspectors provided forks to those selling meat, so that customers could examine the product without handling it. American soldiers in particular were frequently sick, with malaria, cholera, dysentery, fevers, and venereal disease, less frequently with typhoid, smallpox, and leprosy. They were afflicted with body lice and suffered from ulcers on their feet. The British physician Sir Ronald Ross had, in 1897, established a connection between malaria and mosquitoes, though American doctors did not always acknowledge this, blaming malaria, in one case, on the soldiers’ habit of “sleeping in damp clothing” and, in another, “the mists that rose from the ground after a hard rain.” Either way, of course, it was contact with Filipinos or their environment that caused illness. This was true as well of cholera and dysentery. Ninety U.S. soldiers caught the former during an epidemic in April 1902—the result, according to medical officials, of their “indiscriminate mixing with the [Filipino] people.” On tour that spring, the Philippines commissioners and their families avoided contact with all potential hosts. “We astonish the natives when we arrive in a pueblo by bringing our food, bedding, and little alcohol stoves,” wrote Edith Moses. “On account of the cholera we prepare our own dinners and refuse the excited invitations of the presidentes, who have expected to entertain us.” Fears of getting cholera and dysentery were reinforced by Filipinos. In one village, residents implicated a single man whose touch, they said, caused “vomiting,

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diarrhea, and almost immediate death.” Others claimed that a powdery substance “scattered in the streets” brought death to anyone who stepped in it. (Lest we dismiss this as superstition, many Americans believed that drinking alcohol would prevent cholera.) Smallpox, too, was the result of contact with the ill. Starting in 1901, the Americans began using Filipino vaccinators to inject people with smallpox vaccine, a program of “native to native” contact that avoided both dangerous touching by Americans and possible resistance to it by those being injected.14 Because cholera and dysentery were traced to human excrement, Americans were most determined to police it. Objections to the public presence of feces were in part of course aesthetic: well before human waste was identified as the source of disease, westerners had objected to its ubiquity. By 1900 they had learned that even indirect contact with human feces was not just unpleasant but unhealthy. The late nineteenth century saw the creation or renovation of sewer systems in American cities. Wastes were diverted underground and sent far from concentrated populations. The Spaniards had started building sewers in Manila in the 1850s, but these were inadequate to the task. Americans were especially dismayed by the casualness of the waste disposal habits of rural Filipinos. Victor Heiser, the chief American medical officer in the Philippines for nearly a decade, observed that most villagers disposed of their wastes in unlined pits or underneath their houses, where pigs rooted freely and insects buzzed and thus became disease vectors. In more organized places, contracts were let for the disposal of “night soil” away from homes, but the wastes were then often deposited (Heiser thought) in fields where crops grew. Heiser concluded “that the consumption of raw vegetables thus fertilized has had much to do with the spread of amoebic dysentery, cholera, hookworm, and other intestinal diseases” spread by contact. And Filipinos ate with their fingers, which offered another way to spread microbes. Along with roads and railroads, American engineers prioritized the construction of wells and outhouses in Filipino villages. Workers spanned the countryside teaching villagers how to use toilets and stressing the importance of washing their hands with soap after doing so.15 In January 1899, the New York World carried the lurid story of an American soldier named William Lapeer, recently returned from the Philippines. Lapeer claimed that he had been captured and drugged by revolutionaries, then injected with “leprosy bacteria” while he lay unconscious. He was in agony, waiting to see whether he would contract the disease and “rot to death like the lepers he [had] seen in Manila.” Lepers held a special horror for American observers. Advanced leprosy causes nerve damage and the subsequent loss of digits or extremities, leaving sufferers, and those encountering

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them, to contend with visual monstrosity. Prior to the Americans’ arrival, lepers in the Philippines were tolerated and usually cared for by family members. Lepers might even appear in public spaces. Friday was “Leper’s Day” in the town of Cebu, when those afflicted were allowed to “wander around at will,” as Grace Paulding put it. Certain that leprosy spread by direct human contact, Heiser undertook a determined campaign to confine lepers to the leper colony he helped to found on Culion Island. He arranged to have village councils bring their town’s lepers to coastal towns, and at an appointed time a U.S. steamer would arrive to pick them up for transport (“leper collecting”). On Culion the diseased might live out their lives without coming into physical contact with healthier bodies. There were thirty-five hundred lepers there by 1914, six thousand in 1932. “They are undergoing imprisonment that you and I may go free,” wrote Heiser.16 Then there was venereal disease. While most American military officers and civilian officials blamed sexually transmitted diseases squarely on Filipinas—the prostitute was, they believed, “the perpetual and exclusive source of all contagion”—many U.S. soldiers arrived in the islands already infected. The military quickly took charge, sending suspected prostitutes to hospitals for examination, for which they were charged a dollar, and isolation. The soldiers were told to be careful, but sexual contact with Filipinas was considered preferable to masturbation (“lead[ing] to disorders of both body and mind”) or homosexuality. The military rejected physical examination of the soldiers because it would involve intrusive touching that was unworthy of civilized men.17 The Americans hoped that they could isolate themselves from contact with sick Filipinos, correct Filipino behavior, or, if these were impossible, insulate their bodies or scrub themselves clean of infection. Exiling lepers to Culion was a start, and Heiser urged that Filipinos with other illnesses be removed from the families that cared for them and placed in hospital wards with others similarly afflicted. Following the British practice in India of using flannel “cholera belts” wrapped tightly around the waist to prevent dangerous abdominal cooling, the Americans hoped that “stomach bandages,” worn at night, would help them avoid nausea and diarrhea. When cholera erupted in Manila in the spring of 1902, the Americans confined twelve hundred Filipinos to a “detention camp” and burned their neighborhood behind them. The white linen suits worn by U.S. officials bore physical and metaphysical qualities of lightness and purity, especially at a time when dress reformers were urging men to jettison woolens, suspected of “clogging the pores of the skin, which was ‘thus rendered incapable of performing’” its function as a “‘vomitor[y] of impurities.’” Washing with soap loomed large

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in the Americans’ sanitary protocol after the mid-nineteenth century. Cleanliness distinguished the civilized from the primitive. It indicated, as Richard and Claudia Bushman have written, “control, spiritual refinement, breeding; the unclean were vulgar, coarse, animalistic.” Emily Conger, who came to the Philippines with her soldier son in 1900, found the “natives” filthy, unwilling to change clothes or even wash their hands. “One glance,” she wrote, “and there was a wild desire to take those dirty, almost nude creatures in hand and, holding them at arm’s length, dip them into some cleansing caldron.” American sanitationists campaigned vigorously against the Filipino habit of spitting in public—“not only disgusting but dangerous,” as the authors of a prescriptive book on Filipino health practices put it—urged Filipinos to bathe daily, nude and with soap, wear shoes, prevent their children from playing on the ground, and advised: “Change your underclothes and stockings as often as you can—every day if possible. . . . In order to be clean we should not sleep in our underclothes or the clothes we have worn during the day.” Bishop Brent ordered a carton of soap from the United States soon after he arrived in the archipelago, while Francis Harrison, the U.S. governor from 1913 to 1921, evidently washed himself thoroughly with carbolic soap after shaking hands with a group of upland Igorots.18 Let us return to William Taft in his “short and stout” drawers. Taft wanted the balbriggans for comfort, against his skin as it sweated and chafed in the

Figure 9. Philippine governor-general William Howard Taft’s underwear mediates his encounter with a water buffalo, c. 1904. U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center.

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steamy weather, against the irritation of the linen or wool trousers he wore. They could not, alas, prevent him from getting sick. In 1901 he developed something pretty horrible: an ischiorectal abscess, “poisoning from which,” wrote his personal secretary, “spread so rapidly as to require surgery to remove gangrenous flesh,” then a second operation “to facilitate healing.” Returning to the United States to recuperate, Taft had surgery once more, in March 1902. Such abscesses have several possible causes, all of them plausible in the early twentieth-century Philippines. Taft might have ingested harmful bacteria, such as E. coli; he was exposed to it frequently at banquets. He told Victor Heiser that “his intestines harbored a first class zoological garden”—and indeed, he would contract amoebic dysentery in March 1903. Or the illness might have started with severe inflammation, brought on by hemorrhoids or persistent diarrhea. Friction and perspiration would have aggravated the abscess in either case.19 Yet if Will Taft’s drawers could not prevent disease by contact with what seemed the strange new space that surrounded him, they nevertheless served a purpose. They offered a boundary outside his skin meant to separate him from the Philippine environment and its people. They contrasted, haptically, with the kinds of garments worn against the skins of those he had come to serve and rule. Inspired by Laura Otis, we might imagine Taft’s underpants as permeable “membranes,” offering Taft an opportunity to assert Western power yet (he hoped) without the risk of penetration, “whether by bacteria or foreign ideas.” Will Taft’s drawers were pure white, soft with their cotton finish and their sateen waists. They were designed in France, made in Ireland, sold in the United States, sent to the Philippines. They were the intimate garments of civilization, unavailable to Filipinos and likely undesired by them anyway. They marked difference. And that was the point.20

Ch a p ter 5

Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL

I aim to make trouble here. In a volume full of important provocations, I want to take a symbol of triumphant womanhood, ascendant on the global stage, or an icon of the African American escape from the land of Jim Crow, and reimagine it as evidence of a shift in the nature of imperial connection, exploitation, and abuse. My goal in making this sort of trouble isn’t to suggest that other, more sympathetic readings of this symbol are wrong. Instead, I just want to lay multiple readings of the same symbol alongside one another, in jarring disharmony. One person’s triumph, I am insisting, can be another person’s profit. One great stride for an important black woman can be, in the end, proof of the dominion of empire. A single symbol can be caught up in several different transnational flows, without any eventual convergence. The symbol, as the title of this piece indicates, is the banana skirt worn by Josephine Baker in 1926, at the opening of her famous Folies Bergère review. And the historiographical stakes here are high. When the subject is the consideration of African American lives, most transnational histories of the period imagine Paris as an escape from Jim Crow. With good reason, as dozens of the most productive and important black writers, performers, and artists found in Paris a “capital” for the black Atlantic.1 When the subject is Josephine Baker, most emphasize her creative capacity for satire, for parody, for buried critique, along with her indomitable entrepreneurship. And when 59

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Figure 10. A lithograph from Paul Colin’s collection Le Tumulte Noir, 1929, celebrates Josephine Baker in her banana skirt. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, New York.

the subject is racism and empire, most stress the emergence of American strength, the slow decline of Europe, and the perpetuation, even in the midst of this transition of power, of racial advantage. The gap between these interpretive traditions cannot easily be bridged. Histories of transnational encounters modeled on Paul Gilroy’s notion of “roots and routes” often stress heroic

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improvisation, and transfers outside the nation-state, while histories of diplomacy and internationalism and commerce often miss out on the experiences of nominally subaltern peoples caught up in changing times.2 Remembering the night she became a superstar, Josephine Baker seemed puzzled, even decades later, that “the thing that caused the most comment opening night and for fifty years to come was my banana waistband.” “Sixteen bananas,” she continued in simple summary, “pointing comically toward the ceiling were attached to a belt slung low around my hips to accentuate my forward and backward movements.”3 Dancing with a partner onstage, mostly naked but for the string of bananas around her waist, Baker was a contorting, teasing, desirable figure. Her hair was slicked down in what would soon be her signature style, shining like a mirror, parted on one side. Her partner onstage squatted and jumped around her, banging on a small drum in a tropical rhythm, his movements a burlesque imitation of widely disseminated anthropological materials. Baker, a far more gymnastic presence on the stage, mixed in knock-kneed steps from the popular Charleston, along with big smiles and wide eyes. The two figures made for an interesting couplet. Their performatively primitive entanglement was framed by the low-slung, wide-leafed plants that ringed the stage and the jungle vines that draped the background. Debuted in 1926, the banana skirt was merely one of many costumes—all of them provocations aimed at the heart of art deco Paris—worn by the first African American superstar. There were ostrich feathers and sarongs made of palm leaves, glittering flapper-style dresses and bikinis made of strings of shells and pearls. In donning this extraordinary diversity, Baker was becoming a useful stand-in for the broader colonial world, representing everything from Tahiti to Martinique to Indochina to North Africa and, more generally, the entirety of the subjugated brown and black world. The bananas and the feathers and the beads were useful to her. They advanced her career, giving her great wealth and a chance at transcendent fame. She was so successful in this effort—this desire to stage the global South, to embody multitudes—that she was proposed as “Queen of the Colonies” for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale, a veritable world’s fair of empire, held in Baker’s Paris. Six years after wrapping herself in bananas, she was cosmopolitan enough to stand in for the totality of France’s empire. It was the banana skirt that captured the French—and later American— public’s imagination, or that seemed to best match the needs of the moment. And it is the banana skirt we remember. Onstage, Baker’s bananas were strung around her waist, made of cloth or fabric, often silver, and were accompanied by jeweled necklaces and brassieres and bangles and armbands and footwear.

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When artist and former Baker lover Paul Colin envisioned the review for his folio of prints, though, Baker wore nothing but the bananas. His most famous image of her—a nimble dancer, lighter than air, jumping with her skirt made of bananas—was stylistically different from almost every other representation in his folio, looking substantially less like a “darky” stereotype. She is lithe, poised, and elegant. When the folio was released, it was the banana skirt in this one image that caught the eye, seemingly unique among all the costumes, partly because it seemed less like a racist caricature, and more like a sympathetic rendering of an actual performance. And it endures in the present as an icon of feminist bravado partly because Colin’s representation of it seems so untroubled. “There was nothing prurient about all those swinging bananas,” her son Jean-Claude Baker writes; “they were funny.”4 Cultural critic Rosalind Galt, seconding the younger Baker, describes the skirt as a “parody” of “the racialized aesthetic of the ornament.”5 Parodic or otherwise, the skirt was open to a handful of obvious readings. It seemed, at once, like something out of an imperial folktale, an opportunistic faux ballerina’s tutu, knit together from bananas in the jungle, in softhearted imitation of a picture, or a postcard, stolen out of some conqueror’s camp. Or maybe it was an encircling corps of phalli, dangling around the waste of the sexualized black female body, held in suspended animation, enthralled by the spectacular tension of the dance. Or perhaps it was a gesture to the commodification of the tropics, the export of everything worth having in the metropole, and the enjoyment, by white consumers, of everything that tasted of Africa. However one reads it, the string of bananas would seem to be the epitome of colonial power, an overdetermined stereotype emerging from a string of decades now reviled for their projection of racist fantasies onto bodies that were, in the logic of the day, outside the pale. It seems less like a comedic parody of power and more like an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism,” a pitch-perfect embodiment of colonial fantasy with one goal in mind: the advancement of Josephine Baker. Viewing it another way, one needs to work hard—very hard—to see Baker’s performance onstage, bejeweled but largely naked, clad in fruit and bangles and all smiles and angles, as anything other than barely covert minstrelsy. And yet, in the decades since Colin released his folio, that soft image of Baker in the banana skirt has become a symbol for the spirit of interwar Paris, for feminine triumph, and for black superstardom in Europe. It symbolizes a wild release from restraint, an abandonment of convention, and freedom from the Puritan moralism of the United States. Just about every contemporary gesture to the banana skirt imagines it on Baker’s terms, as a playful feminist provocation. Designers like Prada routinely release versions of the

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banana skirt—usually a print on silk or cotton—hoping to clad women in some reiteration of Baker’s supposedly feminist creation. Beyoncé Knowles, the African American singer, has worn a closer imitation of the skirt, with a rhinestone-studded bikini top, and has referenced Baker’s freedom of selfexpression, her “aggressive” investment in revolution and movement. “She seemed like she was just possessed,” Knowles mused on Good Morning America in 2006, “and it seemed like she just danced from her heart, and everything was so free.”6 The notion of escape haunts the banana skirt. Indeed, above everything else, the banana skirt is understood as an African American icon. Its appearance on that stage came well before Baker became “French”—long before she became a citizen, learned to speak the language, and fashioned herself as the embodiment of global France. That night, on the stage, she was not “La Baker,” not a heroine of the resistance, not a continental cinema star, but one of many, a part of a vanguard of black performers and artists, all of them fleeing the land of lynching and the one-drop rule, from Bricktop to Langston Hughes, brought to France by the reorientation of American culture outward, a comfortable exchange rate, and the promise of cosmopolitan Europe.7 For this reason, there is a long-standing African American tradition—from Diana Ross to Beyoncé—of enthusing over Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, as if it were an example of something amazing. That “something amazing” is hard to define, but it is related to the story of Baker’s rise to success. Baker was born into extraordinary poverty. As a young girl, she was a witness to terrible racial bloodletting. She grew up fast. And she left home early. She might fail to recall her happiest childhood moment in East St. Louis, but she would always remember the worst: the riot that left the streets slick with blood, the “Apocalypse” of 1917. Confronted with a white mob and the stench of burned flesh, an eleven-year-old Baker ran for her life, clutching her “babies” (two black-and-white puppies) to her chest. “I would remember the massacre all my life,” she once wrote. Though she was a product of these awful circumstances—circumstances that were typical of black America in the Jim Crow era—Baker still managed to find fame and fortune. Young Josephine was a nervous, small child, a poor “plain ghetto girl” as Ishmael Reed called her, as apt to be scavenging for coal behind Union Station, or pleading for piecework door to door, as she was to be dancing in front of mock stage lights made out of tin pans and candles. Once out of East St. Louis, Baker became famous beyond measure, first in New York and then, more dramatically, in Paris, where that aforementioned advantageous exchange rate and the hunger for the primitive served to make her rich as well. By the end of the 1920s, Baker, once a “plain ghetto girl,”

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had become a superstar—an American exile in Paris now cast in solid gold.8 No longer just an African American expatriate, fleeing Jim Crow and racism, she was a race rebel challenging the world’s conventions, gesturing to her bootstrapping success in the 1920s, and celebrating her rise from poverty to global celebrity. This life narrative—repeated in countless biographies, documentaries, Broadway shows, and silver screen adaptations—is the quintessential African American Horatio Alger folktale. Its endless recirculation—not to mention its unique details and spectacular arc—is what makes it feel like folklore, as if Baker’s ascent to a life of castles and caviar was a shorthand for what was possible, and as if the social forces surrounding her ascent were less important than that spectacular arc. Because of this happy narrative, Colin’s painting of the banana skirt has become a popular postcard and decorative motif on tourist ephemera sold in Paris, robbing the image of shock value, stripping it of its imperial function, and transforming it into something untroubled. It is a visual shorthand for the greatest African American success story of the twentieth century: the transformation of a poor black girl, born into a single-parent household, and transformed by virtue of her own hard work and pluck into one of the wealthiest celebrities of the modern age.9 This story of personal success—rooted, financially, in the display of the black body for white enjoyment—would seem to cut against the grain of the literature on “the black Atlantic.” Later in life, Baker’s efforts to bridge cultures, to sit at the cutting edge of couture, to live, literally, in a castle, might seem to be “counter-modern” in the way that Paul Gilroy once used the term, but dancing on a stage in a skirt of bananas only confirmed modernism’s dominant conceits about the vast gulf between civilization and the primitive. Decades after La Revue Nègre, Baker may have sympathized with the radical politics of antiracism, and the politics that led so many African Americans to seek a temporary home in Paris, but in 1926 her interests were more mercenary. Her biography—publicized later in her life—focused on this story of upward progress, achieved through extraordinary ambition, in the face of racism, but the “roots” and “routes” of the skirt were more complicated. As a symbol of feminine success, the banana skirt is better framed as evidence of her rejection of patriarchy in all forms, and her flight from a context that had seen her married off at the age of thirteen. Generations of white men had imagined black women as sexual consorts and had tried to strip away any dignified representations of black womanhood. And if black women weren’t hypersexualized, they were effectively neutralized, described as mannish, as a finger-wagging “Mammy.” Baker may well have been willing

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to do anything—to don any costume, no matter how outlandish—to steer clear of the landscape she had left behind. Baker didn’t have to go to Paris. She might have stayed in New York, where a renaissance of sorts was emerging north of Central Park, but she chose not to, recognizing, perhaps, that France had more to offer her as a black woman. As Erin Chapman suggests, the rights-talk of the Harlem Renaissance—which might have appealed to Baker, who hungered for recognition as a genius—emerged from a patriarchal context, with African American claims to full citizenship based not merely on artistic merit, but also on the demonstration of masculinity, “proved,” so to speak, on the bodies of black women. Histories of the Harlem Renaissance generally fall into two camps. In the one camp, the period was defined, at first, by a quixotic attempt to foster and produce black artistic genius—quixotic because it was a distraction from concerns about jobs and property values, but also because it fed a growing obsession with the “primitive” in American culture. By the time the Depression arrived, most of the civil rights establishment had refocused their energies to try to take advantage of this obsession, to open a door for the recognition of African Americans as human beings capable of creative genius. And then, when the bottom dropped out of the economy, all that was left was the memory of what might have been. In the other camp, the renaissance marks the awakening of a real commitment to equality across the color line, a genuine awakening of liberal sentiment and cultural pluralism, precursors in this earlier decade to what we now call multiculturalism. One camp sees the 1920s as uneven ground, the odds stacked against African Americans; the other camp sees the ground as level, at least locally, in the parlors of the Lower East Side and the salons of Harlem. Both camps focus on men, and men’s stories, and men’s imaginings of the decade. Chapman, though, reminds us that even the original quixotic vision had a grim underside, that the fabled New Negro renaissance was built, as she submits, on the subjugation of black women’s bodies. Baker didn’t leave Harlem just as things got interesting. She left just as patriarchy—white and black—was, once more, confirmed.10 It is easy, then, to see her embarkation for Europe as a rejection of all this, as an escape from patriarchy and racism. Langston Hughes—a lifetime friend of Baker and a fellow traveler in the black exodus to Paris—remembers standing on the deck of a ship, looking backward at the bustling coastline of the United States, and hurling his Columbia University textbooks over the rail into the Atlantic.11 On board her own transport overseas, and not yet famous, Baker made the same commitment to the future, a commitment that led her, in very short order, to strap on a skirt of bananas.

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A banana can be many things, of course. But it is, first and foremost, a commodity. By the time Baker wore her skirt, the banana fruit—relatively rare in the West in the mid-nineteenth century—had become a symbol of America’s commercial empire and a reminder, more generally, of the necessity of overseas conquests. The streamlining of cultivation and production of bananas for export turned Caribbean and Central American republics into laboratories for a new business model. Freed slaves and their descendants were coerced into the wage sector of the economy, compelled to plant, tend, and harvest by companies—like Boston Fruit and United Fruit—that were headquartered elsewhere but that controlled every step of the production process. These were not expressions of the state, but private corporations, vertically integrated, with every step in the production, supply, and distribution chain controlled by a single entity. Another way of looking at the banana skirt, then, is to see it as expressive of a set of emerging, overlapping commercial relations, as a link between commodities rooted in the peripheries of empire, transferred through the usual means to the metropole, and subsequently conjoined, unpredictably and with spectacular results. The 1920s marked the ascension of American empire and the slow erosion of European prominence. The Great War had left Europe battered, but it had also structurally changed the United States, accelerating the process of capital concentration in cities, drawing immigrants and African Americans into urban spaces, diminishing the political clout of rural sections of the country, and moving the American economy even further toward its eventual goal of being a global export economy. In this international context, the ideal of vertical integration—an ideal popularized by Andrew Carnegie, among others—became an expression of worldwide empire, with significant consequences. And the circulation and consumption of commodities from the “banana republics” of the global South became a conspicuous feature of a world that seemed enthusiastic about the relations of race and empire. It was the United Fruit Company that brought Marcus Garvey to Panama, to London, and to Harlem. And it was, to some extent, the banana that brought Josephine Baker to the spotlight. There was, in this moment of Baker’s triumph, an astonishingly open, candid discussion of race and class as nearly precise synonyms, as if all the truly rich had white skin and all the truly poor had black, and in which cities were white spaces and tropical backwaters were black spaces. “From the Jungle to the Final Mile,” read one telling U.S. Rubber advertisement, which would be relatively unimportant were it not so revealing of commonplace assumptions. In a series of frames, the fantasy of an organic world economy is revealed, from the plantations in Sumatra,

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where dark-skinned men cut trees with hand knives, to the streets of New York, where a group of Gatsby clones drive art deco cars with “good” rubber tires, their authenticity confirmed by the “roots and routes,” again, of the commodity. It took a lot of work to get a rubber tire to New York or a banana to Paris, but the metaphors of connection were already there, alerting people to the function of black and brown bodies in the global economy as faraway producers of raw materials that would be seamlessly transferred to the metropole and transformed, by the magic of the market, into a product for sale. The attachment of blackness in particular to foodstuffs and the kitchen has long been noted. In the United States, for every bag of rice or jug of syrup or box of Cream of Wheat or soap there was an image of Uncle Ben, the kindly old black man, or Aunt Jemima, the smiling Mammy, or Rastus, the white-hatted “chef ” who served up grits, or the Gold Dust Twins, bringing cleanliness to the American household. “Slaves in a Box,” one historian calls these iconic images, because their role in advertising was to suggest that each product provided contented, obedient service, analogous, it was thought, to that offered by a slave to his or her master. Commodities like cotton, sugar, corn, and, more distantly, tropical fruit were routinely linked to the same symbolic surround, emphasizing the faraway location of black bodies and their proximity, in that distance place, to the harvest of the material foundation of white happiness.12 French images paralleled—and departed from—this surround. Rastas and Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima were “domestic” in two senses, because they were contentedly confined to the kitchen and located in the mythic rural South. They knew their place, as the saying goes. French advertisements from the years surrounding Baker’s debut onstage reveal the same connection between commodities and the periphery or empire, but the emphasis is invariably on the foreign, the alien, and the colonial subject in service somewhere, but not necessarily in the modern city. A black-skinned man clutches an oversize bunch of bananas at his waist, but carries a sombrero in one hand. A black silhouette wearing gold anklets and bracelets, a pointy blue skirt, and nothing else, pours coffee into a champagne coupe. A Senegalese tirailleur, smiling and grinning, drinks a chocolate-and-banana-flavored drink on the African savanna. A young boy—without shoes and wearing a jaunty red cap—holds a steaming cup of hot chocolate aloft, while playing with an elephant, an indication that he is somewhere in Africa or, perhaps, in a traveling circus. Countless advertisements for rum, coffee, sugar, citrus, and chocolate show jet-black figures, all in the distant colonial present, signifying empire in their presentation of service and consumption.13 Baker’s

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banana skirt is a part of this imperial context. The image of the long, tropical fruit served, back in the 1920s, as a soft advertisement for United Fruit. As late as the 1980s, the banana was used by the Chiquita brand as a signifier of tropical humor, a part of the headdress of a presumably harmless, dancing dark-skinned female figure.14 Beneath this global context, there was even more history. All in all, the effect was not merely to see the black body as a natural companion to commodities rooted in the global periphery, but also to see the black body as a commodity. Such a sight line reminded the viewer, with a wink, of the slaveholding past, of the moment when black bodies were sold at auction alongside household goods and animals.15 But it also confirmed, in a quick glance, the near perfect alignment of race and class. Indeed, Baker’s banana skirt did far more than that, because it managed to authorize the viewing of the black female body as a sexual object, too. There she was, smiling and dancing, surrounded by an erect skirt of bananas and wearing not much else, and seemingly thrilled by the experience. When Baker set out to transform her success on the stage into something bigger, her emphasis was determinedly on anything but the banana skirt. Marketing “Bakerfix,” a hair pomade, she stressed, instead, the trademark art deco curl, a feature of her slicked-down hair. “It was the fate of the bananas,” biographer Phyllis Rose writes, “to become ever harder and more threatening with the years.”16 When she returned to the United States in 1936 for the Zeigfeld Follies, she left the banana skirt back in France. In its place, she donned a skimpy top-and-bottom combination that featured a bunch of sharp spikes protruding outward, warning the audience that she was dangerous, unavailable, and protected. She was still a commodity—her presence on the stage assured that—but she was working against the bananas, against the idea that she was merely a representative, not a performative genius but a “Negro dancer.” And when she was much, much older, and she had created a museum dedicated to her life, she put the banana skirt in one of the exhibits and kept her kids away. She also relentlessly attacked that global alignment of race and class, the same alignment that had reduced her body into a commodity no different from a banana. Not like those who aligned themselves with the Popular Front, or the Communist Party, or the radical Left generally, and who sought to tear down the system and replace it with a more level social landscape. Instead, she set out to beat the aristocracy at their own game, to be the richest woman in the room, to have the most extraordinary homes, to be the figure foregrounded in that last frame of the U.S. Rubber advertisement, the smiling woman in the big, roaring automobile. This meant, in the end, putting

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as much distance between herself and the banana skirt as there was between the skirt and East St. Louis. In another image from Paul Colin’s portfolio, Baker—as before, clad in the infamous banana skirt—dances with a partner. He is the quintessential minstrel representation, overly tall and dressed in a tuxedo, with skin just slightly lighter and browner than the black of his jacket’s fabric, and with swollen red lips and bug eyes taking up half his face. He has no nose. No eyebrows. Just coal black skin and oversize fire-engine-red lips. Baker, in contrast, is far lighter, far smaller, and much different physically. She wears just a skirt of bananas and a pair of bangles. Her posture is balletic, even cubist, all muscles and angles. Her head is turned to look at us, and an enigmatic eye—coy, intelligent, troublesome—peeks out over her shoulder. A single art deco curl graces her cheek. She does not match her partner, and their dance is a pas de deux of opposites. There are many ways to read this image, or to understand this iconic artifact of the 1920s, this simple string of bananas. One could read the male partner as a representation of the African American diaspora to Paris, and see Baker as a symbol of French empire. One could see the bananas as reminders of black commodification for white enjoyment. Or one could see, in that discerning eye, making contact with its opposite, the gaze of a clever ingénue, watching her audience watch her, making sure that that group saw her in just the right light, ensuring that they would propel her to fame. The challenge, really, is to embrace all of these readings, to let them lie in productive tension. To let the banana skirt be everything that it was.

Ch a p ter 6

V-J Day, 1945, Times Square BROOKE L. BLOWER

On August 14, 1945, quartermaster first class George Mendonsa found himself en route back to war. The son of a Portuguese fisherman who grew up sailing the Narragansett Bay, the young Rhode Island volunteer had enjoyed five weeks of shore leave with family but was now booked for a flight from New York to San Francisco to rejoin his ship, the USS The Sullivans. Mendonsa and his shipmates had participated in a string of fierce clashes during the Allies’ Pacific islandhopping campaign, most recently providing cover for landing forces and rescuing burned and battered survivors of kamikaze attacks off Iwo Jima and Okinawa. This battle-tested sailor had survived more than a year and a half of harrowing duty at sea. But no one had any illusions about the carnage that would ensue if the invasion of Japan went forward as planned.1 New York buzzed that summer afternoon with talk of the bomb, Soviet operations in the East, and tentative peace negotiations. Killing time before his flight, Mendonsa took a Long Island girl he had recently met to Radio City Music Hall. When attendants interrupted the matinee to announce that the Japanese surrender was imminent, the couple joined the human stream exiting the theater and drifted toward Times Square. Like other celebrants, they stampeded the bar at Child’s Restaurant, where Mendonsa put back drinks as fast as bartenders could pour them.2 70

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Figure 11. A sailor kisses a woman in white in Times Square on August 14, 1945. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

Tipsy with booze and excitement, Mendonsa then stumbled out into a street still only lightly dusted with confetti. Outpacing his date, he traipsed past growing knots of gatherers, catching the eye of the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, out snapping pictures with his handheld Leica. Eisenstaedt, a World War I veteran and German Jewish émigré, had perfected his visual storytelling skills as an Associated Press freelancer in Europe before bringing

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his candid but well-composed social tableaux style to Life’s staff, which he joined at the magazine’s inception in 1936. Following his instincts, the seasoned “father of photojournalism” kept ahead of the sailor, whom he remembered “running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight.” Eisenstaedt recalled: “Suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed.” Pleased with the contrast between their clothes, he took four pictures of the couple’s embrace. His second exposure appeared in Life two weeks later in a feature commemorating the victory celebrations, titled “The Men of War Kiss from Coast to Coast.”3 Life reprinted Eisenstaedt’s stunning image a few times during the decades after 1945, but its iconic status soared in the wake of the Vietnam War, when moviemakers and others began revisiting the American World War II experience in search of reassuring, redemptive war narratives. The late twentieth-century revival of the redesignated “Good War” hinged on storytellers’ ability to strip the conflict of its geopolitics and moral complexities and instead remember it through the personal battlefield triumphs of everyday enlistees—recruits, now aging veterans, like the one kissing in Times Square.4 Eisenstaedt’s textured street scene and its Greatest Generation poster couple “combined all the right elements: the returning soldier, the woman who welcomed him back and Times Square, the crossroads that symbolized home,” writes the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman.5 The sailor and his swooning lady in white have since been honored, parodied, and merchandised countless times. Girls gaze dreamily at poster reproductions on their bedroom walls, and by 2005, couples even began staging annual mass kiss-ins on the original site.6 Eisenstaedt’s photograph appears to foreshadow an almost providential postwar golden age for the United States. It epitomized “the American victory,” claim Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi, who recently established the kissers’ identities: “At last the conquering hero and his obliging maiden are together, safe and sound.” Projecting forward in time to unprecedented prosperity, as so many viewers do, they anticipate “there will be marriages and a baby boom. . . . Life will be good.”7 It is telling that commentators such as these now see only an “American” victory in the image, not the Allied victory. Celebrations like the one in Times Square broke out across the world in August 1945, but V-J Day, as a global moment, has been forgotten.8 Instead, Eisenstaedt’s photograph seems to dramatize the outsize role Americans played in winning the war as well as the special rewards they would reap with the peace. It invites a nation-centric retelling of the conflict, placing domestic dreams at the heart of the struggle and obscuring the role international politics and experiences played in

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Americans’ wartime calculations. Here stands the citizen-soldier as reluctant hero, an American Odysseus whose ambitions were simply to be the world’s Good Samaritan and then return to the comforts of home.9 Precisely because Eisenstaedt’s image seems to say so much about the national experience, scholars usually attribute its power to how it reassures viewers “that the demands of citizenship ultimately lead to individual happiness,” as the visual rhetoric experts Robert Hariman and John Lucaites write. Set against the backdrop of Times Square—an archetypal democratic public sphere, many point out—the photograph places the white, heterosexual bond at the heart of the nation in order to artfully reconcile a tension at the core of the modern liberal state, namely the tension between collective security and public obligation on the one hand, signaled by the uniforms, and individual initiative and private desire on the other, embodied by a passionate embrace. “It is fitting to mark the end of the ‘Good War’ with a representative kiss,” Robert Westbrook suggests, for it portrayed the “consummation of the bargain between protector and protected”; with its “mix of joy and violence,” it hinted at “the ambiguities of the moral contract” that united the pair. The political philosopher Marshall Berman likewise calls the kiss a “communion of citizens,” witnessed by onlookers, he suggests, who sing their approval like a classical Greek chorus, assembled in the modern-day agora of Times Square.10 Yet even as the photograph held out the promises of citizenship in a liberal society, for viewers at the time of its original publication it also tapped into anxieties about the capacity of the state to manage the demobilization of millions of citizen-soldiers. GIs coming home would need to “uncoil,” explained one ad picturing a soldier disembarking from the gangway in the same issue as Eisenstaedt’s photograph: “Is your town ready for him?” Toward the end of the war, decommissioned troops did not call to mind thriving college classrooms and suburban subdivisions but the turbulent aftermath of the last war, when men in uniform contributed to unrest both at home and abroad.11 The V-J Day celebrations themselves revealed the potential for chaos. In New York alone, the revelry led to looting, vandalism, and some 275 fires, as well as six deaths and more than nine hundred hospital trips. A man forcefully grabbing a woman on the street “suggests the wider mayhem,” the art historian Alexander Nemerov writes of Eisenstaedt’s couple; it warns that “the advent of peace could be dangerous.”12 In 1944 and 1945, public leaders argued that it fell primarily to women to tame all these servicemen into husbands, and Life manned the front lines helping Americans visualize postwar sexual and family norms capable of settling the returning troops. Perhaps a good woman would be enough to anchor a frisky seaman to his community, the Times Square kiss intimated, echoing

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other popular entertainments that sought to assuage concerns about sailors on American shores. For example, Jerome Robbins’s groundbreaking ballet Fancy Free (1944) and Broadway musical On the Town (1944) transformed shipmates’ pushing and shoving, flirting and philandering into harmless, gracefully choreographed horseplay, and Hollywood shore leave films, such as The Fleet’s In (1942) and Anchors Aweigh (1945), triangulated male affection through the hot pursuit of women, all the while diffusing lust into love. It was no easy task to overturn Times Square’s then well-known but now often-forgotten reputation as a gay male cruising ground, or to remake the sailor into an unambiguously heterosexual social type—and a man on the prowl for sex into a wholesome icon no less—but Eisenstaedt’s photograph might be seen as part of a popular genre attempting to do just that kind of cultural work.13 Thus, set in a domestic frame, Eisenstaedt’s photograph presents a blueprint for postwar social citizenship and sexual readjustment. It can be seen to promote the same values as the GI Bill, privileging men in uniform as the most deserving citizens while also stressing the importance of reorienting their energies away from the same-sex environment of the military and toward the heterosexual nuclear family, where women would relinquish wartime independence and let them take charge.14 It signaled a double domestication: a domestication of the woman, who viewers imagine will be returned to her traditional role as wife and mother after a period of disruption, but also a domestication of the man, as he, too, is redirected toward the pleasures of marriage and home. Yet there is a third kind of domestication going on here, and that is the domestication of New York itself. This essay explores New York’s international context and connections as well as Times Square’s status as a liberty port destination for men in uniform in order to call attention to the ways in which “fraternization,” widely recognized for placing pressure on women in overseas staging grounds and battle zones, also gave rise to a coercive sexual politics in U.S. mainland ports. Scholars have sketched how, in English towns adjacent to American encampments, loitering GIs earned the label “overpaid, oversexed, and over here” by harassing and even following women home. They have discovered, too, how women in Sydney carried hat pins and other makeshift weapons after dark to protect themselves against “brown-out Romeos.”15 Growing details, moreover, are emerging about rape and other sexual assaults perpetrated by American servicemen from Normandy and Germany to Okinawa and Japan. But historians have not connected these “foreign” war experiences to those of women in the continental United States. The “home front” continues to be imagined as a place set apart, largely absent of able-bodied men, where women surely

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struggled for rights and opportunity but remained blessedly sheltered from the chaos “over there.” “US military policy,” Mary Louise Roberts argues, “protected American families from the spectacle of GI promiscuity while leaving French families unable to escape it.”16 Yet seeing New York as part of the war’s landscape rather than safely removed from the conflict reveals how Life’s editors and generations of subsequent admirers have remade the Times Square of Eisenstaedt’s photograph into the “home front,” when it was actually a much more complicated space. By 1940, New York operated the largest and busiest harbor in the world. Half of the nation’s foreign commerce and nearly three-quarters of all overseas passenger traffic passed through there. Long before the United States officially entered the conflict, New Yorkers began practicing blackouts and air raid drills. The war felt ever present, even if the bombs never did rain down. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the metropolis blossomed into a colossal military zone, the headquarters for the so-called Eastern Sea Frontier. Defense batteries ringed the harbor, where gun crews fired bring-to shots across the bows of unidentified vessels. Huge training camps sprang up on the city’s outskirts, where inductees arriving from faraway hometowns trained in lifeboat safety, wrote their wills, and took their meals from German and Italian POW kitchen staff. On the beaches, strollers stumbled upon petrol-soaked food rations, bodies, and other debris washing up from nearby shipwrecks. “In New York, the front was at the sea buoy,” one merchant seaman remembered.17 New York served as the leading embarkation point for U.S. troops bound for combat. Approximately 3.2 million men in uniform filtered through there, almost twice the number that passed through San Francisco, the nation’s second-largest departure hub. Conscripts christened it “Last Stop, USA.” Like Hawaii, as written about by Beth Bailey and David Farber, they experienced it as a “first strange place,” a terrain right at the edges of war that never quite qualified as “home front” or “America.” The English journalist Alistair Cooke called Manhattan “Tijuana on the Hudson.” Reaching New York after a cross-country tour of the wartime United States, he said, felt like “returning from America and entering an international settlement.”18 More than just an embarkation point, the city also served as the world’s most popular liberty port for servicemen on leave or in transit. Commentators marveled at the formidable number of uniformed men on the wartime streets of New York—and not just GIs but also British Tommies, Australian Diggers, Dutch marines, French sailors, and more. Times Square was their beacon. The district, “whose brassy charms a conscientious returned soldier could hardly shun,” most readily brought to mind Port Moresby in New

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Guinea, one GI half-joked. For many men in uniform, the salient categories of existence were not home and abroad but duty and leave. New York and New Guinea, in their militarized world, belonged to the same network— a string of way stations in close proximity and relationship to the battle zones, punctuating and sustaining troop movements and fighting, not least by providing periodic, morale-building access to women. The Minnesota conscript LeRoy Neiman described his representative path through war as a succession of military hassles and horrors interspersed with episodes of revitalizing sexual adventure. Time off to “compete for dames” in Hollywood’s canteens offset the wretchedness of basic training in California. Coveted passes to devour Manhattan’s fleshpots, “like the condemned man’s last meal,” made drilling at his next post, Camp Shanks, almost bearable. Thoughts of Liverpool’s “willing damsels” sustained courage while crossing the U-boatinfested Atlantic, and angling for ways off base to “sally forth in search of gin and sin” in London took the edge off preparing for the cross-channel invasion. The reward for storming Omaha Beach was not only whatever “local talent” could be found along the way in Northern France but also, at the end of it all, drinking and whoring in Paris, “a party” of legendary proportions.19 What kept men going, another enlistee explained, were thoughts of “women, women and women and more women and liquor.”20 U.S. military officials found sex, and not just in the form of barrack pinups, a particularly effective mobilizer. Infantrymen invaded Normandy in anticipation of “liberating” grateful Frenchwomen. Recruits went to the Pacific not only to defeat the Japanese but also, as one marine admitted, to “tour the islands and screw all the hula girls.” Notoriously promiscuous in all theaters of war, the American rank-in-file regarded getting laid as a consolation for maybe getting killed, while commanders on the ground imagined sex drive as critical to battlefield success. “A man who won’t fuck, won’t fight,” General Patton liked to say.21 For this reason, the burdens of “swaggering masculinity” extended beyond the heat of battle and into shore leave itself, explained one GI, where a “red-blooded” American had to show he was capable of “asserting his will,” “using his fists,” and “taking women in contemptuous, domineering stride.” Many felt compelled to prove their prowess—to play the sexually aggressive “wolf.”22 Ports of call, including New York, were not just places where men got liberty but also where they took liberties, where boys were “liable to over do it” and sometimes “play rough,” as one shore patrolman explained. The uniform conferred a measure of anonymity and demanded respect and privilege from nearby civilians, all of which allowed its wearers to behave in ways they would not have in civvies. “We headed out to the fancy midtown bars and

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restaurants in military uniform just to show the slackers and café society toffs that we were real men on a real mission, while they were weasels,” Neiman remembered about his Manhattan furlough. “A sailor in New York had to be cocky,” the choreographer Jerome Robbins agreed: “Once you put on the uniform, that’s the way you behaved.”23 Looking at Eisenstaedt’s elegantly composed photograph now, when black-and-white photography connotes nostalgia and class—and when Times Square has become a destination for package tour groups and schoolchildren—viewers presume that they are looking at an inclusive, democratic locale filled with fellow citizens. But like the fun zones of other liberty ports, Times Square served, quite the opposite, as a place to suspend civic virtue. The amusement quarter had earned a seedy reputation during Prohibition and the Great Depression, when upscale resorts and legitimate theaters lost ground to gangster-run gambling and burlesque houses. Perhaps as a downat-the-heels working-class enclave, Times Square facilitated a certain kind of democratic mixing, but through a process of “masculinization,” as George Chauncey describes, it had become by the late thirties and forties quite inhospitable to all but the manliest of men, whether they sought homosocial or homosexual company. The neighborhood’s billboards peddled whiskey and cigarettes to the male consumer. (Eisenstaedt’s photograph advertises Ruppert’s beer and Bond’s economical two-trouser suits.) The district’s peep shows and action movie grind houses catered openly to the stag trade. Here, amid the roughhousing, drinking, and posturing, in the no-frills barbershops, late-hours cafeterias, and watering holes stinking of malt and five-cent cigars, flourished an atmosphere not so far removed from the male sporting world of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, Times Square’s World War II– era virile bravado enthralled the Beat writers who idolized all the “cats and characters,” as Jack Kerouac called them, from the sailors and hoodlums in dungarees or zoot suits to the “dishwashers who leaned in steamy kitchen doorways, all tattooed and muscular.”24 But to a woman, with business other than to attract men, Times Square’s “cheerful vulgarity” could be menacing, especially during the wartime dim-out. Lingering in the vicinity of soldiers and sailors, particularly unescorted, placed her in danger of being mistaken as “loose” or worse by servicemen or the police. Times Square posed a risk to a woman’s reputation and possibly even her person.25 Wartime mobilization intensified the area’s aggressively masculine orientation as troops converged on Penn Station from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the harbor’s receiving ships, and the training camps of neighboring states. At least ten thousand uniformed visitors came weekly to the aptly named Crossroads of the World, forming lines outside the neighborhood’s

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two hundred military clubs and canteens. “You heard every accent” among these throngs, one reporter noted, “except the New York one.” Taking in the smell of popcorn and exhaust, they enjoyed free show passes and gawked at the sidewalk’s tropical fruit juice stands like the tourists on hiatus from war that they were. Roving in small packs, young Brits and Aussies and Yanks packed the bars and dance halls, carousing, fighting, and getting “stewed to the gills.” Drunks sang dirty renditions of sentimental songs while zigzagging down the street—like the sailor in blues on the left edge of Eisenstaedt’s photograph. Sometimes soldiers passing through New York bristled at the swelling numbers of women in the city’s workplaces, “looking as if they owned the joint,” as one GI complained. But Times Square was different. Even as women stepped out to drive taxis, deliver milk and mail, and wear military uniforms themselves, it remained a bastion of male prerogative.26 Seizing the special license the area accorded them, military men engaged unapologetically in what crude army parlance called “getting ass.”27 Wistful GIs perused girlie magazines like Eyeful and Titter at local newsstands and responded to come-ons from the area’s surplus of male hustlers. “Mostly, of course, they were after girls,” one writer observed. Well-slathered with pomade and aftershave, out-of-town draftees hunted for those infamous “victory girls”—supposedly “man-hungry” bobby soxers with “uniform hysteria,” who, though often only young teenagers, could be seduced into taking their patriotism all the way.28 Researchers regarded this sexually charged milieu as a gold mine; it provided material not only for Jerome Robbins’s sailor ballets but also for Alfred Kinsey’s sex studies. But for military police canvassing the area, it was simply trouble. Struggling to keep watch on so many sailors in such a large city, the navy’s shore patrol concentrated their forces on Times Square. “Overboisterous servicemen” nonetheless taxed the patience of New Yorkers, as they propositioned female residents, cavorted with prostitutes in backyards or on front stoops, and generally took “a great deal of advantage of the uniform.” Like in overseas ports, young American men sometimes went AWOL—“after women and liquor” or “a wolf on the loose,” as GIs renamed the acronym. They spurned local laws and authorities, such as municipal cops and train conductors, sometimes even resisting arrest by MPs from a different branch of the military.29 And by 1945, as troops began returning from Europe after V-E Day, the number of rowdies on “skirt patrol” reached a critical mass. Only days before Eisenstaedt took his pictures, five ships alone disgorged close to fifteen thousand fighters into the city, and, on the day itself, nearly nine thousand more arrived.30 All of this is to say that, like other territories subject to the “friendly” invasion of Allied forces, Times Square posed special challenges to women,

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especially young, unescorted ones. Hatcheck girls and other nightclub employees endured “insulting and obscene remarks” on the job. Female office workers commuting home from nearby buildings likewise faced “a kind of GI gauntlet,” one journalist explained: “American, British and French servicemen are forming nightly stag lines along the curbs and in front of shop windows, ogling girls and women surging toward Forty-second Street subway stations.” The “wolf-whistle” became a ubiquitous sound in the “honky-tonk quarter around Times Square,” one woman remembered, where “lean and rangy servicemen shifted their gum to the other cheek as they eyed the sidewalk broads.” A simple smile emboldened men to latch onto the arms of unsuspecting “babes.” Often they did not take “no” lightly. “The soldiers and sailors used the same techniques they saw the smart-guy characters play on the screen. These innocent boys,” recalled one female writer: “They tried to make you feel guilty for not wanting to go to bed with them.”31 “Sailors call you the vilest names if you ask them to leave you alone,” another Times Square resident complained; her friend was expecting a baby, “but even that doesn’t protect her from being insulted and chased right up to our very door.” Another New Yorker wrote to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox about servicemen “staggering wildly about bullying civilians and frightening women and children out of their wits” on midtown subways and streets. “None of us want our men to be panty-waists,” the complainant admitted, “but isn’t it humanly possible for the Ships’ Police to keep this sort of thing confined”?32 From southern Italy to the South Pacific, local women made a practice of “taking to the hills” and hiding “good” girls indoors when Allied troops drew near, and at Port Moresby WACs lived in a barbed-wire compound, escorted about by armed guards charged with shielding them from lascivious compatriots.33 In New York, for better and for worse, women relied on luck and street smarts. This brings us to Greta Zimmer, the woman in Eisenstaedt’s photograph. Seeing Times Square not as a protected home front but as a rough-and-tumble, multinational military zone dramatically revises how we view that famous kiss. Greta Zimmer, a young Jewish girl, lived in Austria with her family at the time of the Anschluss. In 1939, she escaped to New York with her two younger sisters. Taken in by relatives, age fifteen at the time, she never saw her parents again. To the best of her knowledge they were murdered at Auschwitz. In Manhattan, Zimmer volunteered as an air raid warden and, to make ends meet, worked as a dental assistant in an office near Times Square. She is wearing her uniform in the picture. On the day in question, rumors about the Japanese surrender had been drifting in with patients all morning.

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After her bosses returned from their lunch hour, she hurried to the site with the city’s most reliable information: the ticker-tape sign at Broadway and Seventh Avenue. She did not like being out in public in her uniform and was anxious to get back. “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed,” she told an interviewer years later. “The guy just came over and grabbed!” He did not say anything to her, and “it wasn’t a romantic event,” she insisted: “He was very strong. He was just holding me tight.” Another reporter asked what she had been thinking at that moment. “I hope I can breathe,” she responded. “I couldn’t speak,” she explained. “I mean somebody much bigger than you and much stronger, where you’ve lost control of yourself, I’m not sure that makes you happy.”34 Viewers who find it unsettling to learn that Zimmer was grabbed against her will approach the photograph with new eyes, noticing how thoroughly she has been immobilized in that headlock, and how hard Mendonsa grips her waist. But many find ways to rationalize what they see. Alexander Nemerov understands that the “sailor’s act is violent as he steals his unsolicited kiss,” but, like other scholars, depersonalizes the image, lifting it out of the realm of the everyday and engaging with it instead as an allegory for the atomic age.35 Robert Hariman takes a different common tack, brushing off suggestions that this might be assault by simply asserting that “times change”—when actually this qualified as assault then, too, depending on who was doing the kissing and who was being kissed.36 Viewers also reassure themselves by imagining that although the sailor caught the young woman off guard, she eventually relaxed and enjoyed the kiss. In Eisenstaedt’s first photograph, Zimmer clenches her hands into fists, her right pinned to her chest clutching her purse, her left trying to push his shoulder away with the back of her palm. In the second shot, however, she lowers her left arm. “As he continued to lean forward,” Verria and Galdorisi assume, she “gave over to her pursuer.”37 Yet analyzing Eisenstaedt’s second and third frame side by side reveals that Zimmer actually did something that women often did, not when they enjoyed a man’s attention, but when they felt vulnerable and exposed: she was pulling down her skirt. By the fourth shot, her fist returns to its defensive position. The body language in these photographs contrasts sharply with that shown in an earlier series of public kissing shots taken by Eisenstaedt in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Seeing soldiers off after their leaves, here wives and girlfriends lean in, yearning for their partners’ touch. The men are gentle, attentive, softly brushing lips and cheeks. The women’s arms are not trapped against their torsos but cling lovingly to their partners’ coats or shoulders. Steady on her feet, rather than in danger of falling over, one woman lifts onto her tiptoes to get closer for a last caress.

Figure 12. Contact sheet showing all four frames of the famous Times Square kiss. Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt/ Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

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Figure 13. A sailor tenderly kisses his girlfriend at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, December 1943. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / Pix Inc. / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

Nor did the famous Times Square embrace share the spirit of jubilant reciprocity conveyed by the consensual kissing that took place during the victory celebrations. In the “Men of War Kiss from Coast to Coast” layout, for example, other photographs feature couples who collapse into each other with equal force. Men’s hands are not curled into tight fists but rest flatpalmed on their partners’ backs. The women are not stiff but at ease, angling their heads forward and kicking their heels or hiking their knees into the

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air. For what these kissing portraits lack of the expert perspective and iconic setting of Eisenstaedt’s work, they make up for it with genuine affection and egalitarianism. What Eisenstaedt’s photograph did resemble, however, were other cases of coerced kissing in Times Square on V-J Day. Newsreel footage and other pictures repeatedly show women leaning back defensively (and in at least one case being forcibly dipped to the ground) as well as with arms lodged between

Figure 14. The hands tell the story. A woman tries to free herself from the grip of a sailor celebrating victory over Japan in Times Square on August 15, 1945. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

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themselves and their pursuers, turning away or pushing against men’s shoulders to free themselves.38 Indeed, it took so long to identify Life’s famous couple precisely because so many sailors confessed to grabbing women there during what PM described as “the wildest, loudest, gayest, drunkest, kissingest hell-for-leather celebration the big town has ever seen.” Some scavenged the streets for pretty girls. One seaman simply sat on the curb, waiting for them to pass and then pulled them into his lap. The celebrations, thought one bystander, boiled down to “a bunch of people gathered in Times Square, some girls getting laid.” Newspapers offered only hints about how far men might take this “promiscuous kissing and mauling by total strangers,” but the Washington Post disclosed that at least one woman’s clothes “were literally torn from her body by exuberant soldiers and sailors, and a policeman who attempted to intervene was knocked down.”39 How must it have felt to be accosted like this, in plain sight of the euphoric masses, amid the blizzard of paper strips and the din of horns? Some laughed off these wayward contacts, probably recognizing how overwhelmed servicemen felt and perhaps not yet fully processing what had just happened. Others fled. The nurse Edith Shain “wanted to be part of the celebration,” but an “amorous sailor” and another kissing soldier “motivated a retreat into the next opening of the subway.” Feeling morally compromised, Shain did not admit her suspicion that she might have been the woman in white in Eisenstaedt’s iconic photograph until 1979, and only came to terms with her experience that day by subsequently refashioning it into a romantic, welcome event—“a good kiss,” she embellished, “like a dance step, the way he laid me over in his arms.” Those who did vocally protest the unwanted attention were dismissed as poor sports. A Times writer described one New Yorker marching down the street indignant, her face smeared with lipstick. “They don’t ask a girl’s permission,” she complained: “They just grab.” “The crowds on the whole, however, were good-natured,” the writer quickly added, implying that the girl who complained was not. “I’m married! I’m married!” objected another woman ensnared by a soldier, according to PM’s man in Times Square. “Well tell your husband this is with the compliments of the Third Division,” the GI responded and then gave her a “resounding smack.”40 Giving girls a good smack took on ritualistic proportions during the victory celebrations and not just in Times Square. In other stateside military hubs soldiers staged kissing ambushes, and “wild-eyed sailors” cornered girls for “what-have-you,” as one “terrified” woman later remembered. Accounts surfaced of women trying to dodge these traps, usually unsuccessfully, and then “admiring” crowds, like the one in Eisenstaedt’s photograph, gathering and applauding noisily in charivari fashion when they were caught. Reporters

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quickly normalized these incidents, weaving details of assaults in with the rest of their coverage of the merriment, making no effort to distinguish between voluntary kissers expressing their own joy and appreciation and others who had been caught against their will. This “spirited display of public kissing,” Life described, “ran the gamut from mob-assault upon a single man or woman, to indiscriminate chain-kissing. Some servicemen just made it a practice to buss everyone in skirts that happened along, regardless of age, looks or inclination.”41 In Chicago’s Loop, where the Tribune reported men “kissing strange girls indiscriminately,” one thirteen-year-old, who had never been kissed before, saw just such a sailor coming toward her. “With alarm, I realized he was looking at me,” she related. Panicking, she tried to evade him in the crowd, but he found her. “Hello, Baby,” he cooed as he gave her “a big buss on the mouth and lurched on.” Brazen servicemen were “‘attacking’ women and girls” in Boston, too. Throughout the war that city had hosted furloughed sailors who “sort of got out of hand,” remembered the Boston Herald society editor, and as a consequence, “young ladies were more or less advised to keep away from Scollay Square.” “Downtown I felt uncomfortable,” she admitted. Not surprisingly, the Globe flippantly surmised, the “girl who resisted a V-J kiss” in that area proved a victory-day rarity.42 Nothing, however, rivaled the “orgy in San Francisco,” as the Chronicle called it, where thousands of rampaging sailors overturned cable cars, “stripped girls of clothing, and necked on street corners.” During three days of so-called “peace riots,” which caused thirteen deaths and more than a thousand injuries, unsuspecting women were “molested” and their escorts were beaten. Published reports made a meticulous count of the broken liquor store windows but offered only oblique references to the “feminine assault” that furnished a major method by which sailors and marines “let off steam,” as the Life caption reporting the attacks put it. “Guys were kissing, and practically raping, everybody on Market Street,” remembered one hotel hostess: “They were pulling girls’ pants off and sailing them down the street.” Many allegations of sexual assault, including gang rape described by witnesses, came to light in subsequent weeks, and officials confirmed that at least six rapes took place. But the grand jury tasked with investigating the disorder put the whole affair to rest by concluding that “when large numbers of young men realize that they are freed from war they are prone to celebrate overzealously.”43 The social pressure to kiss, to politely suffer unwanted advances—just like being subject to catcalls or being pinched—was a predicament girls who grew up in the mid-twentieth century learned to grin and bear. Whistles and other forms of unsolicited attention could be meant as flattery, just

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as removing hats, opening doors, or pulling out chairs signaled courtesy. But the daily sexual etiquette of the city streets also served as reminders to women that they were different and less powerful, that they owed their freedom of movement to others’ self-restraint, goodwill that at any time might be rescinded. War only heightened the stakes of these encounters. The distinction in servicemen’s minds between fighting on behalf of women and fighting for them—as war booty—easily blurred, as Robert Westbrook points out, but despite these ambiguities, proving sexual loyalty and obliging men in uniform remained a mandatory female patriotic service.44 Kissing had become subtly but profoundly political. “When a soldier gets a furlough, or a sailor comes ashore / The longer you make your kisses the shorter he’ll make the war,” the songstress Sophie Tucker advised young women. Or as Gene Kelly instructively crooned in Anchors Aweigh, “I begged her. . . . I pleaded. . . . I argued. . . . I threatened. . . . And I finally got that kiss.” Audiences in Times Square, where the film was in its fifth week playing on V-J Day, took note.45 Greta Zimmer, who later became Greta Friedman, has faced pressure to remember that Times Square embrace in positive terms. Life reunited her with Mendonsa in 1980, and though she did not want to, coaxed her into kissing him again for the camera. It has been so hard for Americans to come to terms with the wartime experiences of Friedman and women like her, because they equate Eisenstaedt’s image with scenes of homecomings occurring in towns across the United States instead of drawing more revealing parallels between mainland ports such as New York and other military staging grounds, occupied territories, and liberated zones across the world. Homefront mythologies underpin a perhaps comforting but misleading mapping of the war’s landscape, dividing it too cleanly into a civilian safe haven, and a separate, overseas, militarized, and masculine war front. These spatial constructs perpetuate a set of exceptionalist and gendered narratives about the American war experience, shoring up the notion that war was the exclusive business of men, that American women in particular had been shielded from disorder, that they did not endure firsthand war’s brutalities and indignities and therefore that their sacrifices did not need to be honored or compensated in quite the same way.46 Viewers do not want to think that the wartime experiences of women in the United States had anything to do with the plight of others overseas and find it hard to imagine that U.S. servicemen treated “their” women, especially white civilians, with anything other than respect. Sexual aggression has been extraterritorialized in U.S. histories of World War II. Maybe

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women endured abuse in Manila or Berlin. Perhaps even in London and Paris, but surely not on Broadway. Yet seeing Times Square as part of a transnational, wartime urban network reveals that encounters in Manhattan belong not only to the classic home-front story but also to a global history of the dangers women faced, even if out of range of bombers, and even when occupied merely by “friendly” forces. Across the world, including in New York, women made day-to-day bargains with strange men in uniforms who had set up camp in their vicinity—relationships that were sometimes forced, sometimes consensual, but often colored by wartime pressures. Once the landscape of war is reenvisioned as a complex geography dependent on the presence rather than absence of women, the far reach of combatrelated violence becomes more readily apparent. In the same issue as Eisenstaedt’s photograph, for example, Life’s roundup of the week’s news and sports included descriptions of a stranger who attacked a Chicago nurse while she slept and a Seattle veteran who beheaded his wife with a souvenir bolo knife brought back from the Philippines. Sharply rising rates of violence against women and girls were tied directly to waging the war, and not just abroad, although officials suppressed troubling rape statistics for morale purposes and fueled instead a popular obsession with female immorality and infidelity.47 Meanwhile, scared and resentful conscripts, passing through American communities on the way to combat, bucked up their courage and took out their frustrations on local female targets, and later they streamed back, sometimes bringing weapons, psychological trauma, or alcoholic and sexually aggressive habits with them.48 Conquering women has long been a deliberate tactic rather than an accidental byproduct of war, and since the 1940s civilian casualties have increasingly outpaced military combat victims, reaching a staggering 90 percent of total casualties by 1990. In modern warfare, in other words, women and girls have become more likely to be harmed or killed than men in uniform. War has decidedly been a woman’s affair, despite the ways in which popular entertainments from movies to video games continue to portray it as largely a man’s domain.49 Eisenstaedt’s image contains within it both of these opposing narratives about how armed conflict works. Viewing the photograph from a domestic point of view, it can be celebrated as a tribute to America’s victorious fighters and “a symbol of personal liberation,” as David Hackett Fischer calls it, so richly deserved in the aftermath of battle.50 But viewed in international perspective, it becomes something else: a reminder that war is not a romance—and an icon to the travails of women, not as bystanders but active participants in modern combat, who, even in the United States, too often found themselves in the path of the world’s armies and navies.

Ch a p ter 7

The Kinsey Reports NAOKO SHIBUSAWA

They called it the K-bomb. The comparison was irresistible: the second Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, was launched on August 20, 1953, the very same day the world learned of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.1 Both the report and the bomb shocked, although only one surprised. This 1953 Kinsey report had been much anticipated, particularly because the earlier one, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, had been an unexpected best seller. Medical publisher W. B. Saunders’s market research indicated that ten thousand copies would be plenty for the first printing of the male report. But Saunders vastly underestimated the public’s appetite for eight hundred–plus pages of charts, graphs, and clinical prose when the topic concerned sex. Some advance buzz about the male report prompted Saunders to more than double the first printing to twenty-five thousand. Still that wasn’t enough. Within ten days of its release, Saunders had to order its sixth printing, bringing the total to 185,000 copies.2 Nearly 250,000 copies sold during the several months it spent on best-seller lists, and a half million more before a decade had passed. Quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon, the Kinsey report remained for decades afterward “a godsend to radio comedians, nightclub jokes, gin mill raconteurs and connoisseurs of the shady quip.”3 The report was translated into over a dozen languages and sold about two hundred thousand copies outside the United States. Around the globe, Kinsey, a middle-aged family man with three adult children, was being hailed as doing “for sex what Columbus did for geography.”4 88

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Figure 15. Hollywood nightclub singer Julie Wilson begins her song by pretending to read the Kinsey report, October 1948. Photo by Peter Stackpole / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

Within a year of the male study’s release, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey (1894– 1956) promised also to navigate the uncharted waters of women’s sexuality. In early 1949, news media across the world reported that he and his team of researchers at Indiana University–Bloomington had finished interviewing eight thousand women. “The women are more extreme than men,” the Egyptian Gazette quoted Kinsey. “The results of our interviews are astounding.”5 With such teasers, Kinsey easily got domestic and international journalists to journey all the way to Bloomington four years later for the second report’s release.6 In Pakistan, the Karachi Dawn observed, “Never before in the publicity world has a book been awaited with such curiosity, nor received with such wild enthusiasm.”7

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As in the United States, the female report also provoked more controversy abroad than the male study. For example, a Wisconsin editor had telegrammed Kinsey, denouncing him for inflicting “the most direct and devastating attack on Christian civilization” since the Russian Revolution.8 Democratic representative Louis B. Heller of Brooklyn had publicly charged him with “hurling the insult of the century at American women.” Without having read the book, Heller asked that it be barred by the post office until Congress had determined “the value of such studies, if any.”9 The federal government did not heed the congressman’s request, but the book did face censorship overseas, where it also prompted concerns about morality—albeit without the added nationalist outrage. In South Africa, the male report had been released without delay, so South Africans were annoyed when their government decided to review the female report to see if it passed a decency test. By the time their customs office approved its release for sale, the copies earmarked for South Africa were gone; they had been sent to Britain to meet the demands over there.10 Although South Africans had to wait a few more weeks for their copies, they were more fortunate than readers in Ireland. The Irish government banned the book outright. The Catholics in the Philippines had better luck: despite a “last-ditch effort” by their religious leaders, the book passed the censors.11 Meanwhile, the educational department in Taipei also banned the Chinese translation of the book because it threatened to exert an “undue influence on the mental health of boy and girl students.”12 Observing such reactions, a reader in Trinidad asserted that those with “a vested interest in the suppression of the truth” invariably behaved this way.13 Many overseas readers also stressed that Kinsey’s findings applied to American females only, and they hotly debated the research’s relevance to their own societies. People around the world wondered what the American doctor revealed, if anything, about women’s “hidden secrets.” How did a Hoosier zoology professor become an international sensation? Sex sells, of course, and certainly more so than gall wasps. Prior to becoming “Dr. Sex,” Kinsey was best known for studying the evolution of wasps that create tumor-like growths called galls when they inject their eggs into trees and other plants. After finishing his doctorate at Harvard in 1919, he had established himself as a nationally respected entomologist, a charismatic lecturer on the IU campus, and the author of an immensely successful biology textbook. While ambitious academics at this stage often cruise into university administration, Kinsey took the riskier route of switching the focus of his scientific career to a barely recognized, seemingly illicit field. Few before Kinsey were willing to label themselves as sex researchers.14 But Kinsey was unfazed, stubborn, and persistent—willing to risk controversy

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for knowledge’s sake. After being recruited to coordinate and co-teach an interdisciplinary marriage course in 1938, he realized that sexual behavior must be understood from a biological perspective. He saw how long-standing taboos and newer, Freudian notions about sex had mystified the students in his marriage class. They misunderstood or knew little about sex, despite its centrality to happiness in marriage. In 1941, he established the Institute for Sex Research with the help of university president Herman B. Wells and secured funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. With a small staff, he applied the taxonomic expertise that he had gained from studying gall wasps to amass data on human sexual behavior. By the time the first report came out seven years later, it was the atomic age, and comparisons to bombs came easily. Both Kinsey reports unsettled prevalent ideas about sex and morality. Chapters on masturbation, premarital sex, extramarital sex, sex with prostitutes (male report only), homosexual activity, and “animal contacts” revealed a stark contrast between putative norms and actual behavior. What Americans had been saying about sex vastly differed from how, how much, and with whom or what they had sex. The reports also discussed all the sexual behaviors as scientific phenomena and presented consensual acts such as infidelity in a neutral fashion, not as the moral issue that many throughout the world believed them to be, and the news media capitalized on the opportunity to titillate. “Kinsey Reports on Unfaithful Wives,” proclaimed Taipei’s China Post.15 Frequently cast as an exposé with potentially explosive consequences, the female report particularly triggered comparisons to the bomb. Kinsey’s literal change to a sexy topic brought him worldwide attention because information flows had become increasingly globalized. News items and scientific knowledge spread from Western metropoles to the rest of the globe, following trajectories established through imperialism. News, technology, and scholarship traveled along older paths—and also more recent inroads, since capitalist expansion continued apace with formal colonialism’s end. Underlying this material infrastructure of information flow was, of course, an ideology of imperial power, advancement, and superiority. This is to say that while this scientist devoted himself to proving the “naturalness” of most sexual activity, there was nothing natural about why or how Kinsey became “global.” A truly transnational study on the reception and impact of Kinsey abroad would require archival research on all major continents and outside the scope of this essay. Yet the library of the Kinsey Institute on the Bloomington campus offers some clues in the clippings from domestic and international news outlets and correspondence that Kinsey received from around the world. Seventy-four binders hold 25,293 clippings of media responses to

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the reports. The vast majority of the clippings come from the United States, but several binders are devoted to European responses and one solely to foreign, non-European responses to the female report. This latter category included European colonies in Asia and Africa. Existing scholarship on foreign responses to the Kinsey reports have been written largely by Europeanists examining the impact of the reports in European nations, and the documents at the Kinsey Institute for the time period show the same bias.16 So we see the richest conversation on Kinsey in European nations, as well as in former European colonies and industrialized nations such as Japan. This evidence in turns tells us how, where, and why information flowed as it did when the reports first came out.17 The sources at the Kinsey Institute confirm that there was no uniform or universal reaction to the Kinsey reports. Both in the United States and abroad there were fans, critics, and the disinterested. International reactions paralleled U.S. ones in many respects, but oftentimes in ways that revealed opinions about the United States as much as about Kinsey. And what Europeans, European settlers, and others said is similar to what those studying Kinsey in the American context have observed.18 Americans used the reports on sexual behavior to assess gender relations, of course, but also class mobility, civil rights, views about work and leisure, the conduct of the Cold War, and scientific “advancement.” In other words, the Kinsey reports prompted discussion about a range of issues that ostensibly had nothing to do with sex.19 The reports appear to have set off similar soul-searching assessments abroad in both Western and non-Western states. But these examinations were also comparative, stacking themselves up against the United States. Even if harshly critical or dismissive, the non-U.S. responses to the Kinsey reports nevertheless seemed to accept as axiomatic that intimacies among citizens of the new hegemon revealed an important core of the global power. Sex measured more than sex. To all, sex measured modernity. What that means and how that came to be is the subject of this essay. “I do not see much of Alfred after he got interested in sex,” papers from Kenya to Australia to Japan quoted Clara “Mac” Kinsey as lamenting.20 That Mrs. Kinsey’s ironic quip brought a chuckle to readers in far-flung areas deserves a brief reflection on how comments could travel across the globe by the mid-twentieth century. For example, the remark was read in Kenya, still a British colony in the 1950s, because Kenya had been plugged into the international Anglo news circuit since the early 1880s, shortly before it came under the rule of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. The late nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” had followed the cutthroat contests for market shares of the mid-nineteenth-century among U.S. and European

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cable and newswire outlets such as Western Union, the Associated Press, the Eastern Telegraph Company, Reuters, Agence Havas, and Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau. In tandem with developments in railroads and steamships, such communications companies created a growing transcontinental network of cables and telegraphic systems that enabled huge transfers of capital, technology, people, ideas, and news at an unprecedented pace. In 1851, the first cable connected Dover and Calais, allowing near-real-time contact between the London Stock Exchange and the Paris Bourse. Within two decades, a proliferation of international cables created webs of communications that allowed a high degree of coordination among merchants, bankers, and markets within the transatlantic economy and beyond—to British settler colonies, India, the River Plate zone of South America, and Asian metropolises such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. By the turn of the century, with the colonization of Africa nearly complete, all continents became enmeshed in the global communications infrastructure that transmitted financial transactions, imperial policies, scientific ideas, and news. In 1893—the same year the American-born planters seized governance of the Kingdom of Hawaii—the Associated Press joined a news cartel formed by Reuters (UK), Havas (France), and Wolff (Germany) that had been created in 1869.21 Further enhanced by wireless technology by the mid-twentieth century, these established global and imperial networks allowed the Associated Press (AP)—as well as other American outlets such as United Press (UP) and the International News Service (INS)—to place their stories not only in rural and metro newspapers throughout the United States, but also around the world. News of Kinsey’s research thus reached far and wide, albeit most significantly in the economic and imperial networks just outlined above. In addition to the controversy that Kinsey’s research elicited, words of appreciation came from across the globe praising him for “fighting ignorance” and bravely challenging taboos. In South Africa, the Johannesburg Star noted that the prestigious British medical journal Lancet approved of Kinsey’s report. Both an Israeli newspaper and a German-language daily in Argentina congratulated Kinsey for courageously attacking the notion that all sexual matters should be veiled in secrecy. Israel’s Davar daily approvingly noted Kinsey’s purpose “to expose and demolish” the hypocrisy of many sexual standards, and the Argentinisches Tageblatt credited Kinsey for replacing “moral evaluations based on religious and other traditions by cool, matter-of-fact data.” Writing from India, geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane agreed. From his new perch at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, the British-born Haldane paid tribute to Kinsey’s dogged commitment to science. Haldane especially appreciated how Kinsey confirmed the “extreme

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diversity of human beings”—for instance, the enormous variation in sexual frequency found even within demographically similar populations. “It was as if some people ate thirty times as much or slept thirty times as long as others,” Haldane marveled. If a tad less effusive, the Yomiuri Shimbun in Tokyo also acknowledged the significance of Kinsey’s studies; it advised specialists and intellectuals to take notice, as the studies would “become the foundation of future research of sex.”22 Indeed, Kinsey’s reports inspired similar studies in other countries or affirmed those that were already under way.23 Perhaps the best known was the “Little Kinsey,” a 1949 British survey by Mass-Observation, a private social research organization. “Little Kinsey” was so named because it relied on a smaller sampling of two thousand middle-class men. (Kinsey and his team interviewed twelve thousand, although data from only fifty-three hundred men made it into the book.) The Little Kinsey also reported on masturbation, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and sex with prostitutes. It was also considered explosive. “Gunpowder!” scrawled a retired chaplain, his only answer to the questions on Mass-Observation’s written survey.24 International readers learned of similar studies being planned or embarked on in nations such as South Africa, Israel, Germany, Austria, and Japan.25 In addition, the Singapore Free Press and the Jerusalem Post reported that in Denmark, an “attractive and blonde” doctor named Kirsten Auken had completed a doctoral dissertation in 1947 on the sex habits of Danish women, a year before the first Kinsey report.26 And the Palestine Post related the story of two young Finnish physicians who had to cease their Kinsey-like study because of opposition from Finnish parents, the Ministry of Education, and other high authorities.27 Even with his thoughtful approach, only partially described above, Kinsey’s methodology came under international criticism—mostly from those who understood that Kinsey relied on interviewing, but not much more about how he conducted his research or tested the validity of his data. Nevertheless, their concerns were not without reason. First and foremost, nonU.S. criticisms focused on sampling. Like American critics, they particularly doubted that Kinsey could generalize from a relatively small sample despite his attempts to achieve a modicum of demographic spread. And although the volume of interviews appeared enormous—nearly twenty thousand if using the most generous numbers—they represented a tiny fraction (0.013 percent) of the 150 million people living in the United States at the time.28 Of course, this percentage would be infinitesimal compared to the global population of 2.5 billion. But while Americans critics wondered if Kinsey’s data were skewed by exhibitionists willing to talk about sex—that is, whether the study gave a “perverted” portrayal of sex activities in the United States—non-Americans

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tended to be more bothered by the use of wholly American data to apparently make universal claims regarding human sexual behavior. They felt compelled to point out that Kinsey’s studies pertained not to “the human male” or “the human female,” but to American males and females—and only to a subset of them, mostly white and middle class. Although the very title of the Kinsey reports came across as yet another example of American hubris, this was not Kinsey’s intention, as he was acutely aware of the limitations of his sample. Kinsey also carefully titled the first report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, rather than Sexual Behavior of the Human Male. The preposition “in” was to convey that his studies pertained to “the behavior occurring within the human species.”29 Still, a question remains as to why Kinsey did not add “American” to his original title, or simply use the preposition “within,” as that would have helped clarify his meaning. A second frequently discussed “problem” concerned the sole focus on what Kinsey called biologic expressions of sex. As in the United States, international readers wont to find fault complained that Kinsey ignored the commonsensical fact that sex cannot be reduced merely to the physical act. Where is the love? Where is the soul? The spirit? And like the Brooklyn congressman who charged that Kinsey delivered the insult of the century to American women, many of the critics had not read the book before delivering their opinion. Granted, many international commentators wrote their opinions before the book was available in their countries. Yet such objections continued to be expressed after the reports were translated and/or passed the censors. Kinsey may have been a positivist, but he understood the limits of science and the importance of context. It was precisely because love could not be scientifically measured that he omitted it from the purview of his research. Measuring what cannot be gauged statistically through an established unit of measurement made no sense to him. Doing so would lead to conclusions that were not based in empirical science. That said, Kinsey’s choice to use the orgasm as a unit of measurement brought criticisms abroad and at home, for reasons similar to the objection that the significance of orgasms, like sex itself, ought not to be reduced or oversimplified. Not all orgasms were the same, critics pointed out; they were wholly contextual. Surely, an orgasm derived from loving partners differed from that resulting from rape or masturbation, they pointed out.30 It certainly could be different—Kinsey didn’t deny context— but orgasms, he still insisted, could be measured by frequency, duration, volume of emission, and so on.31 In fact, an attention to context not only girded his research, but also was its raison d’être. Notions about sex were highly dependent on cultural norms that changed over time. This is why he made the effort to differentiate Americans over the age of fifty from those who were closer to

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their twenties and thirties. Kinsey firmly believed that most customs and laws regarding consensual sexual behavior were misguided and overly restrictive. Leading the public and lawmakers to that conclusion was Kinsey’s overall goal, besides contributing to scientific knowledge in a relatively unknown area. A third negative reaction from international commentators was to dismiss Kinsey’s research altogether, on the basis that it did not add much to knowledge. “What is new in the Kinsey report?” asked a South African reader in a letter to the editor of the Natal Daily News. Such swipes against Kinsey were frequently taken by Europeans and European settler colonialists who were given to compare wise “old Europe” with the “young, immature United States.” Europeans already knew all that was needed to be known about sex and had done so for millennia, the South African reader pointed out. “America, suffering from a sickening surfeit of knowledge and a devastating dearth of reverence, thinks she has found something new,” the reader huffed.32 Italians commented that Europeans, moreover, had no need for statistics on sex; what they knew about sexuality they had known forever and through “instinct.” This self-knowledge freed them from the “merciless taste for self-discovery” that afflicted Americans.33 Criticisms about this particular American scientist’s research, then, expanded into reproofs of the United States more generally. Kinsey symbolized what was wrong with America. The criticisms of Kinsey therefore flowed from general resentment toward the new hegemon, especially from Europeans adjusting to a declined status. Less than a decade after the end of World War II, U.S. power remained unparalleled. No other nation rivaled the United States simultaneously in all three realms of economic vitality, military strength, and cultural reach. With such influence came others’ fear and bitterness. Thus when the first Kinsey report came out three years after the war’s end, many in Britain viewed it “as a distasteful and intrusive study typical of [a] brash and emotionally unrestrained society.”34 This portrayal of Yanks as less mature and less cultured than the British predates this period, of course, but since the interwar period, British commentators had been expressing anxieties about how the spread of blatant eroticism of American films, jazz, and pulp fiction might be undermining British morality. Similarly, in Italy, the K-bomb or “la bomba kappa” reinforced notions that “Americanization” undermined Catholic faith, morality, and the traditional Italian family.35 The dangers of American culture were not a significant European concern prior to the twentieth century; indeed Europeans often doubted that an American “culture” existed. Nonchalant or dismissive attitudes shifted with the rise of Hollywood, the ongoing strength of U.S. capital, and, of course, Allied dependence on the United States during World II. Unsurprisingly, the presence of American

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GIs in Britain during the war made at least some British wary of what they considered Americans’ excessive sensuality. Disdain toward Americans could still be dismissive and patronizing. The West Germans and the French tended to regard the Kinsey reports or American influence with pity rather than fear. Americans may live in an oversexed land, this was true, but it was also “a wasteland that lacked any genuine eroticism.”36 American-style “dating” sadly reflected a superficial society obsessed with competition. Cold and materialistic, American wives prodded their husbands to be more and more successful. In the bedroom, the wives were frigid and the men “under-developed” lovers whose sheer incompetence made their wives “deformed” sexually. It was no wonder that two-thirds of American marriages were in trouble, the West German media repeatedly recited.37 It seems that they were unable to resist this delicious bit of schadenfreude against the victors of the recent war. In contrast to West European or settler colonial criticisms, those from the Eastern bloc and other socialists were often directed at the American political economy. Although not the only ones accusing Kinsey of profiting from sex, those ideologically opposed to capitalism saw conspiracy in what they considered the vapidity and amorality of American culture. In a broadcast to East Germany, Radio Moscow argued that Kinsey not only failed to provide new knowledge, but also served the capitalist state’s purpose of deflecting attention from the economic exploitation of its citizens. Kinsey was nothing but a “hired charlatan for the capitalist class” who was receiving generous financial rewards for “the great favor” he provided to “Rockefeller, Dulles, Morgan, and their crew by turning out his trash.”38 A socialist in Israel agreed: “Dr. Kinsey seems to like dollars. A tendency not so academic, but typically American.”39 Yet Kinsey was hardly a money-grubbing showman. The salary he drew as an IU faculty member was not extravagant—well under six figures in today’s dollars, and an amount much lower than the average salary of an IU faculty member of comparable rank in 2013.40 He continued to live modestly in a quiet neighborhood near campus—an avid gardener, he took pride in his enormous collection of irises, and the once-aspiring pianist and his wife regularly invited friends and colleagues to listen to classical music in their living room. All royalties from the books he plowed back into research. The Rockefeller Foundation gave crucial funding for the Institute for Sex Research for about a dozen years. But the foundation had not pledged lifetime funding, as Radio Moscow had also claimed, and withdrew its support soon after the female report was published. The chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation at the time happened to be Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,

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who happily helped pull the plug. The dour, moralistic Dulles had never been comfortable with the idea of funding anything to do with sex.41 No doubt he would have been offended by a claim that the Kinsey reports were serving “a great favor” to him or that he would have condoned using them for any state purpose. Perhaps Dulles would have agreed with characterizing some sectors of American society as prurient, but he probably would have adamantly rejected any notion that prurience was inherent in liberal capitalism or American character. In fact, Dulles had been presiding over a State Department urgently attempting to enforce heteronormativity in response to accusations that it harbored “fellow travelers” and “sex perverts” among its ranks. During the period between the publication of Kinsey’s two reports, the State Department became whipped up about the secret sex lives of its employees. In late January 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy had infamously announced that he had a list of 205 known Communists in the federal government. In the ensuing “lavender scare” that grew out of the red scare, the State Department tried to root out homosexual employees as potential security threats. The U.S. media widely reported that gays were vulnerable to being blackmailed into passing state secrets to the Soviets. Gays, moreover, were said to be part of a “homintern”—a society as nefarious as the Comintern. The Communist International, of course, was real; but the “homosexual international” was a figment of the imagination. As it turned out, so was the notion that gays were security threats. Not one had been found to betray the nation throughout this entire period—or even earlier during the World War II era. Yet Americans easily conflated Communist subversion with homosexual perversion: commies were queers, and queers were commies. While this correlation possessed no basis in actuality, it was easy to presume that attributes of the “other” were associated. The imagined enemy was effeminate, immature, backward, primitive, queer, and not fully white. The imagined “normal” American was the opposite: white, masculine, mature, modern, civilized, and straight. These attributes did not always align neatly, of course, but this did not stop outrageous, nonsensical statements purporting that such connections existed. This helps explain how Republican representative Arthur L. Miller—a physician by training, no less—could declare that homosexuality originated with the “Orientals” and that Russians were “strong believers in homosexuality.”42 As I have argued elsewhere, simply a vague notion of association sufficed, because these attributes are mutually constitutive, parts that are presumed to interlock into a greater whole.43 The point here is that Americans, as well as international commentators of the Kinsey reports, conflated and muddled ideas about sexual behavior and

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“character”—personal and national. The question, of course, is why they did so. What was Kinsey up against? In a word: history. Kinsey’s reports provoked hyperbolic comparisons to the atomic bomb because they burst apart received notions about “decency” and “respectability.” But while the bomb raised doubts about modernity’s presumption of moving forward to a better future, the Kinsey reports maintained the faith, pushing toward emancipation from superstition and backward, “traditional” beliefs. His research showed progressive trajectories toward greater sexual liberation. Not only were Americans of all classes becoming more comfortable with having sex in the nude, but also women born in the 1920s and later had a much higher rate of achieving orgasms than women born around the turn of the century. Since the older generation believed women could not or should not be expected to enjoy sex too much, fewer husbands among this cohort felt an obligation to make sure their wives climaxed. Accordingly, many wives of that generation reported receiving no pleasure from sex and that they performed conjugal relations to be dutiful or kind to their husbands. In contrast, subsequent generations of American husbands felt responsible for their wives’ pleasure and reported being dispirited if they were unable to make their wives orgasmic.44 Although Kinsey noted that the pressure for mutual orgasms now added a strain to some marriages, the narrative arc of his studies appeared to confirm a progressive development toward more open-minded and less inhibited attitudes toward sex, for women in particular.45 Again, Kinsey’s ultimate purpose was to push for even more progressive change to realize freer and, presumably, happier sex lives. This narrative arc of progress toward sexual liberation, however, failed to fully realize that the restrictions on sexual behavior as Kinsey knew them in the mid-twentieth century were fairly recent phenomena. Kinsey had pointed to the Bible as a possible source of American attitudes; ancient Hebrew strictures forbade sexual activities such as adultery, same-sex behaviors, incest, and nonproductive sex. But these ancient strictures, aimed at eliminating potential threats to the patriarchal family, were not simply passed down untouched over the course of millennia. For instance, Christians only became obsessed about sexual purity as “a badge of heroism” after adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire made martyrdom a much less viable option for proving one’s faith.46 Moreover, this Christian ideal of sexual purity was inconsistently applied and achieved in the ensuing centuries. Same-sex interactions were tolerated and even respected during the early Middle Ages among elite circles.47 Although punished at other times, anal sex or sodomy was still not considered the practice of a specific group (that is,

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homosexuals) but rather a sinful excess that anyone might commit. To be sure, people had preferences in sexual partners prior to 1800, and there were certain sites in urban areas where same-sex partners could easily find each other. Nevertheless, “modern preoccupations with the centrality of sexual habits, tastes, or preferences (what are often termed ‘orientations,’ ‘identities’) to one’s true or inner self were yet to emerge.”48 People in Europe and arguably elsewhere in the world lived without the sexual categories familiar to us today such as “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” or “lesbian”—much less “bisexual” or “transgender.” Indeed, prior to 1800, scholars now say, there was sex, but no sexuality. Kinsey was unaware of this longer history, but he would have been pleased to know it because he had taken pains to emphasize what we today would call the socially constructed nature of sexual behavior. One imagines he would have appreciated historian George L. Mosse’s statement that “what one regards as normal or abnormal behavior, sexual or otherwise, is a product of historical development, not universal law.”49 One of the biggest points of the female report was that women could be as sexually responsive as men. Kinsey’s argument about social conditioning’s impact on sexual behavior would have been reinforced if he knew that people prior to 1800 generally thought that women were sexually responsive as well. In fact, Europeans in this pre-Malthusian era even believed that women’s orgasms were necessary for conception.50 More attention and importance were therefore given to women’s sexual pleasure than a hundred years later. So what brought about the change in sexual attitudes and practices? The answer is quite complex and can only be partially covered here, but for understanding international reactions to the Kinsey reports, three interrelated influences will be quickly sketched with broad strokes. The first is the rise of bourgeois respectability and capitalist discipline. A newly assertive bourgeoisie sought to distinguish themselves as frugal, conscientious, and self-controlled, thus superior to both the shiftless poor and the dissolute aristocracy. Their notions of “respectability” spread to the other classes in the decades before and after 1800 and significantly altered comportment in everyday behavior in Europe, from table manners to common etiquette to sexual acts. Europeans began using utensils instead of their fingers when eating; stopped belching and farting freely in public; learned to blow their noses into a handkerchiefs, not their palms; began to relegate all erotic behavior to private quarters; and started to see masturbation as a social threat, not simply a sin.51 Masturbation in particular—seen as a wanton and antisocial act—came to symbolize the moral problems of the new economy based on fictions of credit and speculation. Both credit and masturbation seemed

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to share a “weird and disturbing magic” that one could get something for nothing. But private acts in the commercial realm could lead to a greater social good through a strengthened market. Adam Smith thought this to be true because greed would be moderated by the capacity for empathy and a desire for sociability. Yet with solitary sex, private vice could never become public virtue. Autonomous and free sexual pleasure therefore “went against the founding axiom of all economic life,” suggesting that “there really might be a free lunch.”52 In the new liberal capitalist order, there could be no free lunch; so in order to prevent men and women, boys and girls from choosing “the wrong kind of engagement with their inner selves,” they had to be carefully supervised and taught otherwise. A type of inner discipline had to be inculcated to ensure that individual pursuit of liberty did not rend the social fabric.53 Second, also toward the end of the eighteenth century, notions of respectability and self-control combined powerfully with nationalism. Nationalism helped safeguard social stability by reinforcing economic and social hierarchy through the idea that all, no matter how poor or humble, possessed equal status as a member of the new nation. But the imagined community of the nation was exclusive, barring not only foreign outsiders, but also those born into the nation who failed to meet its requirements for full membership. Thus the distinction between normality and abnormality basic to modern respectability was also used to differentiate normal, virtuous citizens— virile men and chaste women—from abnormal, antisocial, and sick deviants. Moreover, it meant that criteria regarding respectable sexual behavior now applied to determining the upstanding, decent citizen. Lack of self-control or sexual intoxication thus came to signify the canary in the mine: a person unable to govern sexual urges would presumably be unable to meet his or her responsibilities to the family and the state. Such individuals could conceivably threaten the foundations of the legal and moral order.54 Put in this context, the furious telegram from the Wisconsin editor about Kinsey’s “devastating attacking on Christian civilization” makes more sense. (Here, “Christian” was congruent with “American.”) The professor appeared to be encouraging licentiousness and thereby undermining the social foundation. Such hyperbolic responses thus demonstrated the spread and endurance of the connection between sexual respectability and the nation since 1800. Moreover, new eighteenth-century beliefs regarding the importance of the health of individual bodies to the nation rose in tandem with a conception about a metaphoric social body. The nation was now seen as if it had an organic life, with birth, development, peak, decline, and decay. Enlightenment thinkers, especially Scottish ones, invented the idea of universal and

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linear development from a supposed state of brute primitivism to one characterized by refinement, socioeconomic structure, and wealth created through private property. Across the Atlantic, these notions about the development of nations profoundly shaped republican ideology during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and they remain commonsensical to us today over two hundred years later. Belief in the metaphoric social body gave extra importance to individual health because the nation was a composite of such individuals. Healthy individuals added up to a vital state; sick ones to a declining or decaying one. As the woes of rapid urbanization and industrialization became more apparent by the end of the nineteenth century, sexually deviant behavior thus came to be seen as not simply a sign of ill health, but also a potential source of infection to the national body.55 Such notions lasted well into the twentieth century. Congressman Miller mentioned above had also likened homosexuals to being “fetid, stinking flesh” that posed a health hazard to the national well-being. Third, the dominance of the West—which stemmed from a variety of factors, including profits from slave colonies—meant the spread of these ideas about discipline and decency to the rest of the globe. European colonialism also dispersed Western institutions, technology, literature, arts, dress, habits, and other ideologies. The onslaught was so thorough that westernization and modernization appeared to be inseparable or the same thing. Japanese intellectuals and leaders pondered this question for decades after the Meiji Restoration. Many throughout the world continue to grapple with this question today. Postcolonial theorists have innovated the notion of “alternative modernities” as a means to “provincialize” Euro-modernity—which is an effort to see the European path as a way to achieve modernity’s promises of liberty, human rights, and affluence, not the only way.56 But after the Enlightenment, European imperialists foreclosed this option to think in terms of alternative paths to the future and imposed their cultural forms, their institutional arrangements, and their social practices with the presumption that these were universally beneficial. Thus non-westerners began adopting “respectable” behaviors. The Japanese began frowning on public urination, concubinage, and same-sex relations.57 In the Ottoman Empire, homoerotic discourse moved from the cultural center to its margins. Heterosexual erotics were likewise downplayed; penises were removed from the popular shadow puppets.58 In fact, strictures regarding sexual comportment were so successfully integrated that some of the colonized came to believe that same-sex practices were unknown in their lands prior to European imperialism. This unfortunate misconception remains today. In 2011, India’s health minister pronounced homosexuality

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a Western “disease”—restating a widely circulating idea that has become more entrenched in Africa in the era of AIDS.59 Homosexuality likewise has been cast as a bourgeois capitalist infection by socialist states such as Castro’s Cuba.60 Therefore even the harshest critics of the West have internalized European ideals of vital, masculine, and heterosexual nationhood. Indeed, these homophobic reactions may partly stem from the fact that European imperialists began differentiating themselves from the “natives” on the basis of sexual practices. Again, this act of self-definition relied on binaries of differences. Sexuality served as another important marker separating the modern and civilized from the backward and uncivilized, and Europeans created a “geography of perversion” that comprised the entire non-Western world.61 Thus three interrelated developments or processes—capitalist culture, nationalism, and Western imperialism—influenced sexual practices and eventually imbued sexual behavior with significance regarding ethno-racial, individual, or national character. Sex became a measure of nations, a marker of modernity. Sex gauged the current status of the nation and even spoke to its aspirations for the future. For example, between 1946 and 1949, the Japanese media published as many as a thousand articles, reports, and commentaries on the postwar “sexual liberation.”62 To be sure, the influx of American GIs in occupied Japan prompted this discourse. But rather than discussion centering on sex between Americans and Japanese, it concerned a larger question of Japanese courtship and marriage. Reform was in the air, especially during the early years of the occupation, and the recently defeated Japanese thought that becoming a better people and understanding democracy required attention to their sexual relations. Some Japanese remained skeptical, of course. Reviewing Kinsey’s female report in 1954, a writer cautioned that the “tremendous increase in unnatural sexual behavior—petting, premarital intercourse, and adultery—must not be sugar-coated as ‘the victory of sexual liberalism.’” It appeared ironic to this writer that a nation that once pushed strict Christian ethics regarding marriage was now advancing toward “sexual anarchy.”63 It is doubtful that any Japanese prior to the Meiji Restoration would have put “sex” and “anarchy” together. Today, in the twenty-first century, the term “sexual anarchy” is immediately understandable to people around the world. Kinsey thought he was struggling against traditional taboos—that he was trying to help eliminate the last vestiges of premodern and unreasonable Christian prohibitions in sex. Little did he know he was also acting against the very forces that have created our modern world—capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism. One suspects, however, that this knowledge still would not have deterred him.

Ch a p ter 8

The Quiet American FREDRIK LOGEVALL

“We used to sit in the cafés in Saigon and talk about Greene’s book,” journalist David Halberstam later said of himself and other journalists covering the U.S. military buildup in the early 1960s. “It seemed at that time . . . the best novel about Vietnam. There was little disagreement about his fine sense of the tropics, his knowledge of the war, his intuition of the Vietnamese toughness and resilience, particularly of the peasant and the enemy.” Only one element, Halberstam continued, raised reservations: “It was only his portrait of the sinister innocence of the American that caused some doubt, that made us a little uneasy.” The public-affairs officer at the U.S. embassy, Halberstam added, was particularly bitter about Greene’s novel: “He called it an evil book, made worse, he said, because it was so effective, so slick.”1 The Greene in question was, of course, Graham, and the novel, The Quiet American. It is a work that speaks directly to our present concern, being very much “transnational,” “iconic,” and “American,” a novel written by an Englishman that is set in colonial French Indochina and that centers on the actions of an American agent in Saigon. Published in 1955, it has sold more copies in the United States over the past fifty years than any other Greene novel. And no wonder, given the work’s narrative power and Greene’s seeming prescience regarding what two Western powers, first France and then the United States, would encounter in battling Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary 104

Figure 16. Bantam Books brings Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American to American readers in its 1957 paperback edition. Courtesy of Random House LLC.

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nationalist forces. The Quiet American would have a deep impact on how generations of American observers viewed not only the French war in Vietnam, but—in particular—the U.S. war that followed. In the novel, set in southern Vietnam in 1952, at the height of the Franco– Viet Minh War, Alden Pyle—the quiet American of the title—is a new arrival in Saigon who works for the CIA, under the cover of an “economic aid mission.” He is intent on encouraging an indigenous “Third Force” that is neither colonialist nor communist—it will be, that is to say, a democratic alternative to the French-backed puppet government and the Ho Chi Minh– led Viet Minh. Pyle befriends the cynical and world-weary British journalist Thomas Fowler, who introduces him to his young Vietnamese mistress Phuong. A tempestuous love triangle develops. When Fowler learns that Pyle has supplied a Third Force general with material used in a bombing in a Saigon square, he betrays the American to the Viet Minh, who murder him and dump his body in a canal. It is a work of propulsive narrative force. If not one of its author’s true masterpieces—that designation is usually reserved for The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and arguably The End of the Affair—it comes close behind. But it’s not the plot or the character development that accounts for the book’s remarkable visibility (and sales figures) in the United States in the decades since publication; it is, rather, Greene’s seeming ability to peer into the future, to see even in the early 1950s the disaster that would befall the world’s mightiest superpower in the jungles and savannas and villages of Vietnam. Seeing all around him the troubles befalling the French war effort, Greene anticipated with uncanny clarity the problems the United States would experience in attempting in vain to subdue Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism by force of arms, despite America’s vastly superior military firepower. For all that, however, one reads (and rereads) the novel with a certain unease. Nagging questions present themselves about how fairly Greene represents the principal actors in the drama, and about whether his own colonialist sympathies and anti-Americanism—the latter increasingly evident by the early and mid-1950s—shaped his narrative and his character development to an important degree. These questions would matter less were it not for the fact that countless readers over the years have invested the work (notwithstanding Greene’s disclaimer in the preface that his is “a story and not a piece of history”) with deep historical authenticity. A closer examination of the context in which Greene researched and wrote The Quiet American, and of the outsider perspective he brought to the task, explains much about why Pyle, Fowler, and Phuong say what they say and behave as they do—and about why the novel has had such staying power for a half century and counting.

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Greene arrived in Vietnam in October 1951, soon after the publication of one of his great works, The End of the Affair, and having just that week graced the cover of Time (“the next Dostoevsky,” the magazine called him).2 He had not come with a plan to write a novel on the war. He was on assignment from Time’s sister publication, Life, whose publisher Henry Luce and editor Emmet John Hughes had been impressed with an evocative—and staunchly anticommunist—piece Greene had written for the magazine on the insurgency in Malaya. They commissioned him to write one also on the Indochina struggle. He wasted no time getting into the action, joining a French bombing squadron on an operation in Tonkin mere days after his arrival. In the novel, which Greene began writing already in March 1952, Pyle is a clean-cut young Bostonian “impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance”—he brims with references to The Challenge to Democracy and The Role of the West, written by his fictional hero York Harding, a political theorist partial to abstractions. “York wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force,” Pyle tells Fowler at one point. Later, Fowler hears from his assistant: “I heard [Pyle] talking the other day at the party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen. . . . “He was talking about the old colonial powers—England and France, and how you couldn’t expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in with clean hands. . . . “Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Viet Minh and he said a Third Force could do it. There was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism—national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.”3 Critics over the years have faulted Greene for presenting to the reader an American who seems singularly and implausibly naïve, but Pyle’s views on the Third Force are not really at odds with what many actual U.S. analysts felt at the time. Greene almost certainly heard this line of argument from American officials he encountered during his three-and-a-half-month stay in 1951–52, among them Leo Hochstetter, the public affairs director for the real-life economic aid mission. Robert Blum, Hochstetter’s superior, likely spoke in similar terms to the Briton, as did Edmund Gullion, the young deputy at the American legation. All three men were sure that the French war effort would fail unless the Vietnamese were convinced they were fighting for genuine independence and democracy. The only way to make them

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so convinced was to build up a genuine nationalist force that was neither pro-communist nor obligated to France, and that could rally the public to its side. Even those American officials who still insisted on the need to back the French—Donald Heath in Saigon, David Bruce in Paris, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman in Washington—fully shared the belief that ultimate success in the struggle depended on the emergence of a Vietnamese government possessing sufficient authority to compete effectively with the Viet Minh for the allegiance of the populace. Greene took abundant notes on what he observed that winter—as his letters home, his journal, and his articles make clear. A good deal of the information he gathered would find its way into the novel. Most of the time he was in Saigon or Hanoi, but occasionally he accompanied French Union troops into the field. Tall and unarmed, he was an easy target, but he showed utter disregard for his own physical safety, even when at Phat Diem he found himself in the midst of heavy fighting. (This action features prominently in the novel.) Greene was not at this point pro–Viet Minh, but the talent and fierce dedication of Ho Chi Minh’s forces impressed him. In an article for Life he acknowledged that many of Ho’s supporters were driven by idealism and were not part of any monolithic Stalinist movement. The magazine’s editors were less than pleased, and they frowned on Greene’s conclusion that there existed little chance of stopping communism in Indochina. The article urged France to prepare itself for retreat from the region, and warned Washington that not all social-political problems could be overcome with force. The editors, aghast at this message, rejected the piece, despite the fact that Greene also offered up a crude articulation of the domino theory of the type that Fowler ridicules in the novel. (“If Indo-China falls,” Greene wrote, “Korea will be isolated, Siam can be invaded in twenty-four hours and Malaya may have to be abandoned.”) Thus rebuffed, Greene offered the article to the right-wing Paris Match, which published it in July 1952.4 The article concluded with a sentimental tribute to the courage and skill of French soldiers. It is a jarring passage; what did Greene mean by it? Maybe he was trying, for the sake of his French readership, to soften the blow of the impending defeat. But it is also quite clear that he retained in 1952 more than a little sympathy for the French cause, and for European colonialism more generally. He had himself been born into the British Empire’s administrative class, and its worldview and mores continued to imbue him. He could write movingly of Saigon as the “Paris of the East,” and he liked spending time in the cafés along the rue Catinat in the company of French colons and officials. He was indeed in this period somewhat of a wannabe Frenchman. Castigating the Americans for being “exaggeratedly mistrustful of empires,”

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Greene said the Old World knew better: “We Europeans retain the memory of what we owe Rome, just as Latin America knows what it owes Spain. When the hour of evacuation sounds there will be many Vietnamese who will regret the loss of the language which put them in contact with the art and faith of the West.”5 No wonder that Greene and the colons got on so well: they spoke in the same terms regarding all that European colonialism, whatever its missteps, had accomplished, and regarding the damage the clumsy and misinformed Americans could do. Greene’s sympathetic views on the French cause in Indochina would in time change, but not his negative assessment of the United States. It was set in stone. Already in the interwar period, America had become for him a symbol of rampant materialism, lack of tradition, political immaturity, and cultural naïveté. In his second novel, The Name of Action, published in 1930, we find the stereotype of the nefarious American, in the form of the arms dealer. Now, two decades later, with the onset of the Cold War and the McCarthyite witch-hunts, his view grew darker still. How, he wondered, could a people be at once so smugly self-righteous in their conviction that the American way was best for everyone and so obsessively fearful of the Kremlin’s designs?6 Fowler boasts early in The Quiet American that he has no politics, but in fact his language is riddled with anti-Americanisms, as he picks up the fight against Pyle’s arrogant self-righteousness. Bitter experience has taught Fowler that the world is not infinitely malleable, that some problems are beyond solution, some questions beyond answer, and that certain Western notions, such as democracy, don’t necessarily correspond in any real way to how the world actually works. Along comes the Ivy League–educated Pyle, ignorant of the world and full of reforming zeal, “determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” Fowler does not initially see the danger, but instead reaches out to shield the American: “That was my first instinct—to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we should be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.”7 Innocence in this context does not mean freedom from guilt. This is a central theme in the book. Fowler continues to call Pyle “innocent” even after he determines that the American has been supplying plastic explosives to General Thé for use in terrorist attacks. Pyle never suspects that the world is a messy and morally ambiguous place, and that people’s motives, including his own, might be more sinister than they seem. In his mind there are

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no limits to what the United States can achieve, and its purposes are wholly noble. It’s Pyle’s very innocence, that is to say, that makes him dangerous. The Quiet American was published in Britain in December 1955 and came out in the United States the following March. The novel won lavish praise from British critics. “The best [Greene] novel for many years, certainly since The Power and the Glory,” declared Donat O’Donnell (the pen name of Conor Cruise O’Brien) in the New Statesman. Evelyn Waugh, writing in the Sunday Times, found the work “masterly, original, and vigorous,” while Nancy Spain (Daily Express) thought it “as near a masterpiece as anything I have ever read in the last twenty years.” According to the Times Literary Supplement, “it is quite impossible to close the discussion simply by closing the book,” in view of the issues at stake. “A particular excellence of The Quiet American lies in the way in which [Greene] builds up the situation finally to explode in the moral problem which for him lies at the heart of the matter. . . . The effect is powerful and long-lasting, and it is by this effect that the whole book must be judged.” And in the Manchester Guardian, Norman Shrapnel pronounced the novel “superb, the sort of prize for devotion to duty that comes to a reviewer once in several years. . . . Attack the book at its weakest points and nothing essential fails.”8 American reviewers, as a group, were less enthusiastic. Some were broadly generous, lauding Greene for his skillful pacing, his evocative sense of place, and his taut, clean style. The Chicago Sun-Times called it “the best novel about the war in Indo-China,” while the New York Times said it was “written with Greene’s great technical skill and imagination.” Even some of these reviewers, however, as well as those who were wholly negative in their evaluations, faulted the author for what Newsweek called “This Man’s Caricature of the American Abroad.” Why did Greene invent such a shallow, cardboard figure as Pyle, one who was never allowed to win any of his debates with Fowler, the cynical and well-traveled British narrator? The only explanation was that the author had allowed his palpable anti-Americanism (resulting, some of the reviewers speculated, in part from his being temporarily denied a visa to enter the United States in 1952) to drive his story. A. J. Liebling, in a sharp and pompous review in the New Yorker, took particular umbrage at the direct connection between Pyle and the killing of innocents, and concluded that Greene—who, Liebling delighted in pointing out, could not manage to get American idiomatic English right—merely resented the rise of the United States to world leadership. “There is a difference,” Liebling charged, “between calling your over-successful offshoot a silly ass and accusing him of murder.”9 Greene plainly touched a nerve among these reviewers, who were testy about his portrayal of their national character. What they missed was the

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complexity of both Fowler and Pyle. Fowler is jaded and sardonic and content to caricature all things American through one-dimensional analysis, but the novel also shows a dark element in his own character. He feels threatened by Pyle’s vitality and courage and chooses to betray him, perhaps out of sexual jealousy, and he shows scant concern for the ordinary people of Vietnam and what will happen to them. Even after he sets up Pyle to be killed by the Viet Minh, moreover, he admits sneaking admiration for the young American’s willingness to commit to a cause: “All the time that his innocence had angered me, some judge within myself had summed up in his favor, had compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism.” After all, Fowler is reminded, “Sooner or later . . . one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”10 Still, the American critics had a point: too many of the Pyle-Fowler encounters were one-sided affairs, in which the Englishman always seemed to get the last word. Consider the famous nocturnal watchtower scene, in chapter 2 of the novel. Here we find Fowler telling Pyle that the peasants in the field care only about securing enough rice, to which Pyle replies that they want to think for themselves. “Thought’s a luxury,” Fowler answers. “Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?” Having apparently conceded this point, Pyle asserts that peasants do not make up the whole of the Vietnamese population. What about the educated? Would they be happy under the communists? “Oh no,” says Fowler, “we’ve brought them up in our ideas.”11 Generations of college students have debated who gets the better of this exchange. For the vast majority of them—in my own classes, certainly—it is Fowler who triumphs. Greene himself certainly thought so. But it’s possible to interpret the encounter differently. For British journalist Richard West, an admirer of the novel who freely admits to seeing Vietnam “through Greene-tinted spectacles,” it is the American who gets the better of the argument. “In this debate, I find myself wholeheartedly on the side of Pyle,” West writes in a sympathetic essay published shortly after Greene’s passing in 1991. “It is wrong and arrogant to suppose that because a man lives in a mud hut, he cannot think about God or indeed democracy.” In the late 1960s West had made a film about the inhabitants in a small village in the Mekong Delta, and though no “expert on their thinking,” he found them to be interested in the outside world and avid listeners to the BBC. The countryside, West rightly notes, was often the center of discontent and militancy in the French period, and he argues that Pyle was right to predict that peasants would resent communist rule, “partly perhaps because they want to think for themselves.”12

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I find considerable power in West’s analysis. Fowler, it must be said, is hardly immune to the kind of shallow analysis he so often ascribes to Pyle, and to Americans generally. He seems blind to the possibility that situations could arise in which Pyle’s idealistic innocence might prove much more humanly useful than his own weary realism. Of course, behind the innocence there lurks another, more sinister element, a self-righteous and brutal efficiency that Pyle shows no hesitation in deploying. Utterly confident in the theories he picked up in some books while a student at Harvard, he is prepared to do whatever it takes to support them. If some Vietnamese civilians are killed in the process of establishing the Third Force, it is a necessary price to pay. It is this darker element in Pyle’s can-do naïveté that Greene stresses in the novel; over time, it is what would give The Quiet American its prescience, its seemingly perpetual contemporary resonance. This quality in the U.S. advisory effort in South Vietnam was not clearly evident initially, though, and thus most American reviewers felt free to be dismissive of the characterizations, and to recognize nothing of themselves in Alden Pyle. It is illuminating in this respect to consider Hollywood’s first adaptation of The Quiet American, which changed the story to make Pyle the completely good American and Fowler a communist dupe who betrays Pyle solely out of sexual jealousy. In the novel Pyle works for the economic mission, while in the film his employer is the more noble-sounding “Friends for Free Asia.” No longer is he the upper-class New England boy from Harvard but an aw-shucks Texan who went to Princeton. And whereas in Greene’s version the Pyle-backed Third Force leader Trinh Minh Thé is responsible for the bombing in the square, in the movie the blame is pinned on the communists. The film, skillfully directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and shot on location in Saigon, in other respects tracks closely to the plot and the dialogue of the novel, but this was small comfort to Greene, who expressed mocking disdain upon learning of the alteration. “If such changes as your Correspondent describes have been made in the film,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the London Times, “they will make only the more obvious the discrepancy between what the State Department would like the world to believe and what in fact happened in Vietnam. In that case, I can imagine some happy evenings of laughter not only in Paris but in the cinemas of Saigon.” In his memoir Ways of Escape Greene referred to “the later treachery of Joseph Mankiewicz.” Elsewhere, he wrote that “the book was based on a closer knowledge of the Indo-China war than the American [filmmaker] possessed and I am vain enough to believe that the book will survive a few years longer than Mr. Mankiewicz’s incoherent picture.”13

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Figure 17. Hollywood sets the record straight in the pivotal watchtower scene of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1958 adaptation of The Quiet American.

Contrast this with the view of U.S. intelligence official Edward Lansdale (often believed to be—almost certainly wrongly—the inspiration for Alden Pyle), who was a consultant on the film and who, in a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem, praised its alterations from Greene’s “novel of despair. . . . I now feel that you will be very pleased with the reactions of those who see it.” In October 1957, Lansdale invited representatives of “virtually all [U.S. government] departments, agencies, and services concerned with psychological, political, and security affairs” to attend a prescreening of the film in Washington; “they all seemed to enjoy it as much as I did,” he wrote the chairman of the advocacy group American Friends of Vietnam (AFV).14 The film had its “world premiere” in January 1958 at Washington’s Playhouse Theater, a screening attended by, among others, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and General J. Lawton Collins. “History has somewhat negated the story of the book by Graham Greene, and the motion picture, in our opinion, sets the record straight by placing the turbulent event period of 1954 [sic] into a more accurate historical perspective,” the press release by the AFV declared. The motion picture gives appropriate weight to the constructive role played by the United States in assisting the Vietnamese in their quest for national independence. Mr. Greene’s book, written before it became clear that Free Vietnam would survive, denies the possibility of a third

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alternative between communism and colonialism. The record since Dienbienphu is demonstrably clear—that third force, Vietnam ruled by the Vietnamese, has become a reality. Consequently, in attempting to set the historical record in order, this motion picture has a most important function.15 The AFV’s judgment was premature. Even as the Washington screening occurred, an insurgency was gaining steam in South Vietnam. It would continue to build in the coming years, even as the U.S. military involvement increased. To up-close observers such as David Halberstam and other reporters in Saigon, Greene’s novel seemed astonishingly prescient, as they witnessed the parallels between the French war and this new American one, and they sensed the dangers of innocence in a difficult and complex society such as Vietnam. Even those who, like Halberstam, were in this period supportive of Washington’s Vietnam commitment, found themselves thinking more and more of Alden Pyle. The “innocence” notion should not be exaggerated. By the early months of 1963, certainly, a bleak realism permeated much of the U.S. official analysis about the prospects in the war, at least behind closed doors. In the intelligence community, pessimism was now the order of the day, and there was growing apprehension also in Congress, including on the part of former Diem stalwarts such as Senator Mansfield. President John F. Kennedy, too, grew increasingly wary, hinting to aides in the final months of his life that he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam following his reelection in 1964.16 His successor Lyndon Johnson, for his part, in 1964 began to question the long-term prospects in the struggle, even with major American escalation, and to wonder about the war’s ultimate importance to U.S. national security. In September, for example, he said of the hapless Saigon leaders: “I mean, if they can’t protect themselves, if you have a government that can’t protect itself from kids in the streets, what the hell can you do about an invading army?” A few months after that, LBJ dejectedly noted that “a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam, there’s not a bit.”17 History is silent on whether Lyndon Johnson had read The Quiet American when he uttered those despairing words; chances are he hadn’t. (It’s easier to imagine JFK having read it, or at least being familiar with its themes.) But suppose Johnson knew the book well; what would he have made of Greene’s depiction of the stakes and the likely outcome in Vietnam? Perhaps, like Liebling, he would have dismissed the novel as the work of a petulant European, resentful of American power and nostalgic for the Age of Empire,

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scared to death that the attempt to build a democratic Third Force might succeed. Or perhaps, just perhaps, Johnson would have seen the novel for what it was: a novel of unquestioned power and foresight, whose strength derived, in part, precisely from the fact that its author was neither American nor French nor Vietnamese, which meant he could offer the clarity of vision that sometimes only an outsider can bring. Perhaps, just perhaps, this LBJ, who suspected that Vietnam would be his undoing—whichever way he went—would have paused in his military buildup, would have considered what the story of Alden Pyle and the French war meant for the here and now. Perhaps. Like all writers of his or any other time, Graham Greene had his own biases and cultural blinders, and they come through in the novel and his other contemporaneous writings. He preferred the French colonials over the upstart Americans, and he had little intrinsic interest in the Vietnamese. Still, like perhaps no other analyst of the day, Greene saw what lay ahead in Indochina—for all sides in the struggle. In this way The Quiet American is a marvelous example of the transnational novel. It forces us to ask large questions about human motivation, about democracy, about idealism and cynicism—and, most of all, about the origins of America’s doomed venture in Southeast Asia.

Ch a p ter 9

That Touch of Mink NICK CULLATHER

In the 1962 romantic comedy That Touch of Mink, Cary Grant gets to deliver what may be the most unseductive seduction line in cinematic history, but with his usual deft irony he carries it off. Finally on the verge of breaking through Doris Day’s steely defense of her virginity, with the George Duning score swelling to a crescendo, Grant locks eyes and asks, “How do you feel about the untapped resources of the underdeveloped nations?” Day collapses into his embrace as the camera moves discreetly behind his shoulder, obscuring the point of physical contact. “I think,” she breathes, “they ought to be tapped.”1 Lately paired as a romantic lead with Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and Ingrid Bergman, Grant received top billing, but from its distinctive scenario, lush costumes, and slyly suggestive dialogue audiences recognized That Touch of Mink as a Doris Day movie. Day’s international popularity as a big band singer and recording artist led her in 1948 to Hollywood, where according to her son, publicists crafted her “rah-rah, apple-cheeked, girl-in-awhirl image.”2 Blond, bobbed, and athletic, she was cast by Warner Bros. and Universal as a frothy extinguisher to the smoldering Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield sexuality dominating Twentieth Century–Fox’s screens. Beginning with The Pajama Game in 1957, she starred in a cycle of movies— The Tunnel of Love, Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back—as a spunky, Midwestern working girl, newly arrived in the city, who attracts the libidinous interest 116

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Doris Day and Cary Grant model the art of seduction in That Touch of Mink, 1962.

of an urbane millionaire bachelor. Screenwriter Stanley Shapiro mastered the formula: the rakish plutocrat lays siege to the woman’s virtue; although flattered by his lavish attentions, she is determined not to become “that kind of girl.”3 The will-she-or-won’t-she tension plays out against gag sequences involving psychiatrists, martinis, corporate flunkies, and at least one man in black tie going into a swimming pool. Small-town commonsense prevails, and (spoiler alert) the relationship is consummated, off screen of course, on Doris Day’s terms. Day’s renown and the risqué but not racy content made the genre globally popular, even in prudish Calcutta, where they were known as “marital comedies.”4 Doris Day has been called an “icon of the fifties,” synonymous with a suburban, consumerist, repressed, and eager-to-please decade.5 “She appears as sheer symbol,” John Updike noted, “of a kind of beauty, of a kind of fresh and energetic innocence, of a kind of banality. Her very name seems to signify less a person than a product.”6 Day embodied, according to Dwight Macdonald, “the healthy, antiseptic Good Looks and the Good Sport personality that the American middle class—that is, practically everybody— admires as a matter of duty.”7 Critics first vilified and later rehabilitated Day as a proto-feminist “challenging, in her workingwoman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after, and never be heard from again.”8 Although she was often compared to Monroe, Debbie Reynolds, and Elizabeth Taylor, her stardom peaked later, and her image repudiated the hyperfeminine style of the fifties idols. Day more properly belongs to what Bruce Bawer calls “the other sixties,” the few brief years of confident and restless optimism, now familiar to us from Mad Men, when technology reached for the moon, nations pulled themselves up by bootstraps, and wars on poverty could be won.9 In the tautology of the question, its assurance that

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undeveloped countries bulged with resources waiting to be tapped, her lines from That Touch of Mink captured a moment. Mink was Shapiro’s and Day’s biggest hit. Reviewers panned it, but opening-week screenings set a thirty-year box office record at Radio City Music Hall.10 It won a Golden Globe for best comedy and Oscar nominations for art, sets, and writing. The couture was glossier, the lines snappier, and vicarious experience of elite consumption more radiant. The plot moves Doris Day through settings of increasing extravagance. In the opening scene Grant’s Rolls-Royce splashes mud on Day’s Norman Norell leather-trimmed trench coat. Intending to give him a piece of her mind, she trails him to his Fifth Avenue executive suite and finds herself instead agreeing to meet for a date. The terms of the date start to become clear the following morning, when a minion appears at Day’s West Side apartment to escort her to Bergdorf Goodman for a private fashion show at which she selects a complete wardrobe, including a cream, silk-lined mink coat. Then to the airport and onto a Pan Am 707, chartered exclusively for her. As Day says to herself, this isn’t how they do it in Sandusky. Landing in Bermuda, she discovers Grant is there as the keynote speaker for a global economic conference. Seated among crowned heads of state and prime ministers, she listens as Grant’s speech, a string of indecipherable economic jargon, is greeted by the applause of a grateful world. She is impressed, but not enough to fulfill Grant’s hopes. The sexual duel then follows the Stan Shapiro arc, with him trying to lure her to bed, and her trying to entice him to the altar. In the 1950s and 1960s, two genres, westerns and musicals, engaged directly with themes of modernization in the Third World. Films such as The Magnificent Seven and The King and I encoded the dilemmas of nation building as allegories, placing Americans in foreign settings in the role of advisers helping isolated communities break free of tradition. Historians have recognized these pictures as crucial vehicles for acculturating audiences to the aims and complexities of the development project.11 Less frequently noted are the casual references to modernization theory littering films of all types during the period.12 For directors, the language of economic emancipation was indispensable for humanizing and ennobling the staid organization men called for by contemporary scripts. In Sabrina (1954) Billy Wider established Humphrey Bogart as a suitable match for the youthful, idealistic Audrey Hepburn with an outburst defending overseas investment: “It’s purely coincidental of course that people who never saw a dime before suddenly have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed and their faces washed. What’s wrong with the kind of an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds, and movies on a Saturday night?”13 In

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these films, global development furnishes a backstory essential for dignifying the self-conscious pursuit of pleasure onscreen. They reassured Americans, as President Lyndon Johnson did in his Great Society speech, that they were not “condemned to a soulless wealth,” that they had “the power to shape the civilization that we want.”14 Development allusions could anchor airy trivialities to weighty realities or reveal unseen depths of conscience in a character. That was Stanley Kramer’s intention in the most controversial Hollywood movie of 1967. Just six months after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage in the case of Loving v. Virginia, Columbia Pictures released Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a comedy/drama in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are confronted by their daughter’s engagement to marry a black man, played by Sidney Poitier. Although the parents are liberal (Tracy plays a crusading newspaper editor), their opposition is firm until Poitier reveals his occupation: he is a specialist in tropical medicine for the World Health Organization. Mentioned only once, it is nonetheless an essential plot point: Poitier must fly to Geneva and needs the family’s blessing before he goes. The characterization could scarcely have been more topical. Just weeks before the release, Secretary of State Dean Rusk announced the wedding of his daughter Peggy to Guy Gibson Smith, an African American army pilot. News coverage dwelt on the groom’s credentials, his Georgetown degree and work at a NASA test facility.15 Similarly, Poitier had to personify aspirations that transcended politics or race. “Never in a million years would this girl marry a postman, black or white,” Kramer explained. “He had to be a remarkable fellow.” This was not even a movie about race, he insisted; it was “about young and old. This generation won’t live like the last generation simply because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Life has moved on.”16 Handled with a light touch, the effect of such intimations is to transform stock characters into representative figures whose qualities are to be judged not by appearances, but against a backdrop of world-changing events. Cary Grant’s louche charm would have little appeal were it not for this type of device. His role in Mink, the jet-setting tycoon/economist planning the destiny of nations, was familiar to audiences in the 1960s. The prototype was Paul Hoffman, the automobile executive who helmed the Marshall Plan and the Ford Foundation, and who could fly to India and “come back with the Taj Mahal under one arm and Nehru under the other.”17 Economists were in demand “in the palaces and parliaments of a hundred countries,” explained the national newsmagazine Time. Development experts enjoyed “a romantic and rewarding wielding of power . . . jetting across oceans a dozen times a year. Fluent in several languages, they are self-confident in discussing

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the great painters, gourmet restaurants and gross national products of many countries.”18 Grant’s role, never embellished, needed only to gesture toward this stereotype to cue the audience that his wealth was backed by intellect and ideals. “The whole southern half of the world,” President John F. Kennedy told Congress a few months before Mink debuted, was “caught up in the adventures of asserting their independence and modernizing their old ways of life.” Whether the future held hope and growth or chaos and tyranny depended on the West’s ability to put into the field “high caliber men and women capable of sensitive dealing with other governments, and with deep understanding of the process of economic development.”19 Thinkers had chewed over the mysteries of economic growth since the Enlightenment, but the collapse of empires and the rise of hostile ideologies in the wake of World War II made the subject vitally important to the United States. The three decades before 1950, according to the National Security Council, had “seen the collapse of five empires—the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese—and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French.”20 The speed of change led many to conclude the world was witnessing a historic transformation in which national liberation would be followed by rapid material and social progress. Scientific discoveries opened entirely new possibilities. “Torrents of ideas and opinions burst upon us which we were, at that stage of our evolution, unable to assimilate,” Egypt’s leader Gamal Nasser marveled. “Our minds were trying to catch up with the advancing caravan of humanity.”21 Nations that won bitter struggles for freedom expressed demands for equality in engineering reports and planning documents. Many looked to the Soviet Union, whose five-year plans built an industrial powerhouse that defeated Nazi Germany. Communism could offer both a model and a method for achieving economic power, but American officials knew that their own traditions and ideas held no such guarantees. The Chinese Revolution and the Soviets’ 1956 “aid offensive” made it clear that victory in the Cold War would go to the side that could meet the insistent demands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America for jobs, food, housing, and education. But beneath the rivalry lay an optimistic faith that the scourges of poverty and disease could be vanquished, and the root causes of war thereby reduced. “If all people everywhere could be content and their living standards even and compatible with ours there would be no envy in the world, and therefore, less provocation of war,” Grant explains in Mink. “When you encourage and help people to develop their own natural resources, you do more than put bread in their mouths, you put dignity in their hearts.”22 In similar terms,

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Kennedy declared the 1960s the “Decade of Development” and launched an all-out push for “economic takeoff.”23 Amid this rush for modernization, experts emerged as a new global aristocracy. Robert Payne, author of The Revolt of Asia, predicted that “the future guardians of the Asiatic heartlands will not be the feudal owners but the trained agricultural chemists.”24 In the new international order, hierarchies of knowledge replaced the old dominance of force and race. Sir John Boyd Orr, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization, predicted that science and expertise would give white governments a slim chance to maintain their influence. With race privilege at least officially extinguished, the white nations could either be “destroyed or submerged” or use their mastery of industrial processes to “gain a new power and prestige.”25 But there were worries, echoed in Kennedy’s appeal, that technical overseers lacked the caliber, the worldly sophistication necessary for a highly sensitive task. Paul Scott revisited India in 1962 while writing his masterpiece, The Jewel in the Crown, and found the former bastions of colonial exclusivity, the officers’ clubs and cantonments, inhabited by a “new race of Sahibs,” the technicians “superiorly equipped to manage, guide, execute, or instruct.” Surveying the mottled limbs protruding from tennis shorts in a parlor where immaculately whiteturbaned waiters still served claret, his Indian host proposed that “many of your present-day experts are not what members of the club of twenty years ago would have called gentlemen, are they?”26 Suave development virtuosos of the type portrayed by Cary Grant were rare enough that those who fit the mold became international celebrities. The travels of Gunnar Myrdal, economist, member of the Swedish cabinet, and United Nations official, were recorded in newspapers around the world. Governments acted on his pronouncements on economic planning, race relations, population control, and illegal drugs. In common with many modernization theorists, Sir W. Arthur Lewis was born on an imperial fringe (in his case St. Lucia), educated in Europe, resident in the United States, and employed by governments everywhere. A Nobel Prize winner, he advised India, Nigeria, and Trinidad. But in the 1960s, the power couple who personified the romance of development was Barbara Ward and her husband Sir Robert Jackson. An Australian war hero and one of the highest-ranking officials in the UN, Jackson was involved in nearly every major development scheme, from the reconstruction of Europe to Ghana’s Akosombo dam to famine relief in Bangladesh. Ward’s best-selling books explained the struggles of the Third World in plain but stirring language. In any week in the 1960s, she could be heard on the BBC, read in the Times of India or the Economist, and seen at the side of Pope Paul VI, Robert McNamara, or

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Lyndon Johnson. The couple lent a frisson of humanitarian urgency to social evenings at embassies and Kennedy compounds. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, himself a celebrity economist, remembered an occasion in Delhi in 1962 when Ward “proposed a program of mobilizing the villages. She was so eloquent on the subject that everybody approved and nobody thought to ask her what it meant.”27 To build a corps of such worldly experts, the State Department, the World Bank, and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations teamed up with universities in 1956 to train Americans going abroad in the arts of “overseasmanship.” Diplomats were no longer the key players in foreign relations, Harlan Cleveland told the project’s inaugural meeting; that role had been taken by “operators and specialists” whose job was “to bring about the Westernization of the East with all possible dispatch.” Professor Gerard Mangone of Syracuse agreed: “More and more America appears to the world in the form of hundreds of engineers, doctors, public administrators, agricultural specialists, and information experts.” But the conferees found it harder to define the intangible qualities that made some Americans effective abroad. Sensitivity and linguistic ability were certainly useful, conferees felt, but “too much cultural empathy might produce softness.” Professional expertise might also be overrated, since many of the best operators were generalists. It was clear, however, that overseasmanship belonged to a select group of business and academic experts who needed to be cultivated and, according to State Department psychologist Mottram Torre, kept apart from the “secretaries, file clerks, and messengers whose work status would put them at the lower middle-class level.” Junior staff should remain cloistered in embassy compounds, he recommended, “because they lack the maturity, social graces, and experience in that milieu.”28 Social graces were, of course, not universal among development practitioners. Harvey Slocum, an engineer hired in 1951 by India’s government to build the Bhakra Dam, was described, generously, as “a two-fisted drinker and brawler.”29 Speaking no Indian languages, bowing to no sensibilities, and driving his workers with threats and profanity, he erected what Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called a “temple of modern India,” one of the highest concrete structures in the world. Critics of foreign aid often contrasted the mechanics and agronomists willing to get their hands dirty against the economists and paper pushers who issued grandiose pronouncements about transforming societies. The 1957 best-seller The Ugly American, which generated a wave of public enthusiasm for increasing and reforming foreign aid in the United States, was primarily a brief for altering the class composition of development experts. Aid budgets and planning were dominated, according to authors Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, by Americans who “looked

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like Brooks Brothers, Dartmouth, confidence, poise, good cocktail conversation, no dirty jokes, and a representative of the United States,” leaving the real labor to working-class ugly Americans doing “almost costless and far more helpful” projects in dusty villages.30 Class tension was not incidental to discussions of aid and social change. Modernization theory and practice determined what values, ideas, and ways of life would be discarded and which would become part of the march of progress. The United States was struggling, according to Barbara Ward, to find “the version of our society which is appreciable [sic] to the backward peoples of Asia.”31 Every group wanted a place in that version. The Ugly American advocated a style of small-scale, voluntarist, low-tech modernization later practiced by the Peace Corps, but it also associated that method with the values of “average Americans in their natural state.”32 Celebrity economists, by contrast, were associated with large-scale, state-directed, centrally planned projects, a style of modernism called dirigisme or “high modernism.” Jackson, Lewis, and Myrdal worked as consultants to powerful national planning commissions that built new industries and steered national income into massive infrastructure projects. Dirigiste planning resurrected the shattered economies of Japan and Europe in the wake of World War II and industrialized Taiwan and South Korea. The international consensus that favored stateled growth until the mid-1960s increasingly came under attack, particularly in the United States, from free-marketeers who fanned populist resentment against the aristocracy of expertise. Development practitioners recognized this divide and revealed, through the way they did their work, which side they were on. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing an agricultural Green Revolution to India and Mexico. Despite his status as a Rockefeller Foundation scientist, he made a point of wearing a straw hat and dusty khakis to meetings with prime ministers. “You may have programs that are centered around an embassy and a pretty fine environment in the capital city, but this has very little to do with what’s going on back in the boondocks where 80 to 90 percent of the people live and where the socioeconomic problems have to be solved,” he insisted. “They are not going to be solved around that cocktail party.”33 This class antagonism is also the core plot element of That Touch of Mink, but as comedies do, it presents opposition as a problem to be reconciled. Day’s Sandusky values prevail, and her millionaire economist is brought down a peg. The United States and Europe turned against dirigiste models of development after the 1960s. By 1968, the World Bank was pushing a “basic needs” approach that emphasized vaccines, food, and water instead of steel mills and highways. African and Latin American governments banded together behind

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revised trade rules, the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which would ban tariff protections and subsidies and allow national regulation of multinational corporations. The NIEO would allow the planned industrialization of the Third World, but the United States and Europe responded with a strategy to shrink the state and deregulate Third World markets. U.S. government spending fueled high-tech industries and modern agriculture, but any attempt by Kenya or Bolivia to follow the same policy was, according to President Ronald Reagan, “cheating.”34 The World Bank enforced the new development orthodoxy, known as neoliberalism. The glamour of the jet-setting economist faded too. In 1966, Ramparts magazine exposed Michigan State’s economic mission to Saigon as a front for the CIA.35 The quest for unlimited growth came under attack by environmentalists, and by the 1970s, economists redirected their ambitions toward the more modest goals of sustainable development. Today international aid focuses on emergency relief, rather than on building industries in poor nations. In the 1980s, a new type of international development celebrity emerged, personified first by concert promoter Bob Geldof, and later by U2’s lead singer, entrepreneur, and activist, Bono. In making himself the face of humanitarian relief to Africa, Bono cultivated an image of his working-class Dublin roots while at the same time pushing a pro-business neoliberal agenda for the poorest nations.36 The modernization schemes that appear in recent Hollywood movies also come with a neoliberal moral. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) is a buddy movie pairing a stiff British fisheries expert with an eccentric sheikh. Their impractical project, to build a fish hatchery in the middle of the desert, is propelled by oil money and Whitehall’s need for a feel-good story, “something about the Middle East that doesn’t involve explosions.” The loss of 1960s optimism is clearest, however, in The Girl in the Café (2005), a remake of That Touch of Mink without the mink. Bill Nighy in the Cary Grant role is a sallow civil servant in a top ministerial position earned by a lifetime of cringing. He meets a barista, Kelly MacDonald, who seems equally timid at first, but when he rashly invites her to the G-8 summit in Reykjavik she finds her inner spunk. Disgusted by the penny-pinching maneuvers of the wealthy nations, she shames them into adopting the Millennium Development Goals. On the surface, MacDonald resembles Doris Day, the working-class conscience of the affluent North. In her neoliberal vision, she sees development as a handout the affluent world can, out of a sense of charity, choose to give. Day had a far more ambitious vision, for a world where all peoples had the resources to raise their own standards of living. They were already there, waiting to be tapped.

Ch a p ter 1 0

The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF

On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson gathered reporters and photographers to the foot of the Statue of Liberty. There he signed a recently passed law “to Amend the Immigration and Nationality Act,” more commonly known as the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. Johnson told the crowd that he counted the reforms among the most important policies enacted by his administration. The act finally removed, he said, the shadow of discrimination that had long haunted “America’s gates.” Historians have tended to agree. The document Johnson signed almost immediately became an iconic text. It continues, more than fifty years later, to occupy a central place in nearly every account of late twentieth-century United States history.1 What did the Immigration Reform Act actually do? It changed only slightly the requirement that potential immigrants first demonstrate that they were “admissible.” Applicants still had to show that they were not illiterate, sick, disabled, homosexual, Communist, involved in sex work, nor “likely to become a public charge” in order to receive an immigrant visa. But for those who could clear this hurdle, the reform act eliminated the national origins quota system. Originally instituted in 1924, the quota system imposed fixed limits on the number of visas available for applicants born in each country in Europe and Africa and on people of Asian and Pacific islands ancestry regardless of birth. Through these limits, Congress distributed immigrant visas at drastically unequal levels according to the prevalent view that some 125

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Figure 19. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Immigration Reform Act, October 3, 1965. LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto.

immigrants were racially and culturally preferable to others. The 1965 act ended the quota system, putting in its place a cap of 170,000 immigrant visas for the Eastern Hemisphere and establishing preferences for applicants with family already living in the United States and for those with special training or skills. Presuming that they were admissible and satisfied the established preferences, immigrants from all countries in the hemisphere were treated equally, on a first-come, first-served basis, up to a maximum of 20,000 for each country. The act also newly imposed a limit of 120,000, and new Labor Department certification requirements, on Western Hemisphere immigration, which had never been subject to limits under the old quota system.2 The classic account of these reforms has three key elements. First, it portrays the act, as Johnson himself described it, as the end of the era of immigration restriction and a victory for liberal attitudes toward immigration and race. As one college textbook puts it, “Taken together, the civil rights revolution and immigration reform marked the triumph of a pluralist conception of Americanism.”3 Second, the classic account presents the act as the beginning point, spark, or trigger of a new era of mass immigration to the United States. In 1970 (two years after the act was fully implemented), persons born abroad constituted only 4.6 percent of the U.S. population (9.6 million people). By 2010 the foreign-born population had risen to 12.9 percent (about 40 million people). Third, the classic view of the act suggests that the end of the

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quota system significantly changed the source of immigration to the United States. As one high school textbook puts it, “The act triggered a new wave of immigration to the United States from Asian and Latin American nations which has altered the cultural mix in the United States.”4 Again, the figures are dramatic. In 1960, three-fourths of the foreign-born population in the United States had been born in Europe. By 1990, 62 percent of the foreignborn population had been born in Asia or Latin America, and in 2010 this figure had risen to 81 percent.5 Unfortunately, none of the elements of the classic account of the act holds up particularly well to scrutiny. Specialists in the legal history of immigration and race in the United States have systematically and convincingly dismantled the idea of the reforms as a triumph of pluralism. To the contrary, while it eliminated the quota system, the act left in place a rather significant shadow of discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexuality, politics, class, and disability (through admissibility requirements), and it expanded the intrusive and increasingly militarized practices of the “gatekeeper state.” It also put in place measures intended to restrict the growth of immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa.6 Most notable was the imposition of a numerical cap and Labor Department certification requirements on Western Hemisphere immigration, already mentioned. But the act’s sponsors also believed (incorrectly) that family preferences for the Eastern Hemisphere would prevent any rapid increase in Asian immigration, since so few Asian people had close relatives inside the United States.7 The idea that the act was a crucial watershed in the growth of immigration in the late twentieth century is also difficult to sustain. In fact, the total number of immigrants to the United States grew steadily from the late 1940s forward and began to climb much more explosively only after the 1986 and 1990 immigration reforms (see figure 20).8 And since the act imposed new numerical caps on previously unrestricted immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean, it cannot be credited with helping to increase immigration from those regions, the source of more than 50 percent of immigrants in the period. Many textbooks, especially at the college level, incorporate some subset of these caveats into their accounts of late-century immigration. They are careful to present the act as an unintentional opening for new Asian immigration, rather than a triumph of pluralism. They note that the act imposed a new set of restrictions on Latin Americans, contributing to the rise in undocumented immigration. Yet almost all continue to use the 1965 act to frame the period of mass immigration, the shift in the source of immigration from Europe to the Third World, and growing Asian American and Latino populations inside the United States. High school texts, broader academic conversation,

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2,000 1,800 1,600

IRCA Adjustment

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Cuban and Indochinese Adjustments

1,000 800 600

Effect of 1990 Immigration Act

400 200 0 1955

1960

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1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

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Figure 20. U.S. immigrant admissions and adjustments (in thousands), 1955–2000. These figures show that immigration grew fairly consistently from the 1950s through 1990, with only a few minor spikes produced by refugee crises. The most significant legislative act driving the late-century migrant boom was the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which adjusted millions of undocumented residents to the status of lawful permanent residents. Reforms passed in 1990 significantly raised worldwide limits on immigrant visas. Source: Yearbooks of Immigration Statistics (INS, UCIS) 1955–2000.

and popular media reproduce this framing (without the caveats) through the ubiquitous phrase “post-1965 immigration.” Beyond these historical inaccuracies, the idea that 1965 is the most important signpost for understanding late-century immigration places a very narrow, and largely misleading, nationalist frame around a set of processes that were inherently transnational. This essay presents an alternative, transnational framing of late-century immigration based on a brief analysis of each of the ten largest immigration flows into the United States in the period. Together these ten cases account for about 58.1 percent of all immigrants and about 71 percent of Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian immigrants (that is, a large majority of those newcomers most frequently referred to as post-1965 immigrants) in the period (see table 1). I use the word “transnational” not to emphasize the cultural, political, kinship, and economic ties that many immigrants build across national boundaries. I mean rather to suggest that historians should seek to understand and represent immigration as a consequence

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of relationships between the United States and particular other parts of the world, and as a constituent part of some of those relationships. This transnational model overlaps significantly with the idea, eloquently proposed by scholars including George Sanchez and Nina Glick Schiller since the 1990s, that imperialism is the crucial missing piece in most accounts of U.S. immigration. Put succinctly, most of the societies that most prolifically sent immigrants to the United States after mid-century not only had deep and intimate ties with the United States; they were primary targets or principal adversaries of U.S. imperial power as it was refashioned during the global conflict with the Soviet Union and China that lasted roughly from 1945 to 1991 (the Cold War).9 To see how this approach can revise our thinking about the 1965 act, let us start with the Philippines. The Philippines sent 3,100 immigrants to the United States in the last year before the passage of the 1965 act. Within two years of the act’s full implementation, that number rose to 31,000. This would seem to make the Philippines a fairly convincing case of “post-1965” immigration. But specialists in this area have long argued that it is actually better seen as a case of “post-1898” immigration, highlighting the long-term consequences of U.S. power in the Philippines for understanding immigration streams. There is something to this, and not just for the case of the Philippines. Beginning in 1898, the United States occupied and governed, for varying lengths of time, the Philippines, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, while making several military interventions in Mexico and Honduras and brokering the independence of Panama from Colombia. Table 1

Top ten sending countries in 2010.

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

NUMBER

PERCENT OF FOREIGN-BORN

PERCENT OF “POST1965 IMMIGRANTS”

Mexico

36.0

11,746,539

29.4

India

1,796,467

4.5

5.5

Philippines

1,766,501

4.4

5.4

China

1,604,373

4.0

4.9

Vietnam

1,243,785

3.1

3.8

El Salvador

1,207,128

3.0

3.7

Cuba

1,112,064

2.8

3.4

Korea

3.3

1,086,945

2.7

Dominican Republic

879,884

2.2

2.7

Guatemala

797,262

2.0

2.4

23,240,948

58.1

71.1

Totals

Source: “Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States, 2010,” Pew Hispanic Center, http:// www.pewhispanic.org/2012/02/21/statistical-portrait-of-the-foreign-born-population-in-the-united-states-2010/.

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In the same period, the United States took permanent possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaii, American Samoa, and other outlying island territories. Like their British and French counterparts in Asia and Africa, U.S. companies and colonial officials organized large-scale migration from place to place within this growing empire (Filipinos to Hawaii, Puerto Ricans to the Canal Zone, Haitians to Cuba). By the 1920s, patterns of colonial recruitment also brought colonial subjects to the mainland, especially Puerto Ricans and Filipinos. Mexican workers, though not formally colonized, moved from areas of expanding U.S. influence in Mexico to agricultural and mining enclaves in the U.S. Southwest that closely resembled colonial work camps. This tradition of labor recruitment from territories that lay within the orbit of U.S. imperial power grew exponentially during and immediately after World War II. The Bracero Program and other contract labor schemes brought in more than 4 million workers from Mexico, 420,000 from Puerto Rico, and 100,000 from the British-controlled Caribbean, helping to establish pioneer communities, recruitment networks, and economic and cultural systems based on the outmigration of family or community members in each of these areas.10 But it was during the Cold War that most of the countries and territories that had experienced U.S. occupation after 1898 became large-scale immigrant sending societies. The Philippines is a case in point. Filipinos, living under U.S. colonial government, had been recruited as laborers and shipped to Hawaii and California in the 1910s and 1920s. But the 1934 bill that promised eventual independence to the Philippines reclassified Filipinos as “inadmissible aliens,” a status already applied to other persons from Asia and the Pacific islands. The 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act (passed at the height of the Korean War) removed the clause making Asians inadmissible but restricted immigration from the Philippines to a quota of 100 per year. However, as policy makers in Washington sought to exert increasing power in the Pacific under the new rubric of the Cold War, they maintained three permanent military bases and a major civilian presence in the Philippines. The United States also distributed military and development aid to the Philippine government in an effort to secure the alliance and preserve the privileged position enjoyed by U.S. business interests there. This led to a significant migration stream from the Philippines outside of the quota system. For instance, the United States continued, after independence, to recruit Filipinos directly from the former colony into the U.S. Navy. More than 27,000 Filipino nationals served in the navy between the beginning of the Korean War and the end of the Vietnam War. About two-thirds were recruited before the end of the national origins quota system. These veterans eventually qualified for naturalization and began to bring their

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families to the United States. U.S. servicemen and civilians of non-Filipino ancestry who married Filipinos while stationed in the Philippines did the same. Between 1955 and 1965, more than 24,000 Filipino immigrants entered the United States as immediate family members of U.S. citizens. Over this decade, the United States also brought 11,000 Filipino nurses to U.S. hospitals as exchange workers and trainees.11 Through military recruitment, development aid, and exchange programs the U.S. government hoped to expand the class of English-speaking, U.S.oriented Filipino elites that had first emerged under U.S. administration. These programs also created a “culture of migration,” both a pioneer community of settlers in the United States and a set of “narratives about the promise of immigration to the United States” circulated by media, recruiters, and by the U.S. government, as well as by immigrants themselves.12 Thus when Congress eliminated the quota system, large numbers of Filipinos already wanted to come to the United States, and many thousands had the means to make use of the two preference categories (despite the fact that Congress hoped these preferences would limit new immigration from Asia): professional and family ties to the United States. What is significant about the 1965 act is not that it sparked immigration from the Philippines, but rather that it expanded the opportunities available to a network of migrants that had already begun to form as the Cold War reshaped the long colonial relationship with the United States.13 Adding a caveat to the classic account, that the 1965 act unintentionally increased immigration from Asia through family preferences, does not communicate the transnational dynamic that made this unintended consequence possible. Not all the societies that began to send large numbers of immigrants during the Cold War period had such an extensive history with U.S. colonialism. Indeed, instead of “post-1898” immigration, we might do much better to speak of “post-1949” immigration—that is, immigration that took place after the creation of the People’s Republic of China—or simply “Cold War immigration.” China itself is perhaps the most surprising case. Like Filipino immigration, Chinese immigration grew immediately and rapidly to unprecedented heights after the 1965 act. Nevertheless, Chinese immigration patterns fit awkwardly within the classic view of post-1965 immigration. For one thing, exclusion and discriminatory laws had never actually stopped Chinese immigration to the United States. What they did was shape the racial and social status of working-class immigrants living in segregated Chinatowns. Restrictions forced many to enter the United States under the false claim that they were children of Chinese Americans who were already U.S. citizens. They then lived under the shadow of these “paper” family relationships. The

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end of this experience of “exclusion” in the late twentieth century was not only a growing numbers of immigrants, but also a shift in racial ideology and racial practices. Chinese people, long singled out as uniquely unsuited for American citizenship, came to be understood as uniquely assimilative and economically successful. But 1965 was not the turning point for this change. In fact the shift began in the 1940s, as China became an increasingly important strategic site in both the conflict with Japan and the emerging global competition with the Soviet Union. The United States repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. The United States also set up exchange programs for Chinese university students and intellectuals, in the hopes of building ties with the Nationalist movement and expanding U.S. influence in the region.14 In 1946 (with more than 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in China) Congress made the Chinese wives of U.S. citizens and legally admitted Chinese immigrants eligible to immigrate, without regard to quotas. Almost 17,000 Chinese immigrants came as spouses of U.S. citizens in the decade before the 1965 act went into effect.15 Then in 1949, the “loss” of mainland China produced a migratory crisis similar to later experiences in Havana, Saigon, and Tehran. The U.S. consulate in Hong Kong received a sudden influx of 100,000 applications for admission. Unable to apply for immigrant status because of the quota system, these refugees availed themselves of the existing structure for gaining entry to the United States. They presented themselves as U.S. citizens or close relatives of U.S. citizens, though the consul believed that many of these relationships were falsified. The victory of the Communist Party in mainland China also stranded a cohort of Chinese exchange students with Nationalist political leanings. In response, the U.S. government used refugee policy to admit the stranded students and a total of about 25,000 highly skilled Chinese workers outside the quota system between 1953 and 1965. The Justice Department also began a “confession” program for Chinese who were in the country based on false documentation, regularizing 30,000 people as legal immigrants in the 1950s. This allowed Chinese American families to create legitimate documentation of their actual family relationships in place of the elaborate system of false paper family ties.16 These factors explain why the family preferences, included in 1965 with the expressed intent to exclude Chinese immigrants, actually facilitated a massive increase in Chinese immigration. As in the Filipino case, in 1965 a large pool of Chinese families had recently emigrated to the United States and were therefore poised to make use of measures allowing for reunification with close family overseas. Another group was recently regularized, free from the strictures of “paper” family relationships, and uniquely poised to

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begin a new process of reunification with their actual family members living overseas. When the 1965 act, contrary to expectation, did dramatically increase Chinese immigration, there was little public outcry. The Cold War refugee program and sympathetic coverage of Chinese family reunification had already begun to shift popular sentiment toward a view of Chinese immigrants as highly educated people with legitimate families, as allies of the West, and fully capable of rapid assimilation into the U.S. middle class: a model minority.17 The Cold War also helps explain the very rapid rise of Korean immigration near the end of the century. Although Korea had not been a traditional target of U.S. imperial power previous to mid-century, U.S. involvement in the Korean War (an effort to contain Soviet and Chinese influence in Asia) led to an era of close military and economic cooperation between the South Korean dictatorship and the U.S. government, and to attempts to integrate key sectors of the Korean population into the orbit of the United States through educational exchanges, cultural exchange, and spreading consumer capitalism. Because South Korea was never “lost,” there was no refugee crisis like the one that emerged in Hong Kong in 1949. Yet Korean immigrants, like Chinese, experienced a radical reconfiguring of the racial exclusions they had long faced in the context of new ways of dividing the world into friend and enemy during the Cold War. Media accounts of Koreans began to construe them as racially acceptable allies, victims to be rescued from Communist aggression. Perhaps nowhere was the emerging idea that Koreans were racially suited to becoming Americans more visible than in the rapid rise in adoption of Korean babies by white citizens of the United States (beginning in the aftermath of the war and growing to constitute nearly 60 percent of all overseas adoptions by the mid 1970s). Adopted babies, however, did not make use of family unification preferences, so this did not lead to a broader growth in Korean immigration. The Korean spouses of U.S. service personnel stationed in South Korea, on the other hand, became links in family-based chain migrations as the new law made it possible to bring parents and siblings of citizens, and immediate relatives of immigrants, to the United States. Meanwhile, South Korea developed a class system in which foreign education in English became one of the most important ways to secure preferential employment. Eventually, student exchange and professional preferences became an avenue for immigration, as many Koreans shifted their status from exchange visitor to immigrant.18 The case for situating Cuba and Vietnam as examples of Cold War immigration is clearer still. The United States and Cuba shared ties of “singular intimacy” that stretched back to the early expansion of U.S. commercial

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interests in Cuba in the 1830s. The U.S. military occupied the island in 1898 and again in 1906. By the 1950s a major flow of tourists, cultural professionals, and business visitors moved in both directions between Cuba and the United States, and a steadily growing stream of immigrants moved to the United States from Cuba. South Vietnam was more like South Korea, the site of a new effort by U.S. firms and government representatives to integrate local elites into a sphere of U.S. influence after World War II, and especially during the Vietnam War. Vietnamese immigration to the United States was a minor part of this new relationship, showing only modest growth even after the 1965 reforms. The victories of Cuba’s Twenty-Sixth of July movement in 1959 and of the North Vietnamese army in 1975 produced migrant waves from both countries that, especially at first, skewed toward precisely the urban elites who had been most closely linked with U.S. firms and officials. In both cases, the U.S. foreign policy interests as well as humanitarian impulses led to a speedy recognition of the refugee status of these migrants. Under U.S. law, “refugee,” a legal concept that emerged to refer to stateless people after World War II, became a blanket term referring to all immigrants from Cuba, Indochina, the Soviet Union, and (in smaller numbers) other enemy states during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Immigrants from these selected countries did not have to demonstrate specific instances of oppression or persecution; merely desiring to leave a Communist polity was grounds for humanitarian relief. Legislation passed in 1966, 1977, and 1980 allowed millions of asylum seekers and refugees from these countries to adjust their status to that of immigrant, independent of the numerical limits, preference systems, and even some of the admissibility requirements imposed by the 1965 act (see figure 20). These were Cold War immigrants, but definitely not post-1965 immigrants.19 Like Cuba and the Philippines, the Dominican Republic had a “post1898” relationship with the United States, which had militarily occupied the republic from 1916 to 1924. But only small numbers of relatively well-off Dominicans traveled to the United States before 1961, when Santo Domingo experienced its own Cold War refugee crisis. In the wake of the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo, thousands of Dominicans sought U.S. visas, the only practical way to leave the country. This created an immediate backlog in the processing of applications. Trujillo’s death came close on the heels of the “loss” of Cuba and only weeks after the Bay of Pigs debacle. It was thus very uncomfortable for the Kennedy administration when, in 1962, frustrated visa seekers joined protests and riots outside the consulate. The U.S. government responded by building two new modern consulates and sending in a “planeload” of visa officers to the Dominican Republic (as well as the Peace

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Corps). Immigration shot up from a few hundred a year to nearly 10,000 a year by 1963, and to more than 16,000 in 1965, when U.S. Marines invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent a victory by center-left forces in an emerging civil war. After the United States helped install a new right-wing authoritarian regime, the State Department remained acutely concerned that any interruption in the flow of visas could breed resentment of the United States. Yet because the regime in Santo Domingo was a U.S. ally, U.S. immigration officials did not treat migrants fleeing the Dominican Republic in these years as refugees unless they could prove specific experiences of persecution. Dominican migration, though encouraged by U.S. foreign policy, faced increasing restriction under immigration policy after the reforms of 1965. As a result many Dominican immigrants settled in the United States through the use of family reunification exemptions, by overstaying tourist visas, or through the dangerous open-boat voyages to Puerto Rico.20 Central Americans, especially Salvadorans and Guatemalans, suffered even more dramatically from the double standards inflecting United States refugee policy during the Cold War. Neither country had been subject to U.S. military government, along the model of the Philippines, Cuba, or the Dominican Republic, in the wake of 1898. But both had been part of the larger expansion of U.S. influence in the region. Most infamously, the United Fruit Company monopolized land and shipping in the banana regions of Guatemala, exerting enormous political power through ties with local officials and the U.S. foreign and clandestine services. In the early 1950s, the CIA successfully plotted a coup that helped to cut short a social democratic experiment and brought to power a bloody right-wing dictatorship. The United States then implemented new international aid policies in Central America, designed to foster development as a way to outflank communism. By the later years of the Cold War, however, economic aid gave way to military assistance. After the “loss” of Nicaragua in 1979, the Guatemalan military, armed, trained, and advised by the United States, waged a genocidal campaign against Mayan communities, as well as organized labor and the partisan Left, leaving more than 200,000 dead.21 In these same years the United States funded and trained government troops in a bloody civil war in El Salvador. This conflict displaced more than a million Salvadorans. About half of those fled the country. Neither Guatemala nor El Salvador had any significant historical experience with mass migration to the United States, so unlike Dominicans they could not use family reunification exemptions. The numerical restrictions and labor certification measures in the 1965 law therefore worked as intended, to restrict the legal entry of these new migrant streams. But, in perhaps the most cynical of all the immigration policies of

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the period, the United States denied the vast majority of petitions for asylum by Salvadorans and Guatemalans. The official foreign policy of the Reagan and Bush administrations denied or excused state violence and genocide in Central America, and immigration policy followed suit. The first wave of about 300,000 Guatemalan and Salvadoran asylum seekers was unable to regularize to the status of legal immigrant until the early 2000s. Meanwhile, growing numbers of Central Americans used migration to the United States (largely by means of entry without inspection over the Mexican border) as a strategy for coping with economic hardship, during both the wars and the economic adjustments that followed.22 Cold War migration thus provides a compelling framework for explaining the “trigger” in eight of the ten leading migration flows of the late twentieth century. It does not work particularly well, however, for the cases of Mexico and India. As we have seen, Mexican immigration roughly fits the model of a “post-1898” immigration. But it is really a case all to itself. The expansion of U.S. influence and capital investment (1876–1930s) reshaped the Mexican economy around the export of primary products into the U.S. market. This created a migrant workforce that moved seasonally and cyclically into pockets of industrial agriculture and mining on both sides of the border. This flow increased dramatically in the 1920s, at the moment of new restrictions on European immigration, only to be cut short by a massive repatriation campaign during the Great Depression.23 The movement of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border began to grow again with the creation of the Bracero Program in 1942. Until it was phased out in 1968, the program provided legal status, if not significant labor rights, to about 450,000 Mexicans each year. Most were male workers who crossed the border at their own expense and without inspection by U.S. authorities. Most worked in the booming agricultural industries of the Southwest. Most eventually returned to Mexico in a pattern known as circular migration. Migration became a crucial part of the cultural and economic systems of sending communities in Mexico and of receiving communities in the United States. Employers in these industries continued recruiting Mexican workers without interruption after the cancellation of the Bracero Program. As a result about 27 million Mexicans entered the United States without inspection between 1965 and 1986. This was about the same number, each year, as had entered without inspection annually during the Bracero Program. But U.S. immigration officials no longer rounded up those who entered without visas and delivered them to employers as guest workers. Now immigration officials treated them as “deportable aliens.” Apprehensions of deportable aliens therefore rose steadily in the 1970s, spurring media and political figures to decry an

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immigration crisis and spurring the implementation of increasingly restrictive and punitive border enforcement measures. This made it more difficult to move back and forth to Mexico seasonally, and led to a growing long-term undocumented population, alongside the 1.3 million legal immigrants who entered from Mexico between 1955 and 1980. In 1980, the Census bureau counted 2.2 million persons born in Mexico living in the United States, about 15.6 percent of the foreign-born.24 This pattern conforms to what Castells and Miller see as a global trend in labor migration in the three decades after World War II: the concentration of investment and expansion of production in the highly developed countries drew migrant workers from less-developed countries. After the oil crises of the 1970s, according to these authors, global patterns began to shift in complex ways as capital investment began to relocate to the developing world. Although imperfect, this timeline helps outline the transnational context for shifts in immigration in the United States after the late 1980s, in what we might call the post–Cold War immigration wave. For the case of Mexico the key turning point was 1986, the year Mexico implemented the necessary reforms to enter the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This marked a definitive shift away from policies designed to build Mexican industry inward (to meet the needs of Mexican consumers) and toward a development strategy based on the full integration of Mexican and U.S. economies. The Mexican government opened Mexican consumer markets to U.S. goods, offered incentives to manufacturing firms located in Mexico but serving the U.S. consumer market, and implemented policies (such as reductions in social spending) designed to attract foreign investment. By 1994, the United States and Mexico would put the finishing touches on this new framework with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By the end of the 2000s, Mexico was the third-largest trading partner of the United States. Although integration with the U.S. economy (and large oil reserves) helped push Mexico into the ranks of middle-income countries, it also produced major dislocations. Small farming communities, especially, contended with these dislocations by organizing the migration of some community members as part of mixed strategies for economic survival. At the same time the border became almost unimaginably active in these years, the site of the countless transactions that were necessary for North American integration to work. Movement back and forth across the border, to take advantage of differences in prices, wages, and legal regimes, was a central engine of economic growth in both countries, although the costs and benefits of this growth were distributed unequally in both countries. By 2009, U.S. and Mexican citizens conducted about $850 million of business across the border every day. An

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average of half a million people crossed legally from Mexico into the United States each day to transport goods, to work, shop, visit family, get health care, or attend school. Without this context, it is difficult to fully understand the much smaller number of unauthorized crossings in the period.25 The legal context for Mexican migrants inside the United States also changed dramatically after 1986, with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Though the Reagan administration presented IRCA as an effort to resolve a perceived crisis of unauthorized entry, the reforms actually facilitated the boom in both legal and illegal immigration in the 1990s and beyond. While imposing employer sanctions, and adding to the mounting security apparatus at the border, IRCA included an amnesty provision that allowed the legalization of 3 million people, 2.3 million of them Mexican. Once protected by legal residency, this population began to move out of a very high concentration of work in agriculture toward urban labor in service, construction, and manufacturing sectors, and out of California and Texas into other states. Newly regularized residents made use of family unification provisions to help relatives move to the United States legally. They also provided the social network and resources for the major wave of unauthorized immigrants that entered in the wake of GATT and NAFTA. The post-1986 wave, legal and unauthorized, brought large numbers of women and children into Mexican migrant communities that were previously overwhelmingly male. By 2000, Mexican immigrants of varying legal status counted for three out of every ten foreign-born persons in the United States and formed part of the low-wage workforce in nearly every corner of the United States.26 During the 1990s, similar restructuring programs, WTO membership, and trade agreements took the place of Cold War conflicts in governing relations between the United States and Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America. A hemispheric trade and production system built on the elimination of social spending and the close integration of economies with drastically different income levels and wage scales became the key transnational context for post–Cold War immigration from the region. The case of Indian immigration also points strongly to global economic restructuring as a framework for understanding post–Cold War immigration patterns from Asia. Indian immigration was not linked significantly to U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. It arose rather out of the patterns of migration established under British colonial rule and in response to the new conditions generated by decolonization. India, newly independent, began to send millions of emigrants abroad to the UK and former British colonies in the 1950s. The 1965 act opened the United States to a portion of this growing diaspora. Unlike Chinese, South Korean, and Filipino immigrants after 1965,

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Indian immigrants had few existing ties to the United States. While those other groups depended heavily on family unification preferences, or refugee and exchange programs, in combination with professional preferences, Indians were unique in creating a pioneer generation of immigrants almost exclusively through the preference system for highly skilled workers. Indian migrants thus became the model for the reforms Congress imposed in 1990. This law raised the total worldwide cap on immigrant visas while shifting preferences to be less favorable to family reunification and more favorable to employmentbased immigration. The law also paved the way for the dramatic expansion of the guest worker program for nonagricultural workers. Employers in the United States successfully advocated for these changes as Korea, India, Taiwan, and, most notably, China created new development models based (like Mexico’s) on exports to Western markets, while dramatically expanding their university systems and the supply of highly trained professionals. In such a context, corporations with an increasingly global reach, as well as U.S. universities and hospitals (long accustomed to incorporating Filipino nurses, Korean students, and Indian doctors and engineers) were as eager to integrate the growing number of Asian professionals and managers into a flexible high-skill global workforce, and to dip into the global market for contingent middle-income and low-wage workers, as they were to relocate factories to Mexico or call centers to India. This drove a rapid increase in the number of temporary, nonimmigrant visas (including temporary workers, intercompany transfers, students, and exchange visitors). Nonimmigrant work or exchange visas outnumbered immigrant visas by the end of the 1990s. U.S. employers drew increasingly on migrants with contingent legal status and migrants entering without inspection to exert pressure on the middle and lower rungs of the U.S. labor market. The complex process of global restructuring, what has often been called “globalization,” including significant changes in the nature of employment in the United States, is thus the key context for understanding the dramatic boom in migrations of both high- and low-skilled workers to the United States after 1990.27 In 1964, as Congress debated the bill that became the Immigration Reform Act, proponents of the reforms republished John F. Kennedy’s campaign pamphlet A Nation of Immigrants. Its argument, borrowed from the leading liberal intellectuals of the day, was that the United States was in its very essence a beacon to the world’s immigrants, who flock to its shores to join its exceptional experiment in democracy and prosperity. While celebrating the contribution of previous waves of immigrants, this account also portrayed the United States as unique in its capacity to assimilate and create modern subjects out of newcomers from strange lands. This idea of a nation of immigrants became,

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as soon as the act was passed, the baseline for the classic division of U.S. immigration history into pre-1965 and post-1965 periods. Immigration laws, including many provisions established by the 1965 reforms, are undoubtedly crucial to understanding immigrant flows. Yet building our timeline of immigration history around the 1965 act narrowly frames the issue of latecentury immigration around the question of whom Congress decided to admit. It returns us to the idea of the United States as a uniquely welcoming “nation of immigrants” while hiding from view transnational and imperial relationships and the global contexts that are essential for understanding why and how late-century migrant streams actually took shape. This narrow view reinforces a notion, too common in our public debates, that the desire of the world’s people to come to the United States is self-evident, not in need of explanation. It facilitates the idea that contemporary immigration is merely a collection of millions of discrete decisions by individual immigrants to “seek a better life” by becoming “American.” And, in an ironic twist, it fuels the arguments of the most recent crop of anti-immigrant politicians who charge, for instance, that “thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law, we no longer favor skilled workers from developed nations, but instead favor unskilled immigrants from the Third World.”28 A brief analysis of the top ten immigrant flows in the United States since the 1960s suggests that the idea of 1965 as the primary turning point in late-century immigration history gets the story wrong. I suggest that a division into “Cold War” and “post–Cold War” immigration, with some special attention to the unique and singularly important case of Mexico, is a much better way to organize our understanding of late-century migrations. The idea is not merely to reframe immigration history around foreign policy or global structural change, but rather to point to the interplay among immigration policy, foreign policy, and asymmetrical international exchange as an explanation for the timing and shape of new immigrant flows. The story begins not with the opening of the Golden Door to the hazily undifferentiated peoples of the Third World, but with the ways that the United States, building on its history of imperial enterprise, exerted power abroad and extracted disproportionate benefits in the context of the Cold War and its aftermath. The story starts not with the arrival of new immigrants on U.S. shores, but with the mechanisms by which people in some parts of the world, with specific histories of interaction with the United States, began to imagine moving to the United States. And the story does not proceed as a simple process of doing away with racial exclusions, but examines the ways that elements of U.S. foreign, industrial, commercial, and immigration policy worked together, or sometimes at odds, to encourage, celebrate, discipline, or criminalize the disparate people who acted on these imaginings.

Ch a p ter 1 1

President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Address MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

“The American dream endures,” President Jimmy Carter told the American people in his inaugural address on January 20, 1977. “We must have faith in our country—and in one another. . . . Let our recent mistakes bring a resurgent commitment to the basic principles of our nation, for we know if we despise our own government we have no future.” Drawing on the words of the Hebrew prophet Micah, Carter asked Americans to renew “our search for humility, mercy and justice.”1 Carter’s seventeenminute address, short by inaugural standards, was delivered in a “homiletic style and moralistic tone” that appeared to offer “a therapeutic moment of tranquility” for the nation after the traumatic failed war in Vietnam upended comfortable Cold War verities and after the Watergate scandal, revelations about President Richard Nixon’s abuses of executive power and then ignoble resignation, unleashed a crisis of confidence in the American state.2 With the formal inaugural ceremony completed, Carter further signaled his break from the Nixonian imperial presidency by jumping out of his bulletproof limousine and walking with wife Rosalynn and nine-year-old daughter Amy the mile and a half from Capitol Hill to the White House, the first president ever to do so. “People walking along the parade route,” Carter recorded in his diary, “when they saw that we were walking, began to cheer and to weep.”3 At the center of this moment of self-conscious national renewal was Jimmy Carter’s unprecedented emphasis on human rights. “Our commitment to 141

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Figure 21. President Jimmy Carter champions human rights in his inaugural address, January 20, 1977. Courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Library.

human rights must be absolute,” Carter announced in his inaugural address. “The world is now dominated by a new spirit. Peoples more numerous and more politically aware are craving, and now demanding, their place in the sun—not just for the benefit of their own physical condition, but for basic human rights.” The “craving” for rights Carter identified in his speech opened a new chapter in American diplomacy in which human rights became a central dimension of U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s and beyond. This too was a conscious break from the past, notably from the Nixon administration’s dismissal of human rights as “sentimental nonsense” and “malarkey,”4 derisive sentiments that underwrote a foreign policy many contemporaries, including Carter, felt had betrayed core American values. As Carter later recounted, “I was deeply troubled by the lies our people had been told; our exclusion from the shaping of American . . . policy in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile and other countries; and other embarrassing activities of our government, such as the CIA’s role in plotting murder and other crimes.”5 In the wake of Carter’s inaugural address, human rights increasingly became front and center in popular consciousness, with as many as 67 percent of Americans saying in a May 1977 poll that they read or heard a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about human rights.6 The New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis reported “a genuine, widespread concern with

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human rights.” Carter suggested in his memoirs, “Judging from news articles and direct communications from the American people during the first few months of my administration, human rights had become the central theme of our foreign policy in the minds of the press and public.” For Carter, “a spark had been ignited” and he “had no inclination to douse the growing flames.” Capturing the reach of the American embrace of human rights across the political landscape, a New Republic contributor wrote in 1979: The good grey liberals on the New York Times love it; so do the Friedmanites on the Wall Street Journal. Senator [Henry M.] Jackson thinks it’s made in heaven, and the hitherto-ignored members of Amnesty International hope that at last it may be coming down to earth. The hawkish neo-conservatives at Commentary and the dovish leftists at the New York Review have found one issue on which they can agree— almost. Who could bad mouth human rights? It is beyond partisanship and beyond attack.7 Most American historians have followed the self-perceptions of Jimmy Carter and his contemporaries, arguing that Carter’s inaugural address and his pioneering if not always successful human rights diplomacy “propelled” human rights thought and practice “to unprecedented heights of prestige and power.” In their view Carter’s embrace of human rights and its broader popular resonance in the 1970s had their source in a purely domestic context, gradually cascading out into the world to reconfigure the very structures of international relations and to become the catalyst for today’s ubiquitous concerns with the global protection of human rights. Some scholars emphasize long-standing commitments in the United States to the protection of individual rights or the epigones of Wilsonian concerns with internationalist morality to explain Americans’ receptivity to the kind of transformative work human rights might do. Others attribute it to more concrete domestic political causes, positing the crisis of national confidence in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam and revulsion at the realpolitik of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s foreign policy as the crucial motors that produced American human rights talk and animated Carter’s human rights diplomacy.8 Either way, Americans’ assumptions about their own primacy in the making of a global human rights order run deep. As one Carter political operative put it, the United States is “the one nation where human rights is center stage for the world.”9 In fact human rights had played only a marginal role in Carter’s presidential campaign and occupied a muted place in broader popular discourse before his inaugural address. A brief mention at a Democratic issues forum

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in Louisville in late 1975 and passing references in a speech on foreign policy in Chicago the following March were his only mentions of human rights until the second presidential debate in October 1976, with less than a month to go before Election Day.10 At the debate—better known for the gaffe of Carter’s opponent President Gerald R. Ford, who claimed “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe”—Carter criticized Ford for “ignoring human rights” in Chile and other dictatorships friendly to the United States, his unwillingness to use the Helsinki Accords to promote liberalization of immigration and freedom of expression in the Soviet Union, and his refusal to meet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “a symbol of human freedom recognized around the world.” Carter closed the debate by arguing “we ought to be a beacon for nations who search for peace and who search for freedom, who search for individual liberty, who search for basic human rights. We haven’t been lately. We can be once again.”11 Even after the debate Carter made little public mention of human rights again until his inaugural address put them at the center of American foreign policy. Four months later, in a speech at Notre Dame in which he reaffirmed America’s commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of U.S. foreign policy, Carter noted: “Throughout the world today, in free nations and in totalitarian countries as well, there is a preoccupation with the subject of human freedom, human rights.”12 He was right to suggest there had been a global explosion of interest in human rights in the 1970s. But Americans did not get there first. One might argue that they got there last. In the late 1940s Americans had been fully present at the creation of global human rights talk, actively involved and at moments leading efforts to draft the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that provided the aspirational scaffolding for an emergent global human rights order after the Second World War. But by the early 1950s, Cold War pressures and the struggle for decolonization put the individualistic language of 1940s human rights politics to the side for most American activists and policy makers.13 The leaders of the growing opposition to the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s, and the burgeoning social protest movements that accompanied it, did not commonly employ the language of human rights. Even commentators responding to the most widely publicized incidents of what we would now almost reflexively term human rights violations, such as the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops at My Lai, almost never used the language of human rights. One careful count of the frequency of its use in the New York Times reveals only a handful of references in the 1960s; the same was true of leading journals of opinion and more popular weekly news magazines.14 Jeri Laber, a

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pioneering American 1970s human rights activist who would be among the founders of Human Rights Watch, writes in her memoirs: “I did not use the words ‘human rights’ to describe our cause; it was not part of my everyday vocabulary and would have meant little to most people at that time.”15 What made human rights suddenly visible to Americans in the 1970s? It can be difficult for U.S. historians to acknowledge the extent to which American engagement with human rights in the 1970s was as much if not more the story of the importation of ideas into domestic space as the exportation of American values out into the wider world. Human rights is best thought of in 1970s America as a guest language, one that returned to the cultural politics of the United States through what Americans came to know about the thought and practice of dissidents in the Soviet Union, political activists in Latin America and Asia, and such transnational rights advocates as Amnesty International. When human rights moved from the margins of global political discourse to become a central optic through which a variety of states and peoples saw the world around them, it did so almost everywhere else long before it came to American shores. Not only was Amnesty International, the leading global human rights nongovernmental organization in the 1970s, a European importation into American politics; the contours of human rights thought, language, and politics in the United States were deeply shaped by an even broader and more diverse network of trans-local actors in the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Soviet dissidents came to the language of human rights in the late 1960s. So too did West European leaders, both in their reaction to political repression in Greece and the preparatory meetings that led to the Helsinki Accords. Antitorture activists in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and South Korea found human rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s.16 In all this American actors were, initially, bit players. Carter’s invocation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his presidential debate with Gerald Ford points toward the central but now forgotten role that dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe played in shaping the nascent American human rights imaginary. Figures like Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Václav Havel assumed an unprecedented prominence on the world stage in the 1970s, becoming virtual household names in the United States. The nonconforming dissident was more broadly lionized for his (and those lifted up in the West tended to be male) “titanic stature,” “courage,” and “moral grandeur.” In a typical representation of the era, an observer wrote in 1973 that “one has an initial duty as a human being to salute them; to salute them for existing, and, by doing that alone, making our world a better

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and more honourable place.”17 The Cold War was one frame through which the dissident challenge to the ethos of the Soviet bloc was viewed. But the dissident movement quickly became interwoven in the popular imagination with an emergent global human rights politics. The guest languages of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel became detached from their Soviet-era contexts (and in Solzhenitsyn’s case, his own distrust of human rights talk) to help forge an emergent American human rights vernacular. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was without question the best known of the era’s dissidents and, as an emblem of 1970s human rights politics, the most controversial. His reputation among American critics as “the greatest living Russian writer” first emerged during the 1960s with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and First Circle. His Nobel Prize–winning work circulated widely among American readers, with One Day in the Life and First Circle Book-of-the-Month Club selections. At home Solzhenitsyn was increasingly outspoken about the ills of the Soviet regime, to the displeasure of the Brezhnev Politburo, who banned his writings, had him barred from the Soviet Writers’ Union, and ordered the KGB to disrupt his work and family life. Less than two months after the publication of his magnum opus The Gulag Archipelago in Paris in December 1973, Leonid Brezhnev had him arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union.18 The American press breathlessly covered Solzhenitsyn’s dramatic arrest and deportation, and after he and his family settled in a small Vermont town, Solzhenitsyn quickly became enmeshed in American Cold War politics.19 When President Ford declined to meet Solzhenitsyn at the White House, his challenger in the 1976 Republican presidential nominating contest, Ronald Reagan, told reporters Solzhenitsyn “would be welcome to eat dinner anytime at the Reagan White House.” Ford and Reagan forces sparred over a “Solzhenitsyn plank” at the Republican convention that turned him into a proxy for the internecine feuds within the Republican Party over the efficacy of détente. The conservative senator Jesse Helms sought to confer honorary citizenship on Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s own public speeches in the United States, in which he vehemently denounced what he saw as the tragically wrongheaded policies of détente and encouraged the United States to “intervene” in Soviet domestic affairs, played into a hawkish Cold War reading of his views. Some American liberals took an increasingly skeptical attitude toward Solzhenitsyn’s politics, “disenchanted” by his “far-fetched” Slavophile nationalism, put off by his “scorn for democracy,” and distrustful of “the willful Russian autocrat in him.”20 But Solzhenitsyn’s great imaginative power, even his harshest critics acknowledged, did considerably more than rehash Cold War polemics. In

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The Gulag Archipelago, he offered an entirely original lens through which to apprehend violations of individual human rights far from American shores and made what to American readers was an exceptionally compelling claim that human rights ought to matter. In part, the content and reception of Gulag are essential to understanding Solzhenitsyn’s transformative impact on his readers. Over the course of three volumes, he traced the history of the imprisonment, brutalization, and murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens by their own government between 1929 and 1953 in “that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible, country.” The book relied on eyewitness testimony related to him by more than two hundred prisoners, interspersed with his own experiences in the camps and a sweeping account of how he believed Soviet political culture had brought about the destruction of millions of innocent lives.21 The reception of The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared to rapturous reviews in the United States and elsewhere, was extraordinary. Since its publication in 1973, Gulag has sold more than thirty million copies in thirtyfive languages. American sales reached three million by 1985. While even Gulag’s English-language translator admitted many readers were unlikely to have actually read all eighteen hundred pages of the three-volume work, the sales figures for such an ambitious and demanding work are staggering.22 But more important than Gulag’s subject and vast circulation for an emergent American human rights consciousness was the impact of its form. Solzhenitsyn’s subtitle for the project was “An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” and his method consciously relied on confronting readers with first-person testimony. He was intent upon viscerally pulling his readers into the narrative, insisting on their engagement with the clear intent of altering how they saw and felt about an unfamiliar world. Gulag opens in this way: Down the long crooked path of our lives we happily rushed or unhappily wandered past a variety of walls and fences—rotten wooden palings, clay embankments, brick and concrete walls, iron railings. It never occurred to us to ask what was behind them, or to look or even think about it. But that was where gulag country began, two yards away. . . . All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And then a fatal door opened and four white hands, unused to work but tenacious, grabbed us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear and dragged us like a sack, and slammed the door to our past life shut forever more. “You’re under arrest!” And all you can manage to bleat out is, “M-me? What for?”

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Readers might have easily pictured the white hands grabbing them as well. Solzhenitsyn uses this direct approach throughout Gulag, asking readers to imagine for themselves the harrowing ordeals he describes: “Reader! Just try—sleep like that for one night! It was five degrees Centigrade in the barracks!” Or: “There were tortures, home-made and primitive. They would crush a hand in the door, and it was all in that vein. (Try it, reader!).”23 The “I” is omnipresent throughout Gulag. For Solzhenitsyn it was rendered with a mix of indignation and pity to craft a self-styled voice of authenticity that challenged and discredited the prevailing strictures of Soviet official speech. The receptivity of American readers, for whom the language of Soviet socialist realism was largely unknown, to the immediacy of Solzhenitsyn’s first-person method was conditioned by the increasingly popular style of the New Journalism in 1970s America. Through such works as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, the practices of the novel and the journalist were collapsed into a new form that lifted up the subjectivity of the author who sought to simultaneously engage, inform, and advocate.24 Yet Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag is a long way from the gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson. The techniques of the New Journalism played no role in his own experiments in literary investigation, and his subject matter and moral gravity were quite different. But the sensibility of Solzhenitsyn’s methods and his desire to so directly involve readers in recovering the world of the gulag clearly resonated with the spirit of the New Journalism. For his American readers, bringing the “I” into the gulag offered a palpable window into distant suffering and a visceral sense of the fragility of the human condition. The international circulation of writings by the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, perhaps the 1970s dissident par excellence, offered a cooler, and for some Americans more satisfying, counterpoint to the emotionality of Solzhenitsyn’s rendering of human rights. Indeed Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were often seen as mirror opposites in temperament and affect. An extended 1973 profile of Sakharov by the chief of the Times’s Moscow bureau Hedrick Smith contrasted the “imposing” and “combative” presence of “the Solzhenitsyn of barrel chest, lined and ruddy face, work-worn hands” who “relished prestige and the limelight” with a “kind of Grant Wood–American Gothic simplicity and modesty” that “permeates Sakharov’s life.” Noting his “slightly stooped figure” and “sad compassionate eyes,” Smith believed Sakharov was as “modest in gesture, in manner, in dress, in surroundings” as “an off-duty night watchman.” But behind his lack of pretension, Smith argued, Sakharov was a “Russian intelligent, an intellectual through and through” whose stature as a theoretical physicist and role in the creation of

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the Soviet hydrogen bomb in the 1950s equaled that of Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller in the United States. Rooting Sakharov in this genealogy of self-effacing brilliance, Smith approvingly narrated his more recent transformation into human rights activist “sanctified in the West as a champion of individual rights.”25 Sakharov’s intellectual odyssey in the late 1960s and early 1970s was instrumental in both framing Soviet dissent as part of the emergent vocabulary of human rights and at the same time remaking broader sensibilities about what human rights meant and the kinds of political work it could do. Sakharov burst onto the world stage in 1968 with the publication of “Thoughts on Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” Variously called by the American press a “thunderbolt,” “remarkable,” and an “extraordinary” manifesto because of Sakharov’s extended critique of the Soviet system and the rise of neo-Stalinism, the essay appeared in as many as sixty-five editions in seventeen languages around the world, including in the Times. In his memoirs, Sakharov notes eighteen million copies were published in 1968 and 1969, “in third place after Mao Zedong and Lenin, and ahead of Georges Simenon and Agatha Christie.” The essay was largely concerned with avoiding the prospect of thermonuclear war and argued for what Sakharov termed a “convergence” or rapprochement between the socialist and capitalist worlds that transcended the political and social malaise of the West and the East. Its topical focus moved from thermonuclear extinction to ecological catastrophe, famine, uncontrolled population growth, and a shared spiritual alienation across the Cold War divide. Human rights played a more muted role in Sakharov’s argument. While he extensively discussed the necessity of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression as among the “rights of man” that were central to political community, raised the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and argued that “all anticonstitutional laws and decrees violating human rights must be abrogated,” Sakharov did not offer human rights as a primary conceptual means for envisioning a better future both at home and in the wider world.26 Seven years later, in a speech titled “Peace, Progress and Human Rights” to mark his award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, Sakharov did. The shift in emphasis in the title from his 1968 essay “Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” was telling. “We must today fight for every individual person separately against injustice and the violation of human rights,” Sakharov said in his Nobel address, arguing for the centrality of rights, reason, and moral improvement. He continued: Much of our future depends on this. In struggling to protect human rights we must, I am convinced, first and foremost act as protectors of

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the innocent victims of regimes installed in various countries, without demanding the destruction or total condemnation of these regimes. We need reform, not revolution. We need a pliant, pluralist, tolerant community, which selectively and tentatively can bring about a free, undogmatic use of the experiences of all social systems. . . . Like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.27 As Sakharov argued in My Country and the World, published in the United States just as his Nobel Prize was announced, human rights must be defended everywhere to exist anywhere, and violations of individual rights in one country threatened those rights in all countries.28 It was Sakharov’s capacious rendering of what human rights could mean, and the growing position of global eminence from which he spoke, that helped transform the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from a Cold War issue to a human rights cause in the United States. If American readers could begin to better imagine what the visceral particularities of the deprivation of human rights felt like through Solzhenitsyn’s more imaginative prose, Sakharov acted as a philosopher and guide through whom human rights began to acquire a global moral power. Jimmy Carter’s unprecedented and well-publicized response to a January 1979 letter from Sakharov urging Carter to “raise his voice” in support of human rights activists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe points toward Sakharov’s transnational moral authority. In his letter Carter renewed his “firm commitment to promote respect for human rights not only in our own country but also abroad.”29 Like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel also became an American human rights cause célèbre, helping to recast and deepen the meanings accorded to human rights in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Havel was a coauthor of Charter 77, a Czech human rights manifesto released in January 1977 that criticized the government for failing to implement the Helsinki Accords and UN covenants to which it had signed and their guarantees of freedom of expression and other political and civil rights. Although the charter insisted it “did not form the basis for any oppositional political activity,” the Czech state responded with severe repression against those who signed, including the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of Havel and other Charter 77 leaders for subversion against the state. Havel was in prison for three years. After his release, he remained

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the subject of continual government surveillance and was put under house arrest and in prison for brief periods until, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the “velvet revolution” that marked the collapse of the Communist state in 1989.30 Havel began to capture the American imagination in the late 1970s. The Carter administration very publicly protested the Czech state’s harassment and imprisonment of Havel and other Charter 77 leaders. The administration’s protestations were lead stories in major American newspapers, and Charter 77 the subject of television evening news broadcasts, helping to raise Havel’s profile in the United States. Leading American literary figures such as Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Saul Bellow lobbied for his release.31 But Havel’s more enduring impact on the American human rights consciousness flowed from the growing circulation in the United States of his plays and political writings. In them Havel emerged as a figure who shared some of the sensibilities of Soviet dissidents, especially Charter 77’s strategic inclination to publicly contrast the formal promises of the state to protect human rights with the everyday practices of rights violations.32 Havel’s iconoclastic artistic and political vision, however, was also deeply shaped by the global counterculture and the theater of the absurd of the late 1960s. Indeed what precipitated Charter 77 was the arrest and trial of the Plastic People of the Universe, a radically unconventional psychedelic Czech rock band whose dark, low-fi music drew inspiration from Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground. The band was formed after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and immediately attracted a young and enthusiastic cult following. Concerned by what it saw as the band’s subversive message, the Czech police broke up their concerts, beating up fans and band members, as part of a growing state campaign in the mid-1970s against freedom of expression. Havel, a Plastic People fan, saw the band’s arrest in 1976 as a warning sign of heightened political repression. That such concern with the band could act as a spur to the Charter 77 movement points to the palpable presence of a globally inflected underground countercultural element in Czech human rights politics that would give Havel a hipster quality in the West quite different from the more austere sensibilities of most Soviet dissidents (it is difficult to imagine Solzhenitsyn sharing Havel’s affinity for the Plastic People).33 In the wake of Charter 77 and the international notoriety of Havel’s imprisonment, his plays, long banned in Czechoslovakia, were increasingly performed in Western Europe and the United States. Influenced by practitioners of the 1960s avant-garde theater of the absurd like Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, Havel combined satire and subtle word play to lay bare

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the dehumanization of civil society under the Czech socialist state. American critics called performances of Havel’s work in New York City and at regional theater companies in the early 1980s “events of artistic and political urgency” and lionized Havel as an “utterly heroic . . . fighter for human rights.”34 Most frequently performed were a trilogy of one-act plays whose central character Vanek, a banned playwright Havel loosely modeled on himself, served as a public conscience for those who had compromised their morality as collaborators with the state. In Protest, written just after Charter 77, Havel turned a withering eye on fellow intellectuals who chose collaboration rather than dissent. Here an old friend, surrounded by the affluent accoutrements made possible by his association with the regime, asks the impoverished Vanek to write a petition protesting the arrest of a popular singer while praising him for his courageous “fight for human rights.” By chance Vanek has already prepared such a petition and asks his friend to sign. The friend immediately equivocates. At the end of a lengthy monologue that American critics called “dazzling,” he explains: These people [the state] secretly hate the dissidents. They’ve become their bad conscience, their living reproach! That’s how they see the dissidents. At the same time they envy them their honor and their inner freedom, values which they themselves were denied by fate. That is why they never miss an opportunity to smear the dissidents. And precisely this opportunity is going to be offered to them by my signature. In a monumental act of self-serving moral displacement and convoluted logic, he asks if he should think of himself and sign, or think about the dissidents and not sign. He does not sign, assuring himself, as one critic wrote, “of the rectitude of moral abdication.”35 The focus on the individual that made Havel’s vision of human rights politics so palpable to American audiences also infused his political writing, which became widely available in the United States beginning in the mid 1980s.36 His best-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” opened with Havel asking why a greengrocer in Prague might put a placard in his shop window with the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” He suggested few shopkeepers thought much about this practice, one that formed an omnipresent “panorama of everyday life” in socialist Czechoslovakia, nor did passersby really notice the signs. The message didn’t matter either. It was simply how one got by in a socialist system “thoroughly permeated by hypocrisy and lies” that demanded “conformity, uniformity and discipline.” For the system to work, Havel argued, individuals “need not believe” in it, “but they must behave as if they did . . . they must live within a lie.” In putting his loyalty

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on display in the shop window, the greengrocer signaled his compliance and obedience to the regime but also his complicity in the system. He was “pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust by Mephistopheles.” Everyone, from greengrocers to prime ministers, was “in fact involved and enslaved.”37 If one day the “the green grocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans,” Havel claimed, retribution would be swift: the loss of his position, reduced pay, the loss of special health and education benefits for his family, threats, harassment, and intimidation. For the state, such an action would not have been perceived as an individual or isolated offense. Havel writes, “He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie . . . that the emperor is naked . . . that it is possible to live within the truth . . . a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness.” Living within the truth, for Havel, was the essence of what “dissent” and the “struggle for human rights politics” ought to be about. It was an everyday politics, as suspicious of “abstract projects for an ideal political or economic order” in the democratic West as in the socialist East. Havel was also wary of the term “dissident,” believing that its prevailing usage in the 1970s too often improperly lifted up prominent leaders and elided the deeper moral politics of what was necessarily a mass movement. Instead he reframed its meanings to argue that “the basic job of ‘dissident’ movements is to serve truth,” in part by “defending human rights” but also by developing “parallel structures” where “a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims.” Through the power of the powerless, Havel believed, the “plurality, diversity, independent selfconstitution and self-organization” that is the “essence of the authentic life” could flourish.38 Havel, Sakharov, and Solzhenitsyn’s positioning of the individual as the centerpiece of an emergent consciousness about human rights in the 1970s resonated so deeply in the United States in part because of a profound set of transformations in how many Americans conceived of themselves, and their relationship to the state, society, and the world at large. As Daniel Rodgers has argued, a mid-century consensus about the embedded nature of the individual in the public and the social sphere gave way in the 1970s to an “age of fracture” in which individuals, contingency, and choice became the watchwords of political and social thought. Indeed, Rodgers suggests Carter’s inaugural address emerged at a moment when “the nation disaggregated into a constellation of private acts.” 39 The growing therapeutic culture of the 1970s, dubbed the “Me Decade” by the journalist Tom Wolfe, heightened concern with the self and valorization of individual experience, further conditioning the sympathetic responses of Americans to the kind of testimonials

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and witnessing through which human rights abuses were most frequently made visible. So too did the increasing concern with identity politics and Holocaust memory as the decade progressed in what one historian called “a cultural climate that virtually celebrated victimhood.”40 The circulation and appreciation of dissident writings from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the United States was one manifestation of the larger embrace of the self in the decade’s cultural politics. Mediated by these new concerns with the individual, the testimonials of individual victims of what were increasingly called human rights abuses, whether the arrest and imprisonment of dissidents in the Soviet East or the increasing incidence of torture and disappearances in the military dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, came to define the topography of American human rights.41 We are a long way from U.S.-centric explanations for the origins of the “craving” for human rights that President Carter powerfully evoked in his 1977 inaugural address. Without question, domestic factors shaped Carter’s commitment to human rights and the broader U.S. engagement in transnational human rights politics in the 1970s. They don’t, however, tell us much about how it was that the global vocabulary of human rights came to be there for the taking in the first place. But if Carter’s address and its deep concern with human rights are best understood against a wider transnational landscape, one dimension of the American case was quite different from its other global iterations. In the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, and almost everywhere else in the world, the focus was on violations of rights happening at home and overseas. Yet in the United States, human rights were almost never imagined to have resonance for domestic rights questions in the 1970s, either by Jimmy Carter or most American human rights activists. The social movements of the era for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights only infrequently invoked human rights as a way to frame their causes. And in the rare instances that they did, it was almost always in a minor key.42 Questions of human rights within the United States throughout the 1970s remained almost completely decoupled from what would be increasingly vigorous American attention to violations of human rights elsewhere in the world. In this sense Carter’s turn to the Soviet Union and Chile in the presidential debates of 1976 to locate and define where individual human rights were violated perfectly captured the outwardly directed focus of his human rights politics. Americans imagined that they pioneered human rights talk in the 1970s. And with the same inward-looking perspective, they imagined that it applied to abuses that occurred anywhere but at home.

Conclusion DANIEL T. RODGERS

Icons are objects with power. Glimpsed on a museum wall or as they flit across an art history PowerPoint projection, their nature is wholly changed. In Christian communities in late antiquity, icons were not works of art but doorways into a miraculous, unseen world of spiritual force and mercy. The faithful venerated and adored their icons. They kissed them, bowed as they passed them, laid garlands before them, held them to the sick, carried them with their armies, and paraded them around the city walls in times of siege or trouble. “The icon was a hole in the dyke separating the visible world from the divine, and through this hole there oozed precious driblets from the great sea of God’s mercy,” Peter Brown writes.1 The active verb in Brown’s formulation is important. For icons were not passive; they did things. Icons held the power to heal the sick, to ward off harm, to repel demons, and to bring the believer to the very doorsill of heaven. Without power, an icon is merely paint laid on panels. It was no wonder that modern nationalists were so eager to appropriate the power of icons. In flags, monuments, statues, public buildings, and military parades the new nation-states put themselves on display as objects of public veneration. Still more pervasive have been the constructs of cultural nationalism: the larger-than-life folk heroes, invented traditions, publicly shared memories, repertoires of moral and common sense, and objects of popular commerce and consumption that bound a citizenry into an imagined larger 155

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whole. Through all these forms flowed powers of loyalty and identification. Approach the Empire State Building or the Lincoln Memorial in the right spirit, salute a flag, or read a Robert Frost poem, and one touches not limestone or marble, not patterned cloth or rhyming words, but the pulse and strength of the nation. Modern secular icons, like their spiritual originals, connect those within their aura with fields of power. But that power no longer seeps through in precious driblets. It gushes, and it is the power of fusion of self and nation. But what if, when you bring an icon into close embrace, not one god springs forth but a whole clutch of them? What if, with eager adoration, you touch a modern secular icon, seeking the rush of identification with a larger whole, and not one nation gushes out but a tangle of them, their histories tightly braided together? What if you find yourself not buoyed up by the power of the nation but at sea in histories from which the old, neat, national markers have been removed? That is the premise of the essays collected here. Each takes a familiar American icon and finds, beneath its overtly nationalist uses and design, a knot of origin and context stories whose strands reach out far beyond the nation. There is no object in the museums of Americana that we erect in our common imagination, these essays suggest, or sell to ourselves as commodities, or cling to as a mark of exceptional political character that does not have a similarly tangled history. Recognition of the transnational within the overtly national cultural object does not reduce modern symbols of the nation to mere inert matter. But it does trouble some of the powerful symbolic conventions of nationalism. Rich and abundant as are the examples included in The Familiar Made Strange, they could be multiplied many times over. Each would hold yet a different version of the transnational hidden within the iconic and the familiar. Take Whistler’s Mother, for example. You can find her monumentalized today in the Pennsylvania coal town of Ashland, where as a giant eight-foot statue, built with WPA labor in the 1930s, she sits serenely on a hill overlooking Hoffman Boulevard. She is modeled on the postage stamp that the U.S. government issued on Mother’s Day in 1934, “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America.” The stamp had been promoted by the American War Mothers, organized to ensure that the grief of World War I soldiers’ mothers should have its due, in part by transmuting Mother’s Day from a peace observance into a patriotic holiday. But still more important were the crowds that had flocked to see Whistler’s painting when it toured the United States in 1932–34. When Whistler had exhibited the painting in New York and Philadelphia 1881, it had failed to attract either notice or bidders. Now,

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in the depths of the Depression, massive crowds pressed in to see Whistler’s “holy icon,” as the press called it. Almost one hundred thousand people came to see the painting in Cleveland; twenty-five thousand in Toledo; over fifty thousand in Kansas City.2 At the height of public need for reassurance that the crash had not kicked out all the familiar moral scaffolding of the past, the museum crowds made Whistler’s aloof, seated figure an American mother by the very strength of the longing that drew them. But for Whistler, as we know, the painting had almost nothing to do either with maternal sentimentality or with America. “Alors! bouleversement général!” he had written when his widowed mother announced her intention to move into his London apartment. He turned to her at the last minute when his model for a different portrait failed to show. And like all his portraits, he meant it less as a likeness than as an experiment in tones and colors. Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 pushed forward the art aspirations that Whistler had first acquired in Paris, together with a commitment to aesthetic dandyism so pronounced as was to make Whistler, along with his fellow Londoner Oscar Wilde, an object of send-up for Gilbert and Sullivan.3 As for America, Whistler had left it for Paris and London in 1855 and never turned back. The only part of the “American mother” that is located in America is the statue on Ashland’s slope and a powerful stream of desire. In contrast to Whistler, Norman Rockwell never played the dandy, the exile, or the aesthete. He made his living painting vernacular America in images that the Saturday Evening Post circulated back to the nation for decades as its truest, most iconic representation of itself. Thousands of sentimental, humor-filled portraits of the foibles of daily life poured from his studio. Those paintings were not always uncritical of America. Rockwell’s Southern Justice and The Problem We All Live With still carry visual and moral power a half century after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. But no other American-scene artist cultivated his Americanness more assiduously. Holding a Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover in your hands, you felt the pulse and power, the small-town roots and innocent dreams of America.4 But even from Norman Rockwell’s paintings, when viewed closely, the transnational elements tumbled out. His Rosie the Riveter, a Saturday Evening Post cover in 1943, is a magnificent example of iconic nationalism. Rosie’s muscles bulge, her massive rivet gun is up to any task; fleets of warships and squadrons of airplanes will spring from it. She wears the medals of a war hero. But with her sandwich in hand, she’s also an American innocent. Unlike her enemy counterparts abroad, racing to grind out equally massive war matériel, Rosie couldn’t care less about ideology. Stand within her aura, and you touch the power of American democracy in action. It comes as a

Figure 22. Michelangelo, Prophet Isaiah, 1508–12. Detail from Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 23. Norman Rockwell, Rosie the Riveter, 1943. Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright © the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

bit of a shock to realize that Rockwell copied the outlines of her body line for line—same massive form, same daintily crossed feet, same upraised hand (though without a sandwich), same power and motion—from Michelangelo’s Prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

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Rosie’s unexpected roots in the Italian Renaissance are not the only hints Rockwell dropped that he was much less the provincial American genre painter than he appeared to be. In the back room of his lovingly rendered Shuffleton’s Barbershop, beyond the potbellied stove and the barber’s chair and the comic book rack where the perspective lines converge, a group of familiar old New England men are seated. It takes a moment to realize that they are playing not cards but a violin, cello, and clarinet. (And playing what? hymns for next Sunday’s service? “Oh! Susanna”? Mozart’s clarinet quintet?) It takes a moment more to realize that the intricate receding lines of window and rooms and door frames come straight out of the perspectival experiments of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters that Rockwell admired. Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait invites the same double take. Overtly it shows Rockwell’s gangly figure, pipe askew, peering with quizzical humor at its goggle-eyed reflection in the mirror. But pinned on the easel of this iconic American artist are miniatures of a different sort: a Picasso painting and Van Gogh’s, Rembrandt’s, and Dürer’s self-portraits. Atop one of the frames is an American eagle. Atop the other is a brass parade helmet of the sort that central European fire militiamen favored before the First World War. An antique shop purchase? An admirer’s gift? A joke? A plea (like the Van Gogh and Dürer portraits) to be taken seriously as an heir to European high art tradition? A coy homage to Man in a Golden Helmet, held to be a masterpiece by the painter Rembrandt, who Rockwell repeatedly claimed had influenced his own art most of all? As the multitudes of references tumble out of the image, marking its simultaneous location in personal, local, national, and transnational space, the answer is probably all of these at once. If there was ever a national icon across which the multiple and transnational meanings were overlaid most thickly of all, it is the Statue of Liberty. In its origins, the statue was a patently foreign object set in New York’s harbor. It embodied, in the first instance, the aesthetic and entrepreneurial ambitions of its French designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and its French structural engineer, Gustave Eiffel, both on the lookout for the kinds of colossal monuments that the age of iron had made possible by the second half of the nineteenth century. Bartholdi had offered a sister design several years before to Isma’il Pasha, the modernizing, Eurocentric ruler of Egypt, where the statue would have stood at the northern entrance to the new French-engineered Suez Canal as a symbol of French-Egyptian ambitions for the globe. Had the eighty-six-foot “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia” been built, the New York project would have been all but unimaginable except as a blown-up variation on its original.5

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Politically, the Statue of Liberty was equally French. Its commission and funding were the work of a cadre of influential, business-allied French republican moderates who sought to strengthen their hand in French politics through an alliance with their Republican, business-elite counterparts in the United States. The latter had just emerged victorious from the American Civil War. Their French counterparts, by contrast, reeling from France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and fearful, with good reason, that their nation’s newest experiment in republicanism was at risk of being snuffed out by a Napoleonist revival, were eager for all the borrowed authority and prestige they could muster. Their claim that the monument would memorialize a century’s alliance between the French and American people was, at best, an inventive history. It slipped under the rug Napoleon III’s recent flirtation with the Confederacy. It minimized the imperial rivalry between monarchical France and monarchical Britain that had brought French military forces into the Americans’ anticolonial war and where, bottling up the British army at Yorktown without food supplies or reinforcements, the French fleet had ensured the British surrender. But if the Statue of Liberty was a bid for contracts, for political alliance, and for French national and global prestige, it was more than this as well. When the businessmen-dominated Franco-American Union failed to raise sufficient funds for the statue’s giant pedestal, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World swept in to wrest the statue project from the Republican Party “money kings” who had initiated it. Touting the promise of a pedestal built “with the dimes of the people, not with the dollars of the rich few,” Pulitzer transformed the statue project into a subscription prize for the World’s workingclass, Democratic purchasers. Producers of commercial goods cashed in on the Statue of Liberty by depicting her holding aloft their products. During the First World War, the statue’s character changed once more as the war administration took it up as a patriotic symbol in its war bonds campaign. Emma Lazarus had written her “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddle masses” line as a fund-raiser for the pedestal campaign in 1883. But it was not until the twentieth century, as the gates to free global movement were beginning to close, that immigrant Americans succeeded in clearing out the Statue of Liberty’s rival meanings to make her a symbol of refuge to the world.6 Address the Ashland mother, the Rockwell paintings, and the Statue of Liberty with questions that cut across their iconic status, in short, and a tangle of local, national, and transnational origin stories tumble out of them. Like all the icons of modern cultural nationalism, they harbor plural and malleable meanings. Their public character ensures that they will be sites of contest,

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reinterpretation, and ceaseless reappropriation. But if they are to serve as conduits through which individuals are energized and reassured by the power of the nation, those plural meanings are distractions. The transnational, in particular, must be pruned away; the strands that stretch beyond the nation need to be constantly tucked out of sight. Icons, in this sense, work hard simultaneously to project and to conceal themselves, to insist on the selfsufficiency of their official meaning. If they are doorways that lead to power, they cannot lead everywhere or lead down endlessly forked lanes and byways. Even rebels against the nation conspire to simplify and concretize the meaning of national icons. It is one thing to burn a flag as an act of protest against a law, a war, or an official policy. It is another to ask where the very notion that flags were worthy of reverence came from. That is why the act of uncovering the buried roots and meanings of the icons of cultural nationalism is such hard work. Their very power and aura resist the effort to make them strange. The “transnational lens,” in particular, is not easy to put on or successfully hold in place. Their success in doing so makes these ventures in cultural history particularly striking. “Oh! Susanna,” an overtly formulaic Doris Day romantic comedy, Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, Times Square on V-J Day: all these, and more, become strange under the eye of the talented cultural historians assembled here. But the essays in this volume not only open new readings of old American familiars. They also offer lessons in how to uncover the transnational, destabilizing threads that cultural icons like these hold just out sight. Let us put these lessons, for clarity’s sake, as “rules” for seeing the presence of the world in cultural products where we are least accustomed to expect it. Routes and transits matter. In these essays, no cultural object stands still. “Oh! Susanna,” Brian Rouleau shows, entered nineteenth-century America in the manner of a central European polka tune, the preferred music of Polish, Czech, and German exiles. It went out again as exported blackface minstrelsy. As Brian DeLay retraces the travels of John Singleton Copley’s show-stopping Watson and the Shark, the story begins with an incident in Havana, crosses to England where loyalists like Copley had formed a community in exile, and finally arrives in America where the painting was exhibited, utterly incongruously, among scenes of U.S. military victories. Jimmy Carter’s human rights rhetoric entered the dominant political discourses of 1970s America from outside, Mark Bradley demonstrates, intruded into a realist-dominated Cold War political culture via the speeches and writings of Russian and Czech dissidents, and then came to be recirculated, as an American project, abroad. The Kinsey reports circulated across the world, Naoko Shibusawa emphasizes. Global cultural history is crisscrossed with travels like

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these, circling through and far beyond any single nation. The promise that travel brings surprises may be a tourist agency come-on, but it holds an important germ of truth for historians of culture as well. The meanings a cultural object carries are legion. Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, as Matthew Pratt Guterl shows, was a ring of bananas around a barely clad body; it was a symbol of women’s sensual liberation and their power over male sexuality; it was a minstrel show prop; it was a tool for Baker’s highly successful self-commercialization. But it was also a stage prop that put fantasies of empire and colonial “otherness” on display. To let any one of these readings trump the others, to prune back the riot of meanings, the polysemic exuberance in Baker’s act and its reception, is to miss not only its transnational roots and routes but also its very essence. The stories of the Statue of Liberty carry the same surplus of meanings. “Oh! Susanna,” Rouleau suggests, was simultaneously a lament at capitalism’s power to disrupt and displace, a minstrel song, a vehicle that antislavery agitators could appropriate and subvert, and a catchy update on foreign polka beats. The interpretive parsimony that would pare away the extra-national meanings from cultural icons like these whittles them down to fit the national space we have already pre-imagined them to fit. “Let the banana skirt be everything it was,” Guterl writes persuasively. The transnational is often revealed in very small clues. The importance of minor signs emerges as a striking lesson from these essays. The incongruously placed palm trees on the seal of Mount Holyoke College, Mary Renda shows, were not the error of an artist who momentarily misremembered the distinctive shape of an elm. They clue us into the founders’ profound sense of the college’s place in an expansive Christian transnationalism, a global missionary enterprise, stretching from New England to Hawaii and beyond. Cary Grant’s crack about “the untapped resources of underdeveloped nations,” Nick Cullather shows, was not simply a double entendre meant to get a laugh. It is also a hint at how widely the discourse of global economic development had begun to circulate in the early 1960s in a re-understanding of the world pervasive enough to seep even into a scriptwriters’ shop and a movie audience’s sense of humor. Like the clues Norman Rockwell planted in his paintings, the global is often hidden in very small places. Remember empire! Imperial relations of commerce and power loom over all these essays. The empire, they show, was not “out there.” It was present in Baker’s banana skirt, in Cary Grant’s joke, and in Mary Lyon’s evangelical imperialism. It was palpable, as Andrew Rotter shows, in the fine cotton weave and terror of contagion sewed into William Howard Taft’s underdrawers. It shaped the travels of Bartholdi’s statue as well. A year after Bartholdi’s “Liberty” was

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dedicated in New York City’s harbor, the French government sent a replica to its colonial capital in Hanoi, where it remained as a symbol of imperial enlightenment until Vietnamese nationalists toppled it in 1945. Still later, the most important practical effect of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof argues, was not to swing open to the world the gates of entry to the United States but, rather, to ease flow of populations along routes that the political and commercial sinews of empire had already constructed. Holding the expected, internal causal explanations in abeyance can be eye-opening. This is a particularly difficult lesson for historians to take aboard, professionally trained as they are in skills of contextualization that tacitly privilege the nation. But those first, instinctive contextualizations may be wrong, or at least partially so. The assumption that a continuous line of rights talk runs from the “Four Freedoms” rhetoric of the Second World War, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, to the revived human rights rhetoric of the present day has a powerful plausibility. But that same line looks far less continuous, unbroken, and distinctly American if, as Bradley does, one presses it with less nation-bound questions of context and actors. Assumptions about the especially repressive culture of Cold War America may not be wrong, but they become harder to hold when the transnational life of the Kinsey reports complicates the narrative. “Over there” may be “here.” And the reverse may also be true. Of all the lessons to be extracted from these essays, the importance of reframing the boundaries between “here” and “there” may be the single most important. Read closely, Fredrik Logevall suggests, the famous debate in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American between the naïve American, Pyle, and the hard-boiled British realist, Fowler, is less one-sidedly anti-American than it might appear. Sparring, the protagonists also subtly change their expected places. In a similarly close reading that challenges us to reimagine boundaries, Brooke Blower shows that Times Square on V-J Day lay not outside the theater of war, within a separately organized “home front,” enmeshed in the production of war matériel and morale and yet cordoned off from the violence and social chaos of the war itself. Rather, the line of war ran right down streets of New York, with all the danger that implied. Rereading a photo in whose naïve interpretation we have believed too eagerly, Blower’s essay suggests, in particularly striking form, the lesson of all these essays. The zones of the “near” and the “distant” overlap. Looked at closely, with a suspension of one’s initial belief, “over there” turns out to be “here” as well. Smashing icons like these is not the answer. The iconoclasts of the early Christian church offer no good models for the work that faces the cultural

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historian in our post-national interpretive moment. Hurling their fury at the icons, breaking and mutilating all those they could reach, the iconoclasts longed to purge and purify the imagination of the spiritual. They did not eliminate all the symbols that folk believers had cherished. Rather they sought to refocus popular imagination on just a few—the cross, the bread and wine—and in the process augment and centralize the spiritual authority of the church. The doorway to the heavens would be narrower when they were done, and it would be guarded much more closely. The challenge of cultural history in the transnational mode is just the opposite. It is not to try to clear out the icons from popular currency or stand guard over their authenticity. Let there be more of them, if anything: the spinning blue earth along with Lady Gaga, joined hands and raised fists along with the Apple logo and the Coca-Cola bottle. Cultures produce icons in near endless strings: objects through which powers larger than life can be touched and imbibed. The hyper-commercial culture of the American present produces and discards its icons at a pace unmatched in any past. The desire to find and renew one’s self in their aura of power endures. None of the fruits of the transnational turn in historical scholarship are likely to change that. Nor is strangeness an asset in itself. But in reminding us that even the most familiar of cultural artifacts contains not one but a multiplicity of stories and meanings, and that many of the trails they invite us to follow lead quickly beyond the expected and beyond the nation, these ventures in rereading through a transnational lens are of vital importance. They redraw borders. They invite us to think again. They invite us to venture imaginatively much farther out into the world. They do not ask us to set nations aside. But they invite us to be less quick to collaborate in the processes by which an unthinking, provincial nationalism is generated rather than the critical, self- and worldly aware nationalism that we need.

Notes

Introduction

1. Ruth Pickering, “Grant Wood, Painter in Overalls,” North American Review, September 1935, 271; Wanda Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 131–32. 2. Steven Biel, American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 47, 114–17, 135, 159–60; “Coors Hikes Spending on Gay Ads,” Advertising Age, March 27, 2000, http://adage.com/article/news/coors-hikesspending-gay-ads/58917/; Prachi Gupta, “American Gothic on Meth,” Salon, September 17, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/09/17/american_gothic_on_meth/. 3. Albert Shaw, “The Progress of the World,” Review of Reviews, January 1935, 15–18. 4. “Grant Wood, Iowa Artist,” New York Times, April 21, 1935, X9; “American Artists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 14, 1935, 17; Grant Wood, [pamphlet] Revolt against the City (Iowa City: Clio Press, 1935); Wanda Corn, “The Birth of a National Icon: Grant Wood’s American Gothic,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 10 (1983): 252–75. 5. H. W. Janson, “The International Aspects of Regionalism,” College Art Journal 2, no. 4, part 1 (May 1943): 110–15; William Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 186–89, 273–79; James M. Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 67–86. 6. R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 134, 135. 7. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 44; Juan Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927–1950 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994); Vladimir Crnković, The Art of the Hlebine School (Zagreb: Hrvatski muzej naivne umjetnosti, 2006); Alejandro Anreas, Diana Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds., The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006); Michele Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920–1960 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009); and Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 8. Thomas Bender, “Introduction: Historians, the Nation and the Plentitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 5, 11. 9. Historians have found icons to be rich sources for understanding American politics and culture. Recent examples include Louis Masur, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); Kathy Peiss, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Gary Nash, The Liberty Bell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); 167

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Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); and Sheryl Kaskowitz, “God Bless America”: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). More and more, such studies include prominent transnational components as well. See, for example, Kathy Davis, The Making of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Alys Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Edward Berenson, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 10. Calls for transnational work include Bender, Rethinking American History, and David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 965–75. The transnational turn has been fully present in American studies as well; see, for instance, Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Globalizing American Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), and Winfried Fluck, Donald Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, eds., Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011). 11. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); and Evan P. Haefili, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). On the American Civil War era in wider social and economic contexts see, for example, Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1405–38; and Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). 12. For an expansive vision of American progressive reform and the New Deal, the starting point remains Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). On civil rights see Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Thomas Borstelman, The Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For surveys that build upon this new work see Thomas Bender, A Nation

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among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006); Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Emily Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 13. Louis A. Pérez, “We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International,” Journal of American History 89, no. 2 (September 2002): 558–66; Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 91–112, quotation p. 94. See also Daniel T. Rodgers, introduction to Cultures in Motion, ed. Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 14. Helpful reflections on the field’s multiple methodologies include “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1441–64; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50; Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History, 2009: 453–74; Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” International History Review 33, no. 4 (December 2011): 573–84; Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1348–91. 15. Although we have endeavored to include a range of subjects and perspectives in this volume, it is not intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to the field. Nor are we playing gatekeepers to the contested national heritage by making claims about what should or should not be included in a definitive canon of American myths and symbols—an American version of Pierre Nora’s celebrated Lieux de Mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). 1. Watson and the Shark

The author thanks Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Diliana Angelova for inspiration and advice. 1. Copley to Henry Pelham, quoted in Ann Uhry Abrams, “Politics, Prints, and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” Art Bulletin 61 (June 1979): 268. James Barry (1741–1806), quoted in Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953), 187. 2. Alfred Frankenstein, The World of Copley, 1738–1815 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1970), 126–31. 3. Most sources used in this essay take it for granted that Watson commissioned the work. See, for example, L. F. S. Upton, “Brook Watson,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/watson_brook_5E.html; Perry Townshend Rathbone, American Painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969), 1:300; Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 268. 4. Quoted in Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., ed., A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760–1910 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), 210. Emphasis mine. 5. Ibid. 6. All three quotes from Irma B. Jaffe, “John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” American Art Journal 9 (May 1977): 25. For a more conflicted interpretation,

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centering on what the author sees as Copley’s “patriotic ambivalence,” see Abrams, “Politics, Prints.” 7. See Jennifer L. Roberts, “Failure to Deliver: Watson and the Shark and the Boston Tea Party,” in Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA, ed. David Peters Corbett and Sarah Monks (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 52–73, for a compact discussion of these and other interpretations in scholarship. 8. A proclamation of 1643 banned the use of the Union flag as the jack flag of any non-navy vessels. Similar proclamations were issued in 1694 and 1731 in an attempt to end the practice of smugglers hiding under cover of the Union flag. See Timothy Wilson, Flags at Sea (London: National Maritime Museum, 1986), 10, 33–34, 97–98. The other ships in the harbor have huge white flags—presumably Spain’s flag, which had a white background in 1749. Interestingly enough, Copley makes these impossible to identify. 9. For the reviewer see Geoff Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 106. Other contemporaries made the same mistake. See, for example, the Salem Gazette, June 20, 1782, which mentioned Watson’s mishap in Havana, “at the reduction of which he was present.” 10. See W. Jeffrey Bolster, “‘To Feel Like a Man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1173–99. 11. Stebbins, New World, 210. 12. Upton, “Brook Watson.” 13. Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 268; Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography 20 (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 912. Painting young Brook Watson in action seems to have been a popular entry into English art circles. In 1805 Adam Callander painted Brook Watson and Cattle Incident at Chignecto in April, 1755, now at the McCord Museum in Montreal and viewable at http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/ collection/artifacts/W1797?Lang=1&accessnumber=W1797. 14. See, for example, Oracle Bell’s New World (London), September 15, 1789; and “Probationary Ode for the Laureatship, by Brook Watson, Esq.,” in Gazette of the United States (New York City), August 21, 1790. 15. Upton, “Brook Watson.” 16. Elena Schneider’s groundbreaking dissertation, “The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Cuba” (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2011), demonstrates that inter-imperial trade both licit and illicit was far more common and more important in eighteenth-century Cuba than previously believed. For the asiento and the Royal Havana Company see pp. 39–69. 17. Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 268–69; Upton, “Brook Watson.” 18. Copley, quoted in Jaffe, “Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” 25. 19. Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 267–68. Roberts, “Failure to Deliver,” presents a complex and compelling argument for seeing the painting as Copley’s attempt to come to terms with the Tea Party. 20. Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 269; Upton, “Brook Watson.” 21. Upton, “Brook Watson.” 22. Frankenstein, World of Copley, 138–39, 152–55. 23. City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, July 19, 1809. For a similar traveling panorama that likewise featured Watson see advertisement in the Democrat, May 13, 1807.

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2. “Oh! Susanna”

The author would like to thank Brooke Blower, Mark Bradley, Side Emre, Daniel Schwartz, Katherine Unterman, Erin Wood, and two anonymous readers at Cornell University Press for their helpful suggestions. He also wishes to thank conference attendees at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting and the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations annual meeting for feedback on earlier versions of the essay. 1. “Oh! Susanna,” composed by Stephen C. Foster. Over the years, many versions of the music and lyrics have appeared, but these verses represent how the song was first published and publicly performed. See Library of Congress, Music Division, American Nineteenth Century Sheet Music Collection, “Susanna,” by S. C. Foster, Call No. M1. A12V. 2. William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks at Home”: The Songs of Stephen Foster from His Time to Ours (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 5–6. For the garage band metaphor see Ken Emerson, Stephen Foster and Co. (New York: Library of America, 2010), xviii. 3. Foster’s origins described in Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 4. W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 5. Stephen Foster quoted in Emerson, Stephen Foster and Co., xix. Foster’s brother Morrison, who wrote the first biography of Stephen, claimed that because his sibling witnessed many black religious services while in Pittsburgh, this made his representations of African American culture “completely authentic.”Yet this concern with the “authenticity” of Stephen’s “Ethiopian delineations” better reflects marketing strategies employed by minstrel troupes who universally promoted themselves as genuine reflections of plantation life “as it was.” A more direct influence on Foster’s music was likely the Anglo-Celtic folk music circulating the Atlantic’s waterways. See Morrison Foster, My Brother Stephen (Indianapolis: Josiah K. Lilly, 1932), 49–50, and, more generally, Matthew Shaftel, “Singing a New Song: Stephen Foster and the New American Minstrelsy,” Music and Politics 2 (Summer 2007): 1–26. 6. Bayard Taylor, El Dorado, or, Adventures in the Path of Empire (New York: Putnam, 1894), 274–75; J. K. Kennard, “Who Are Our National Poets?” Knickerbocker Magazine, vol. 26 (October 1845), 331–41; Edwin P. Christy, Christy’s Plantation Melodies No. 4 (Philadelphia: Fisher, 1854), and quoted in Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1975): 1. 7. Walt Whitman, “Art-Singing and Heart-Singing,” Broadway Journal, November 29, 1845, 318–19; Johann Herder, Voices of the People in Their Songs (1773), in Philosophical Writings of Johann Herder, ed and trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Archer Butler Hulbert, Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California Trail (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 167–68, and quoted in Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 9–10; Susan Key, “Sound and Sentimentality: Nostalgia in the Songs of

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Stephen Foster,” American Music 13, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 145–66. On Foster’s music as parable of democratization in the United States see Nicholas Tawa, A Music for the Millions: Antebellum Democratic Attitudes and the Birth of American Popular Music (New York: Pendragon, 1984). 8. On polka and the 1848 revolutions more generally see Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 46–48. 9. On minstrelsy as class-based critique see Lhamon, Raising Cain, 37–55. 10. On minstrelsy as critique of modernization see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), or Lhamon, Raising Cain. See also Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 130–35. The annihilation of time and space was a conceptualization made popular during an antebellum era of rapid advances in communication and transportation technology. A nice summary appears in Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 203–42. The breakup and sale of slave families is described most recently in Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 11. Description of Pittsburgh in “A Glimpse at Pittsburg,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 87 (1901), 84; George R. Boyer, “The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 151–74, quoted 151. On the transatlantic social and economic disarray of financial panic see also Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12. Matthew Perry’s translated playbill in Wilhelm Heine, With Perry to Japan: A Memoir (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 154–55. 13. Bayard Taylor, A Visit to China, India, and Japan (London: James Blackwood, 1859), 79–80; Taylor, El Dorado, 13–17; Thomas Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London: n.p., 1851), 1:132; “Editorial Notes—Music,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, August 1855, 222; John Dwight, “Editorial Correspondence,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 17, no. 22 (August 25, 1860): 174; “Thackeray on Ethiopian Minstrels,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 17, no. 22 (August 25, 1860): 174. International minstrel troupes described in John G. Blair, “First Steps toward Globalization: Nineteenth-Century Exports of American Entertainment Forms,” in “Here, There, and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 17–33. On sailor minstrelsy see Brian Rouleau, “In the Wake of Jim Crow: Maritime Minstrelsy along the Transoceanic Frontier,” Common-place 12, no. 4 (July 2012), and Jeffrey A. Keith, “Civilization, Race, and the Japan Expedition’s Cultural Diplomacy, 1853–1854,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 2 (April 2011): 179–202. 14. Kennard, “National Poets,” 331–41. On embedding the early American economy within a global framework see Brian D. Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), and Sven Beckert, “Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): 1405–38. On the internationalism of the

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California gold rush see Susan Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 15. Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 468–69. On the potential use of music as transnational exercise see Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 16. Christy quoted in Eric Lott, “‘The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly 43, no. 2 (June 1991): 223–24. For the Perry expedition see Thomas C. Dudley Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, letter dated December 20, 1853. On the “hourglass” formulation of nineteenth-century U.S. history see Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” History Teacher 36, no. 1 (November 2002): 41–42. 17. William Wells Brown, The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1849); Tubman quoted in Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman (New York: Associated Press, 1943), and Austin, Songs of Stephen Foster, 38; Martin Delany, Blake; or, the Huts of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, orig. pub. 1861–62), 143. 18. Taylor, El Dorado, 274–75; Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (Philadelphia: n.p., 1852), quoted chap. 23, and see esp. chap. 17: “We shall proceed at once to give the advantages to be derived from emigration, to us as a people, in preference to any other policy that we may adopt.” 19. Related in Austin, Songs of Stephen Foster, 31. 3. “Mary Lyon, Massachusetts”

With thanks to the doll makers and doll historians who assisted me on this project, and to the stewards of historical records and objects at the National Archives, College Park; the Brooklyn Museum, especially Eunice Liu; the Columbia County Historical Society, especially Diane Shewchuck; and the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections—above all, Patricia Albright. 1. Mary Lyon doll, Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, Massachusetts (henceforth MHCASC). The doll appears in a 1976 inventory, but there is no other information about its provenance, and to date I have not uncovered any evidence of its maker. Inventory of the Alumnae Association, by room, September 1976, mimeograph, Alumnae Association Records, General: 1970–79, MHCASC. Doll historian Ray Radley has observed that it appears to be similar to dolls created under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. Ray Radley to Stephanie Blythe, e-mail communication, June 8, 2013, forwarded to the author. 2. The Letters of Lucy Thurston Goodale, 1838–40, transcribed, Lucy T. Goodale Papers, MHCASC. 3. See Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 4. Mary Lyon, “Female Education,” June 1839, reprinted in Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings, ed. James E. Hartley (South Hadley, MA: Doorlight Publications,

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2008), 206–28; Andrea L. Turpin, “The Ideological Origins of the Women’s College: Religion, Class, and Curriculum in the Educational Visions of Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon,” History of Education Quarterly 50, no. 2 (May 2010): 139. 5. Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 177–201; Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979). 6. Miriam R. Levin, Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise: Mount Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American Science (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005). 7. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985). 8. Walter Kiplinger to Paul Goward, Worcester, MA, February 8, 1941, Works Progress Administration Central Files: States, Massachusetts, box 1536, file class 651.3152, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, MD. 9. It evoked as well the scrappy, resourceful women of the Great Depression. 10. The inscription appears on the label inside the doll’s skirt. 11. William Makepeace Thayer, The Poor Girl and True Woman; or, Elements of Success Drawn from the Life of Mary Lyon and Others: A Book for Girls (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), 24; online at Google Books. According to Verne Lockwood Samson, the book was first issued in 1857. The earliest dated edition I have found is from 1859, the same publication date identified by Scott E. Casper. The book was subsequently reissued by various publishers with a new title: The Good Girl and True Woman. Verne Lockwood Samson, “William Makepeace Thayer,” Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 18 (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 412–13; Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 121 and 360, n. 77. 12. William Makepeace Thayer, The Good Girl and True Woman; or, Elements of Success from the Life of Mary Lyon and Other Similar Characters (New York: T.Y. Crowell, ca. 1859), see, e.g., 29, 49, 128, 246, 275, 284, 322; and The Poor Boy and Merchant Prince; or, Elements of Success Drawn from the Life and Character of the Late Amos Lawrence (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1857). 13. Thayer, Good Girl, 26; Edward Hitchcock, The Power of Christian Benevolence: Illustrated in the Life and Labors of Mary Lyon (Northampton, MA: Hopkins, Bridgman, and Co.; Philadelphia, Thomas, Cowperthwait, & Co., 1852). Hitchcock’s book saw at least twelve editions. 14. Thayer, Good Girl, 346, 344. 15. Ibid., 3, 191, 194, 70, 71. 16. Ibid., 23–24. 17. Ibid., 135–36, 303, 342–44. 18. Levin, Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise, 23. 19. Sklar, Founding Mount Holyoke; Joseph A. Conforti, “Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards,” Religion & American Culture 3, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 69–89; Amanda Porterfield, Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20. Mary Lyon to Freelove Lyon, July 4, 1826, Londonderry, NH, MHCASC, emphasis added; also, in Hartley, Mary Lyon, 20.

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21. See, for example, Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), 38. For a related point see Turpin, “Ideological Origins,” 140–41. 22. Hitchcock, Power of Christian Benevolence, 239–40. 23. Mary Lyon to Freelove Lyon, July 4, 1826. 24. Mary Lyon, A Missionary Offering, in Hartley, Mary Lyon, 243. 25. Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8–10; Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 26. Fidelia Fisk, Recollections of Mary Lyon, with Selections from Her Instructions to the Pupils in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (Boston: American Tract Society, ca. 1866), 159–60. 27. Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 10–11; Denise Noelani Arista, Comments by Panel Chair, “Pacific Currents,” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Annual Meeting, Hartford, CT, 2012. See also Denise Noelani Arista, “Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters with Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793–1827” (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 2009). 28. Orra White Hitchcock vignette, 1838, Mount Holyoke College Diplomas Collection, Diplomas, through 1870, Mount Holyoke College Seal, MHCASC; Hitchcock, Power of Christian Benevolence, 309. 29. Marion Marsh Randall, “The College Seal,” Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly 20, no. 4 (February 1937): 189–91. 30. Currier and Ives: Perspectives on America (2008), DVD of a three-part documentary video produced by WGBY. 31. Stephen Nissenbaum, “New England as Region and Nation,” in All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, ed. Edward L. Ayers et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 38–61. 32. Bertha E. Blakely, “A Currier Print and a Mount Holyoke Artist,” Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly 23, no. 2 (August 1939): 51–53. 33. Nathaniel Currier, Prints, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Buildings and Grounds, Seminary Building: Drawings and Prints, MHCASC. Thanks to Patricia Albright for pointing out the difference in the trees in the two versions of Currier’s print. 34. “To the Pastors of the Churches of New England and all friends of the Higher Education of Women,” an appeal by the National Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, Mrs. Moses Smith, president; the presidents of the Mount Holyoke Board of Trustees and Faculty; and the Treasurer of the College, Mary Lyon Collection, Biographical Material and Memorabilia, Birthday Observances, 1897, MHCASC. 35. Philip Stafford Moxom and Lyman Abbott, quoted in the pamphlet Why Mary Lyon Should Be in the Hall of Fame, Mary Lyon Collection, Biographical Material and Memorabilia, Honors Conferred, Hall of Fame (1905), MHCASC (henceforth cited as Hall of Fame, MHCASC).

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36. Lyon was unsuccessful in 1900, when twenty-nine men and no women were elected; in 1905, Lyon got the votes of fifty-nine of eighty-six electors who voted on female nominees. Cover letter from the New York University Senate to Hall of Fame Electors, October 15, 1905, accompanying Hall of Fame: Report to the One Hundred Electors of the Hall of Fame from the Senate of New York University, 1905, Hall of Fame, MHCASC; New York University, Hall of Fame, Record of the Results of the Sixth Quinquennial Elections—1900–1925 (New York: Hall of Fame, c. 1926). In the Papers of the Robertson and Worcester Families at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, online at http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/digital/robertson/Series_II/pdf/AR2_08_02_1085.pdf. 37. Shepard was the daughter of financier Jay Gould and had married railroad magnate J. Finley Shepard. See Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 208n26. 38. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, The Hall of Fame, Being the Official Book Authorized by the New York University Senate as a Statement of the Origin and Constitution of the Hall of Fame and of Its History up to the Close of the Year 1900 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), the quote is from Talcott Williams, p. 287. Of the first one hundred electors, fifty-seven were from New England and the Middle States; thirty from the West, including Ohio; sixteen from the South; and seven from either Washington, D.C., or abroad, but these seven may have hailed disproportionately from the Northeast. MacCracken, Hall of Fame, 31 39. Constitution of the Hall of Fame, p. 1, Hall of Fame, MHCASC. 40. Richard Guy Wilson, “Architecture and the Reinterpretation of the American Past in the American Renaissance,” Winterthur Portfolio 18, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 69. 41. David Garrard Lowe, Stanford White’s New York (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 50, 134, 187, 211. The second Madison Square Garden stood 1890–1925. Although in decades to come, voices of the Arts and Crafts movement would deride Beaux-Arts style as merely imitative, when the Hall of Fame’s colonnade was completed in 1900, this cosmopolitan nationalism seemed to picture America in a fittingly heroic scale: see Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American: Business, Tourism, and the Urban Landscape, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 91–92. 42. The size of the audience is mentioned in Sophie T. (Mrs. J. D.) Walton to Mary Woolley, June 6, 1907, Mary Emma Woolley Papers, Series 1. Correspondence, box 1, folder 4, MHCASC. 43. “Mary Lyon in the Hall of Fame,” TS, 1p, Hall of Fame, MHCASC. See also Ida Pond Sylvester, “Mary Lyon in the Hall of Fame,” Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, July 1927, 65–67. 44. Talcott Williams, in MacCracken, Hall of Fame, 285. 45. Anna C. Edwards, “What We Owe to Our Ancestors,” Anna C. Edwards Papers, MHCASC. Edwards’s derogatory view of these cultures was evident even as she called for recognition of ancestral linkages to such cultures. For another example of an inclusive use of the term “race” in contemporary nationalist discourse see Angela Blake’s discussion of Hamilton Wright Mabie: Blake, How New York Became American, 85–86. 46. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, “Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women, 1870–1910,” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (September 1983): 347–71.

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47. Unidentified newspaper clipping enclosed with letter from Henry Sabin (Amherst College, class of 1852) to Prof. Edward Hitchcock [son of the former Amherst President who authored The Power of Christian Benevolence], Amherst, October 19, 1905, MHCASC. 48. Of the roughly one hundred electors involved in the process in 1900 and 1905, only six were women, but all were white and native-born. According to MacCracken, the restriction to the native-born was especially prized by Shepard, not because foreign-born Americans such as Roger Williams and Alexander Hamilton were not worthy of honor, but rather in order to have a record of the eminence of those “who owe nothing (unless by their own choice) to foreign training; who, in a word, are from first to last Americans.” By 1905, the rules would be amended to allow for a limited number of foreign-born honorees. MacCracken, Hall of Fame, 20; Handbook of the Hall of Fame, New York University, University Heights, New York City, 2nd ed. (New York: Hall of Fame, 1922), 6–7, in the Robertson Papers at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, online. 49. Newspaper clipping enclosed with Henry Sabin to Edward Hitchcock, October 19, 1905. 50. Rev. Jesse Gilman Nichols, “The Smith-Dwight Family: Two Names Honored at Mount Holyoke,” Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, October 1924, 143–44. 51. Ibid., 147–48. 52. Photograph, Miss Rebecca Smith and her Mary Lyon dolls, with notation on reverse, Mary Lyon Collection, MHCASC. 53. Mrs. Charles Fletcher Lent to the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences, June 13, 1928, Records of the Department of Costumes and Textiles: Exhibitions, Columbia County Historical Society Costumed Dolls [07/—/28—09/—/32], 1927–32, Brooklyn Museum Archives. Photograph, Mary Lyon Doll (1932.10), Collection of the Columbia County Historical Society, Kinderhook, NY. 54. Press release, Records of the Department of Public Information, Press releases, 1916–30 [01–03/1929, 035–6], Brooklyn Museum Archives. This document is available online at www.brooklynmuseum.org. 55. List of dolls, TS, n.d., Records of the Department of Costumes and Textiles: Exhibitions, Columbia County Historical Society Costumed Dolls [07/—/28—09/— /32], 1927–32, Brooklyn Museum Archives. Another genteel version of Mary Lyon was a Sebastian figurine (three inches, ceramic) commissioned by Edith Smith Webster in 1948. The Arm-Chair Shopper: A Catalogue of Money-Making Projects to Benefit the Two-Million Dollar Fund for Mount Holyoke College, p. 7, Development Office Records, Two-Million Dollar Campaign, 1948, MHCASC; the figurine is in the Mary Lyon Collection, MHCASC. 56. John L. McKenna, “We Called Her ‘Home’ for Awhile,” War Collection, World War II, 1939–45: Ships—USS Lyon—Correspondence and Photographs, 1990–1995, MHCASC; Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (1969), vol. 4, 173–74. In 1987, the U.S. Postal Service issued a two-cent stamp honoring Mary Lyon. 4. William Howard Taft’s Drawers

My thanks to Mark Bradley and Brooke Blower for inviting me to contribute to this volume, and to Ruth Ginio and the participants in the History Seminar at Ben

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Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, Israel, for their comments and questions on an earlier version of this essay. 1. W[illiam] H[oward] T[aft] to the John Shillito Co., January 10, 1901, William Howard Taft Papers, microfilm, reel 31, Cornell University Library; Taft to Shillito, October 23, 1902, Taft Papers, reel 37; Mrs. William Howard Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1914), 80, 145–46; Owen Findsen, “Lazarus Store Has Long, Rich Heritage,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 12, 1997, http://www.enquirer.com/editions/1997/10/12/ bus_wwlazarus.html. Taft may have purchased more underwear during a visit to Cincinnati in March 1902. 2. “Have you got your Balbriggans on?,” Irish Times, February 2, 2010, http:// www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2010/0227/1224265080397.html; Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 30, 111; Daniel Delis Hill, American Menswear: From the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011), 63–64, 99–100; 1897 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), 255–56. 3. On annexation, war, and the establishment of U.S. civilian control in the Philippines see Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Turn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); Peter Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1980); Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989); H. W. Brands, Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Paul A. Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 4. Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Ernest R. May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York: Atheneum, 1968); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). 5. Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 18; Andrew J. Rotter, “Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 1 (January 2011): 3–19. 6. Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged (New Haven, 1841). The key text for understanding the evolution of manners and the advent of civilization in the West is Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 7. Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 66–76; Constance Classen, “The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the

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Renaissance to Modernity,” in Empire of the Senses: A Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2005), 70, 80, 87–88; George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 128; Iris Macfarlane, Daughters of the Empire: A Memoir of Life and Times in the British Raj (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 125. 8. Constance Classen: The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), xi, 3, 9, 137, 190. 9. Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 70–71; John Patrick Devins, An Observer in the Philippines, or, Life in Our New Possessions (Boston: American Tract Society, 1905), 50; Papers of Charles Henry Brent, box 1, Diary 1902, entry for November 2, Manuscript Division (MD), Library of Congress (LC). 10. W. Cameron Forbes, diary entry for May 31, 1909, W. Cameron Forbes Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; May, Social Engineering, 146, 165. 11. Letter from James M. Smith in Daily Scioto Gazette, February 2, 1900, Richie Routt Papers, box 1, United States Military History Institute (USMHI), Carlisle, PA; Edith Moses, Unofficial Letters of an Official Wife (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1908), 30, 56, 229; Taft, Recollections, 102–4; Eli Lundy Huggins to his sisters, December 3, 1900, Huggins Papers, box 1, folder “46 letters—November 1900–December 1900—Philippines,” Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley; Hans Aron, “Investigation on the Action of the Tropical Sun on Men and Animals,” Philippine Journal of Science (hereafter PJS) 6B, no. 2 (April 1911): 101–32; James M. Phalen, “An Experiment with Orange-Red Underwear,” PJS 5B, no. 6 (December 1910): 525–47; MacArthur quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 240. 12. Devins, Observer in the Philippines, 105; Taft, Recollections, 104, 118; Fernando Calderon, “Obstetrics in the Philippine Islands,” PSJ 3B, no. 3 (July 1908): 245–58 (255); Leonard Wood, diary entry for May 1, 1925, Leonard Wood Papers, box 23, folder “Diary Jan. 1–Dec. 31, 1925,” MD, LC; WHT to Henry Cabot Lodge, October 10, 1903, Taft Papers, reel 40; Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 201. 13. Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 640–69 (640–41). 14. Ibid., 657; Victor Heiser, MD, An American Doctor’s Odyssey: Adventures in Forty-Five Countries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936), 112–13; Ken De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 116, 143, 166, 178, 184; Walter L. Cutter, “Wearing the Khaki: The Diary of a High Private,” Walter L. Cutter Papers, box 1, USMHI; Moses, Unofficial Letters, 233; Kramer, Blood of Government, 103, 113; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Health, September 1, 1903–August 31, 1904 (Manila, 1905), 49; Victor G. Heiser, “Unsolved Health Problems Peculiar to the Philippines,” PJS 5B, no. 2 (July 1910): 171–78. 15. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 18–19, 27–28; Heiser, “Unsolved Health Problems,” 173–76. 16. David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 69–71; Grace Paulding Memoirs, William and Grace Paulding Papers, 1873–1956, box 1, USMHI; Report of

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the Philippine Commission to the President, vol. 2, Testimony and Exhibits (Washington, DC: Governmental Printing Office, 1900), 418; Heiser, American Doctor’s Odyssey, 211–64; Victor G. Heiser, Address to American Mission to Lepers, January 10, 1927, Victor G. Heiser Papers, series 1, folder “Heiser, Victor G.: Religion-Science-Leprosy,” American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 17. De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse, 84–87; Paul A. Kramer, “The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 373; WHT to Secretary of War, January 17, 1901, Taft Papers, reel 31; WHT to Dr. David D. Thompson, April 12, 1902, Taft Papers, reel 35. 18. Heiser, American Doctor’s Odyssey, 108–9; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (London: Polity, 2001), 86–90; Neal Diaries, entry for August 28 [24], 1901, Neal Papers, box 1, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY; Dean Worcester to William Howard Taft, April 5, 1902, Taft Papers, reel 35; Shaun Cole, The Story of Men’s Underwear (New York: Parkstone, 2010), 55; Alain Corbin, Time, Desire, and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 25, 32; Richard J. Bushman and Claudia I. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1988): 1213–38 (1228); Emily Bronson Conger, An Ohio Woman in the Philippines (n.p., n.d.), 51, 70, 122; Fernando Calderon, “Tuberculosis in the Philippine Islands,” Proceedings of the First National Congress on Tuberculosis, December 13–18, 1926 (Manila, 1927), 35–51; William H. Brown, Paul F. Russell, and Clara Palafox Cariño, Health through Knowledge and Habits (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1933), 37–38, 69–70, 139–44; Devins, Observer in the Philippines, 312; Stanley, Nation in the Making, 202–3. Public spitting was outlawed in Manila in 1908. 19. Copy of cable for newspapers, December 17, 1901, Taft Papers, reel 34; WHT to Henry Hoyt, March 16, 1903, Taft Papers, reel 38; Jonathan Lurie, William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 55; Taft, Recollections, 229, 234; Heiser, American Doctor’s Odyssey, 49. 20. Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 7. 5. Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt

1. Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840– 1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan Eburne, eds., Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 2. In Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3. Josephine Baker and Jo Bouillon, Josephine, trans. Marianne Fitzpatrick (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 63. 4. Jean-Claude Baker, with Chris Chase, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1991), 135. 5. Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 126.

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6. Terri Francis, “What Does Beyoncé See in Josephine Baker? A Brief Film History of Sampling La Diva, La Bakaire,” http://sfonline.barnard.edu/baker/francis_01.htm. 7. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 8. Ishmael Reed, “Remembering Josephine Baker,” in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (New York: Atheneum, 1989), 287. 9. Jean-Claude Baker, Josephine: The Hungry Heart (1993; reprint, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001); Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Times (New York: Vintage, 1991); Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker (London: Robson Books, 1981); Bennetta Jules-Rossette, Josephine Baker in Art and in Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 10. Erin Chapman, Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 3. 12. Patricia Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Maurice Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Marilyn Kern Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (New York: Praeger, 1994). 13. Raymond Bachollet, Negripub: L’image des noirs dans la publicité (Paris: Somogy, 1992). 14. Jan Nederveen Piterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 200. 15. Matthew Pratt Guterl, Seeing Race in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 16. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 114. 6. V-J Day, 1945, Times Square

For their ideas and feedback, special thanks to Mark Bradley, Margot Canaday, Christopher Capozzola, Daniel Czitrom, Marilynn Johnson, Sarah Phillips, Brian Rouleau, Julie Reuben, and Henry Yu. 1. Service diary, George Mendonsa Collection (AFC/2001/001/42868), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as VHP); Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi, The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery behind the Photo That Ended World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012), 20–24, 27–31, 44. 2. Mendonsa memoir and oral history, George Mendonsa Collection; Verria and Galdorisi, Kissing Sailor, 57, 60–61. 3. Alfred Eisenstaedt, Eisenstaedt on Eisenstaedt (New York: Abbeville, 1985), 5–10, 62, quotations p. 74; Life, August 27, 1945, 26–27. Lieutenant Victor Jorgensen captured the kiss from a different angle: photograph in General Records of the Department of the Navy (RG 80), Still Pictures Division (80-G-377094), National Archives, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NARA).

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4. Emily Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 99, 116–16, 167–79, 173; John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 200–208, 213–16, 233–46. 5. Michael Kimmelman, “Assignment: Times Square,” New York Times Magazine, May 18, 1997, SM43. 6. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 73–87; Sewell Chan, “62 Years Later, a Kiss That Can’t Be Forgotten,” New York Times, August 14, 2007, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/62years-later-a-kiss-that-cant-be-forgotten/. 7. Verria and Galdorisi, Kissing Sailor, 3–4. 8. Anthony Stelmok, “World’s Capitals Swept by Wave of Celebrations,” PM, August 12, 1945, 6; “Victory Reports around the World,” Life, August 20, 1945, 38; Christopher Westhorp, ed., VJ Day in Photographs (London: Salamander, 1995). 9. Life encouraged reading such American exceptionalism into photographs like this one by drawing increasingly sharp distinctions between “home” and “abroad.” In the edition featuring Eisenstaedt’s photo, reports on overseas unrest—of Essen in ruins and “dark uncertainty” in China—stood purposefully alongside idealized domestic scenes: bathing babies, blissful starlets, and ads for tooth whitener and vacuum cleaners: Life, August 27, 1945. 10. Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 21, 52, 68, 73, 87; Robert Westbrook, “‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” American Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 1990): 587–614; Marshall Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2006), 9, 46–49, 54–58. On Life’s purportedly universalist iconography, which nevertheless privileged the white, middle-class family headed by a male breadwinner: Wendy Kozol, LIFE’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Journalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Erika Doss, ed., Looking at LIFE Magazine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 11. New England Mutual life insurance ad, Life, August 27, 1945, 93; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 142–43. 12. “City Takes a Holiday,” New York Post, August 15, 1945, 5, 22; “It’s Still On,” PM, August 16, 1945, 10; Paul Casdorph, Let the Good Times Roll: Life at Home in America during World War II (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 253–56; Alexander Nemerov, Wartime Kiss:Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 8–9. 13. Susan Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Literature on Women’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” Women’s Studies 5 (1978): 223–39; Kozol, LIFE’s America, 57–67; Beth Genné, “‘Freedom Incarnate’: Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the Dancing Sailor as an Icon of American Values during World War II,” Dance Chronicle 24, no. 1 (2001): 83–103. A particularly fraught American icon, the sailor was both famously democratic and infamously unruly, celebrated in fiction going back to James Fenimore Cooper for his freedoms, but also targeted by reformers as morally suspect for his drunkenness, transient lifestyle, and promiscuity across

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borders and color lines. Eisenstaedt’s image had analogues in earlier idealizations of the sailor’s return: Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), xii–xiii, 4–14, 43–45, 63, 200–212; Berman, On the Town, 58–102. 14. Elaine Tyler May, “Rosie the Riveter Gets Married,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis Erenberg and Susan Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 128–43; Canaday, Straight State, 139–42, 165–72. 15. Sonya Rose, “Girls and GIs: Race, Sex, and Diplomacy in Second World War Britain,” International History Review 19, no. 1 (February 1997): 146–60; Rosemary Campbell, Heroes and Lovers: A Question of National Identity (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 83–97. 16. Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 110–32; J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2010), chap. 3; Sarah Kovner, Occupying Power: Sex Workers and Servicemen in Postwar Japan (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), quotation p. 4. 17. “War Is Fed through the World’s Biggest and Busiest Harbor,” Life, November 20, 1944, 55–60; Joseph Meany Jr., “Port in a Storm: The Port of New York in World War II,” in To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic, ed. Timothy Runyan and Jan Copes (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 282–94; Richard Goldstein, Helluva Town: The Story of New York City during World War II (New York: Free Press, 2010), 9–10, 27–33, 55–59; Steven Jaffe, New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 242–48, merchant seaman quotation p. 243. 18. Goldstein, Helluva Town, 55–56; Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Alistair Cooke, The American Home Front, 1941–1942 (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 281–82. 19. Goldstein, Helluva Town, 105, 252–53; Meyer Berger, “The Not-So-Gay White Way,” New York Times, May 24, 1942, SM10; E. J. Kahn, “The Army Life,” New Yorker, May 29, 1943, 48–49; LeRoy Neiman, All Told (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2012), 28–41. 20. Costello, Virtue under Fire, 76–99, 220–52, quotation p. 91; Leo Block, Aboard the Farragut Class Destroyers in World War II (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 170–85; Peter Schrijvers, The Crash of Ruin: American Combat Soldiers in Europe during World War II (London: Macmillan, 1998), 165–90; Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford, 1989), 96–105. 21. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, Yanks Down Under, 1941–1945: The American Impact on Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 146–51; Juliet Gardiner, “Over Here”: The GIs in Wartime Britain (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), 55–56, 79–92; 108–47; Marilyn Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 1–3, 85–99, 108–9; Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, chap. 4; Roberts, What Soldiers

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Do, 8–11, 59, 63, 134–35, 146–67, 175; marine quoted in Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon, Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 69; Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 925–26n42. 22. Henry Elkin, “Aggressive and Erotic Tendencies in Army Life,” American Journal of Sociology 51, no. 5 (March 1946): 408–13; C. F. Bonham, “Lupus Selective Servicus,” Camp Roberts Dispatch and cartoons reprinted in G.I. Laughs, ed. Harold Hersey (New York: Sheridan, 1944), 26–27, 90, 113, 129, 221–25. On stateside “militarized resorts” and urban tenderloins invaded by GIs on leave, Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 98–99, 106–26. The term “wolf,” which entered mainstream slang in the 1940s, originated among gay men: Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 25–26. 23. Talbert Josselyn, “Sailors Ashore,” Collier’s, December 1, 1945, 26–33; Neiman, All Told, 32; Robbins quoted in Genné, “‘Freedom Incarnate.’” On soldier entitlement and resentment toward civilians, James Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 207–28. 24. Federal Writers’ Project, WPA Guide to New York City (1939; New York: Pantheon, 1982), 167–80; George Chauncey, “The Policed: Gay Men’s Strategies of Everyday Resistance,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William Taylor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 315–28; Darcy Tell, Times Square Spectacular (New York: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2007), 81–92, 112–18; Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City (1950; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978), 361–62; Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation in New York (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), 17–31. 25. Hegarty, Victory Girls, 54–55, 120–30. 26. Memos regarding “boisterous actions” on public conveyances, April 20, 1941, February 28, May 10, and August 12, 1942, W. H. Pashley memo, February 28, 1942, and shore patrol reports in P13–2 Conduct—Offenses folders, box 280, Headquarters Third Naval District, Commandant’s Files, 1939–42 (RG181), NARA, New York (hereafter HQ 3ND); Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 121–22; Lorraine Diehl, Over Here! New York City during World War II (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 169–70, 183–91; Robert Coates, “Big Night,” New Yorker, May 27, 1944, 49–55; Gertrude Schweitzer, “Sailor on Broadway,” Saturday Evening Post, September 18, 1943, 16, 52–57; Kahn, “Army Life.” 27. Otherwise known as “a piece of ass”: Elkin, “Aggressive and Erotic Tendencies”; Zeiger, Entangling Alliances, 75, 97. 28. Anthony Bianco, Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 118–22; Coates, “Big Night.” On aftershave as a GI signature scent, Elfrieda Shukert and Barbara Scibetta, War Brides of World War II (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1988), 13, 130. Servicemen consorted with teenagers at home and abroad. New York established a “Wayward Minors Court” to contend with juveniles not “properly escorted” in Times Square after curfew, and New Jersey forbade soldiers from dating those under sixteen. Nearly half of the Army’s VD cases, military records claimed, traced to girls under nineteen. A large number of GI “war brides,” moreover, were teenagers: Costello, Virtue under Fire, 206–8; Hegarty,

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Victory Girls, 130–37; Campbell, Heroes and Lovers, 88, 95–96; Potts and Potts, Yanks Down Under, 321–23. 29. Paul Blackburn memo, December 3, 1942, John Debs to Commandant, February 18, 1942, Chief of Naval Personnel memo, August 5, 1942, W. H. Pashley memo, August 3, 1942, and complaints in P13–2 Conduct—Offenses folders, box 280, and Rear Admiral Marquart to Vincent McHugh, November 30, 1942, P8–5 Protests-Petitions-Complaints, box 272, HQ 3ND; John Riordan, “Some G.I. Alphabet Soup,” American Speech 22, no. 2 (April 1947): 108–14. 30. Hersey, G.I. Laughs, 171; Kenneth T. Jackson, WWII and NYC (New York: New York Historical Society, 2012), 65; “9,000 Service Men Arrive on 10 Ships,” New York Times, August 15, 1945, 21. These included veterans from the Pacific: “1,798 Pacific Vets Here,” New York Post, August 14, 1945, 6. 31. Memos and shore patrol reports in P13–2 Conduct—Offenses folders, HQ 3ND; Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 27–28, 37–39, 185, 241; Meyer Berger, “Times Square Diary,” New York Times, September 3, 1944, SM16–17, 45–46; Pauline Kael in Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: New Press, 1984), 124. One writer advised women that it was “wise to dress in simple clothes” and be as “inconspicuous” as possible in public “if you want to avoid whistles and caustic comments.” “Cast a couple of warm glances” at a group of stags, she added, “and, presto, they’re ready to move in”: Florence Howitt, “How to Behave in Public without an Escort,” Good Housekeeping, September 1943, 40, 160–61. 32. Shore Patrol report, November 12, 1942, Gladys Green to Commandant, September 12, 1942, George Fortson to Frank Knox, October 12, 1942, in P13–2 Conduct—Offenses folders, HQ 3ND. 33. Brawley and Dixon, Hollywood’s South Seas, 66, 69, 106–7; Shukert and Scibetta, War Brides, 124–25, 137–38, 185. 34. SS Volendam manifest, December 17, 1939, Passenger and Crew Lists, New York, 1897–1957, NARA Microfilm T715, roll, p. 48; Verria and Galdorisi, Kissing Sailor, 35–39; Friedman interview, August 23, 2005, Greta Friedman Collection (AFC/2001/001/42863), VHP; “Local Woman’s Famous Kiss Still Lingers,” May 28, 2012, http://frederickcounty.wusa9.com/news/news/108416-local-womansfamous-kiss-still-lingers. 35. Nemerov, Wartime Kiss, 8–9. 36. Chan, “62 Years Later.” African Americans had been jailed or killed for less, and if Mendonsa violated a man in this way, he could have been convicted as a “sexual psychopath”: Estelle Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,” Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (June 1987): 83–106. 37. Verria and Galdorisi, Kissing Sailor, 67. See also numerous justifications offered by commentators who pounced on one feminist blogger’s critique: http:// cratesandribbons.com/2012/09/30/the-kissing-sailor-or-the-selective-blindnessof-rape-culture-vj-day-times-square/#comments. 38. “V-J Day and the Atomic Bomb Kiss,” New York Amsterdam News, August 25, 1945, A2; Universal Newsreel footage, 200.UN.18–425, segment no. 1, August 16, 1945, NARA. 39. “As New York Celebrated” and “N.Y.’s Celebration Is Gayest of All Time,” August 15, 1945, 8, 14–15, both in PM; Simon Greco in Roy Hoopes, Americans

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Remember the Homefront (1977; New York: Berkley, 2002), 329; “Festal Mode,” Washington Post, August 16, 1945, 8; Mendonsa oral history. 40. “N.Y.’s Celebration Is Gayest”; “Festal Mode”; Alexander Feinberg, “All City ‘Lets Go,’” New York Times, August 15, 1945, 1. On Shain see Verria and Galdorisi, Kissing Sailor, 87–90. 41. “Joyous Bedlam Loosed in City,” Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1945, 1; Peter Carlson, “The Happiest Day in American History,” American History, August 2010, 50–57; “The Men of War Kiss from Coast to Coast,” Life, August 27, 1945, 26. Journalists sometimes instigated these performances. At one Oahu luau, a Life photographer orchestrated a “mass exchange of kisses,” obligating USO hostesses to embrace servicemen returning from Okinawa. He demanded “several retakes” until “wolf calls and whistles warned him the guests would forget all about the food if he persisted”: “Life Goes to a Luau in Hawaii,” Life, August 27, 1945, 103–9. War brides arriving to New York were similarly coerced into kissing for the cameras, though many protested such public affection: Shukert and Scibetta, War Brides, 77, 158. 42. Archie Satterfield, The Home Front: An Oral History of the War Years in America, 1941–1945 (New York: Playboy, 1981), 365; “Revelry Resumed in Loop,” Chicago Tribune, August 16, 1945, 10; girl quoted in William Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 214; Alison Arnold in Hoopes, Americans Remember, 134; “Crowd of 1,000,000 Behaved” and “Highlights of V-J Merrymaking,” Boston Globe, August 15, 1945, 15, 18; Department of Navy moving images (RG428), 428-NPC-15587, 428-NPC-15591, and 428-NPC-19594, NARA, College Park, MD. 43. “Riots and Looting Mark Bay City’s Celebration,” August 16, 1945, 1, and “Navy Clears Bay City Streets Following Riot,” August 17, 1945, 8, both in Los Angeles Times; “Riots End Liberty for 100,000 in Navy,” August 17, 1945, 6, and “Pacific States,” September 2, 1945, 57, both in New York Times; “Victory Celebrations,” Life, August 27, 1945, 21–25; “‘Peace’ Rioting,” August 17, 1945, 1, 6, “The People,” This World magazine insert, August 19, 1945, 5, and “Riot Prevention Plans Made,” September 1, 1945, 5, all in San Francisco Chronicle; Satterfield, Home Front, 366. 44. Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place, 184–89; Westbrook, “‘I Want a Girl.’” 45. Sophie Tucker, “The Bigger the Army and Navy (the Better the Lovin’ Will Be),” in Follow the Boys, 1944; Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, “I Begged Her,” in Anchors Aweigh, 1945; movie notice in New York Times, August 16, 1945, 25. 46. On scholarly categories minimizing women’s wartime participation, Margaret Higonnet et al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1987) and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989). 47. “Week the War Ended,” Life, August 27, 1945, 29; Hegarty, Victory Girls, 89, 92, 206n33. 48. Fiction and film sometimes acknowledged in the 1940s what has since been largely forgotten, namely how veterans might bring violence into the home: Susan Grubar, “‘This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun’: World War II and the Blitz on Women,” in Higonnet et al., Behind the Lines, 227–59; Bodnar, “Good War,” 149–59. 49. Ruth Seifert, “The Second Front: The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars,” Women’s Studies International Forum 19 (1996): 35–43, and H. Patricia Hynes, “On the Battlefield of Women’s Bodies: An Overview of the Harm of War to Women,”

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Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004): 431–45; Elizabeth Heineman, Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 50. David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 562. 7. The Kinsey Reports

I wish to thank Mark Bradley for suggesting that I write on Kinsey, and Brooke Blower for working with the manuscript. For reading and commenting on drafts of this essay, I thank Kristofferson Acevedo, Marc Briz, Patrick Chung, Cynthia Franklin, Eunseo Jo, Heather Lee, Arisa Lohmeier, Ronaldo Noche, John Rosenberg, Jonathan Tollefson, and Paul Tran. 1. John Geiger, “Kinsey’s 2nd Book Called a ‘K-Bomb,’” Atlanta Daily World, July 24, 1953, 4; “Bombs, H and K,” Newsweek, August 31, 1953, 57; “U.S. Calls the Book the ‘K-Bomb,’” Sunday Mail (Salisbury, South Rhodesia), August 16, 1953; “They Call This Book K-Bomb,” Singapore Free Press, August 18, 1953; “Doctor Writes ‘K-Bomb’ on U.S. Women,” Trinidad Guardian (Port of Spain), August 18, 1953; Donald Ludlow, “Before the ‘K-Bomb,’” Barbados Advocate (Bridgetown), August 23, 1953; Asfin Oktay, “Washington Newsletter: Europe First or Asia?,” Dawn (Karachi, Pakistan), September 4, 1953. Unless otherwise stated, all non-U.S. newspaper clippings are from Binder 16 and Binder 56 at the library of the Kinsey Institute for the Study of Sexual Behavior, University of Indiana at Bloomington. 2. Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 265. 3. Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 237–39. 4. “Does for Sex What Columbus Did for Geography,” Natal Daily News (Durban, South Africa), January 17, 1949. The Columbus metaphor continued. See also: “Kinsey’s Report,” Asahi Shimbun (Kokura, Japan), December 28, 1954; “Eve ’56,” L’Echo d’Oran (Oran, Algeria), March 3, 1956. 5. Egyptian Gazette (Cairo), March 4, 1949. 6. Randall Heymanson, “The World Waits on Kinsey,” Australian News Service, review copy, Binder 72. 7. “Sex: Women Don’t Lie Any More Than Men: US Expert’s View,” Dawn (Karachi, Pakistan), August 19, 1953. 8. John Chapple, editor of the Ashland Daily Press (Wisconsin) to Kinsey, Western Union telegram, August 21, 1953, Binder 72, Kinsey Institute library. 9. “Sex vs. America,” Newsweek, September 7, 1953, 20. 10. “Big Demand in E.L. for Kinsey Book,” East London Dispatch (South Africa), October 6, 1953; “‘Don’t Ban Kinsey’ [say] Psychologists,” Johannesburg Sunday Express, November 22, 1953; editorial, “Censorship,” Cape Times, November 26, 1953; “Kinsey’s Book May Now Be Sold,” East London Dispatch (South Africa), January 28, 1954. 11. “Customs to Release Dr. Kinsey’s Book on Human Female,” Manila Bulletin, January 29, 1954.

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12. Reuters report from Taipei in “Kinsey’s Book Banned,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), May 27, 1954. 13. Letter to the editor, “The Kinsey Findings,” Trinidad Guardian (Port of Spain), September 4, 1953. 14. Vern L. Bullough, “History, the Historian, and Sex,” in The Sex Scientists, ed. Gary G. Brannigan, Elizabeth Rice Allgeier, and Albert Richard Allgeier (New York: Longman, 1998), 5. 15. Delos Smith, “Kinsey Reports on Unfaithful Wives,” China Post (Taipei), August 22, 1953. 16. An exception is a monograph that looks at Kinsey’s impact in occupied Japan: Mark McLelland, Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Studies of Kinsey’s impact in Europe include Adrian Bingham, “The ‘K-Bomb’: Social Surveys, the Popular Press, and British Sexual Culture in the 1940s and 1950s,” Journal of British Studies 50, no. 1 (January 2011): 156–70; Judith Coffin, “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,” French Politics, Culture & Society 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 18–37; L. R. England, “‘Little Kinsey’: An Outline of Sex Attitudes in Britain,” Public Opinion Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Winter 1949–50): 587–600; Dagmar Herzog, “The Reception of the Kinsey Reports in Europe,” Sexuality & Culture 10, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 39–48; Penelope Morris, “‘Let’s Not Talk about Italian Sex’: The Reception of the Kinsey Reports in Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 18, no. 1 (January 2013): 17–32; Gunter Schmidt, “Kinsey’s Unspoken Truths in West Germany,” Sexualities 1, no. 1 (1998): 100–103. 17. Also outside the purview of this essay are discussions in scientific journals; scientists worldwide appeared to have heard first of the report through the media. Many, if not most, of the correspondence to Kinsey from overseas came from those wishing to collaborate or even be trained by Kinsey. Kinsey had to tell such individuals that they were a research, not a training institute. 18. The scholarship on Kinsey is extensive, but two studies that focus on the larger significance of the reports in U.S. history are Igo, Averaged American (2007), cited above, and Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 19. Reumann, American Sexual Character, 2. 20. “A Wife’s Report on Kinsey,” Sydney Sun (Australia), May 23, 1953; “Wife Says Last Word on Kinsey Report,” Mombasa Times (Kenya), August 25, 1953; Don Iddon, “K-Day and the Great Ballyhoo: From New York, Don Iddon Concludes,‘Sex Is Here to Stay,’” Japan News (Tokyo), September 23, 1953. 21. Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 22. “Doctors Uphold Kinsey for Fighting Ignorance,” Johannesburg Star, November 14, 1953; Dr. Roman Parzel, “Notes of Comparison on the Fringe of Kinsey’s Study,” Davar (Israel), September 3, 1953, translated from the Hebrew by Rabbi Victor Eppstein, director of the Bnai B’rith Hillel Foundation at Indiana University; review in Argentinisches Tageblatt, December 24, 1954 (translated from the German); J. B. S. Haldane, “Alfred Kinsey,” Hindu Weekly Review, October 8, 1956; “Two American Sexology Texts, Male and Female, Now Complete: The Kinsey Report, Female Volume” [in Japanese], Yomiuri Shimbun, December 18, 1954.

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23. Indeed, much of the foreign correspondence to Kinsey came from researchers seeking training or asking to collaborate with Kinsey. A brief foray into the letters showed ones from Japan, the Philippines, India, Libya, Yugoslavia, Germany, and Chile. See Communications Binder 72 at the library of the Kinsey Institute. 24. Bingham, “‘K-Bomb’”; England, “‘Little Kinsey’”; quote from England, p. 594. 25. “Student Sex Inquiry Planned,” Johannesburg Star, March 19, 1954; Latest News (Tel Aviv), May 5, 1959 (trans. from Hebrew); Don Budget, “German Sex Life as Shocking as That of the U.S.” (AP-Frankfurt), St. John’s Evening Telegram (Newfoundland), March 18, 1950; “This Book [Viennese version] Will Be Kinsey Plus,” Singapore Free Press, September 16, 1954; “Japan’s Kinsey Report,” Japan News (Tokyo), March 27, 1954. 26. Gault McGowan, “A Danish ‘Kinsey Report,’” Singapore Free Press, November 29, 1953, “Danish ‘Kinsey’ Report,” Jerusalem Post, November 13, 1953. 27. “No Finnish Kinsey,” Palestine Post (Jerusalem), June 23, 1950. 28. Percentage achieved by using the most generous numbers from the Kinsey studies, 20,000, divided by the approximately 150 million people living in the United States according to the 1950 U.S. Census. 29. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey, 265. 30. “One View of the Kinsey Report,” International Medical Abstracts (Calcutta) 8, no. 67 (December 1953). The article relayed the well-publicized criticisms of Kinsey by American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. 31. Kinsey had a proto-sex-lab in the attic of his house that he kept strictly private for fear of the consequences. He and his team filmed a variety of sexual acts performed by volunteers, staff members, and their spouses, even Clara “Mac” Kinsey. James H. Jones, Alfred Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (W. W. Norton, 1997); Kinsey (dir. Bill Condon, 2004). A few years after Kinsey’s death, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson (aka Masters and Johnson) were able to have a bona fide sex lab in which they used a device to measure arousal in seven hundred volunteers. 32. Letter to editor, “Kinsey Report,” Natal Daily News (Durban, South Africa), October 16, 1953. 33. Morris, “‘Let’s Not Talk,’” 25. 34. Bingham, “‘Little Kinsey,’” 161. 35. Morris, “‘Let’s Not Talk,’” 18–19, 22. 36. Herzog, “Reception of the Kinsey Reports,” 40. 37. Ibid., 40–41. 38. “Radio Moscow, in German, to East and West Germany,” September 3, 1953, recorded September 21, 1953, by Les Finnegan, Binder 72. 39. R. Yod, “The Women of Dr. Kinsey,” Al Hamishmar (Israel), English trans., n.d., Binder 56. The text explained that the newspaper was the daily of Mapam, a left-wing socialist party. 40. Kinsey’s salary in 1953 ($10,000) would have been $87,454 in 2013 dollars. The average salary for a male full professor at IU in 2013 was $131,329. See http:// data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl; http://faculty-salaries.findthedata.org/l/3886/IndianaUniversity-Bloomington. 41. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 407–8. 42. This statement was preposterous because homosexuality was then illegal in the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Quoted in Naoko Shibusawa,

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“The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (September 2012): 724. 43. Naoko Shibusawa, “Ideology, Culture, and the Cold War,” in Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard Immerman and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 32–49. 44. Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953), 372. 45. On the other hand, the pressure that women should experience orgasm during coitus has led to the phenomenon of women faking orgasms in order to please their partners. 46. Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 19–21. 47. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 48. Phillips and Reay, Sex before Sexuality, 7. 49. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 3. 50. Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 51. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 4–9. 52. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003), 279–95. Quotes from 279, 292, 295. 53. Ibid., 21–23. 54. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 10–11. 55. In addition to Mosse, Mary Poovey has been influential in showing the link between individual well-being and the social body. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 56. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialize Europe,” of course, does not mean to ignore or dismiss European discourse on modernity. It bears repeating since Europeanists and Americanists who know only the provocative title frequently misunderstand the meaning. 57. Gregory M. Plugfleder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 58. Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 168–71. 59. Rahul Bedi, “Indian Minister Claims Homosexuality Is Western ‘Disease,’” Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8617425/Indianminister-claims-homosexuality-is-Western-disease.html. 60. Ian Lumsden, Machos, Maricones, and Gays: Cuba and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). 61. This conception of the racialized, perverted non-Western “other” became interwoven with domestic understandings of a homosexual “other.” Indeed, the rise of sexology occurred during 1860 to 1918 alongside the consummation of European dominance over the rest of the globe. Rudi C. Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Maleto-Male Sexual Behavior outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750–1918 (New York: NYU Press, 1995).

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62. McLelland, Love, Sex, and Democracy, 2. 63. Asahi Shimbun (Kokura, Japan), December 28, 1954. 8. The Quiet American

Adapted from Embers of War by Fredrik Logevall, copyright © 2012 by Fredrik Logevall. Reprinted by permission of Random House LLC. 1. David Halberstam, “The Americanization of Vietnam,” Playboy, January 1970. 2. Time, October 29, 1951. 3. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Viking, 1956), 124. 4. Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (New York: Random House, 1994), 327; Graham Greene, “Indo-China: France’s Crown of Thorns,” Paris Match, July 12, 1952, reprinted in Graham Greene, Reflections, ed. Judith Adamson, trans. A. Adamson (New York: Reinhardt, 1990), 129–47. 5. Greene, “Indo-China,” 146. 6. See Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 2, 1939–1955 (New York: Viking, 1994), 437–46. 7. Greene, Quiet American, 16–17, 29. 8. Times Literary Supplement, December 9, 1955; Manchester Guardian, December 6, 1955. The other reviews are quoted in Sherry, Graham Greene, 472. 9. A. J. Liebling, “A Talkative Something-or-Other,” New Yorker, April 7, 1956, reprinted in The Quiet American: Text and Criticism, ed. John Clark Pratt (New York: Penguin, 1996), 347–55. 10. Graham Greene, Quiet American, 156. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Richard West, “Graham Greene and The Quiet American,” New York Review of Books, May 16, 1991. 13. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 17; Yours, Etc.: Letters to the Press, 1945–89, by Graham Greene, ed. Christopher Hawtree (New York: Viking, 1989), as quoted in Graham Greene, The Quiet American, Viking critical edition, ed. John Clark Pratt (New York: Penguin, 1996), 310–12. 14. Lansdale letters to Diem, October 28, 1957, and to General John O’Daniel, October 28, 1957, quoted in Pratt, Quiet American: Text and Criticism, 307–9. 15. “Statement of General John W. O’Daniel, Chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam, in Regard to the World Premiere of the Motion Picture ‘The Quiet American,’” (n.d.), Douglas Pike Collection, Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock. See also Joseph G. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 52. 16. For counterfactual assessments regarding what a surviving Kennedy might have done in Vietnam see, e.g., Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 395–400; and James G. Blight, Janet M. Lang, and David A. Welch, Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived: Virtual JFK (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). For the argument (which I find unpersuasive) that Kennedy had initiated a withdrawal at the time of his death see James Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, January/February 2004, 29–34; and Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance

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of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 165–79. 17. LBJ-Bundy telcon, September 8, 1964, in Michael Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 35–36; LBJ-Russell telcon, March 6, 1965, ibid., 210–13. 9. That Touch of Mink

1. Delbert Mann, dir., That Touch of Mink, Universal, 1962. 2. Terry Melcher, “The Doris Day I Know,” Good Housekeeping, October 1963, 91. 3. Bosley Crowther, “Maestro of Sophisticated Comedy,” New York Times Magazine, November 18, 1962, 18–130. 4. “Tunnel of Love at the Metro,” Times of India, March 5, 1959, 5. 5. Molly Haskell, Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21. 6. John Updike, “Suzie Creamcheese Speaks,” New Yorker, February 23, 1976, 111. 7. Dwight Macdonald, Dwight Macdonald on Movies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 110. 8. Haskell, Holding My Own, 27; Janice Welsch, “Actress Archetypes in the 1950s: Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn,” in Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Karyn Kay (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 101–4. 9. Bruce Bawer, “The Other Sixties,” Wilson Quarterly 28 (Spring 2004): 65. 10. “Music Hall Sets Record with That Touch of Mink,” New York Times, June 29, 1962, 13. 11. Christina Klein, “Musicals and Modernization: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I,” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War, ed. David Engerman et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 129–62; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 474–86. 12. This is not including a number of films in which development is an explicit theme or plot element, such as The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), Exodus (1960), or The Chairman (1969). 13. Billy Wilder, dir., Sabrina, Paramount, 1954. 14. Lyndon Johnson, “Speech at the University of Michigan Commencement,” May 22, 1964, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 1:704–7. 15. Simeon Boders, “A Challenge for the Guy Smiths,” Ebony, December 1967, 146; “Wedding Pictures from the Rusk Album,” Life, October 6, 1967, 32; “Negro Reserve Officer Weds Rusk’s Daughter,” Lodi News-Sentinel, September 22, 1967, 1; “Mixed Marriage Pleases Sec. Rusk,” Chicago Defender, September 30, 1967, 31. 16. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Ebony, January 3, 1968, 56–62. 17. “Philanthropoid No. 1,” Time, June 10, 1957, 65. 18. “Doctors of Development,” Time, June 26, 1964, 86. 19. John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to Congress on Foreign Aid,” March 22, 1961.

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20. National Security Council, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” NSC-68, April 7, 1950, http://goo.gl/KPRtQ. 21. Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 75. 22. For a full script of the movie see http://goo.gl/Sp9XS. 23. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), 273–304. 24. Robert Payne, The Revolt of Asia (London: John Day, 1947), 278. 25. John Boyd Orr, The White Man’s Dilemma: Food and the Future (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 100. 26. Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet, vol. 1, The Jewel in the Crown (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2007), 177, 203. 27. John K. Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 495. 28. Harland Cleveland and Gerard J. Mangone, The Art of Overseasmanship (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1957), 2, 12, 101, 86. 29. “Harvey Slocum, Dam Builder, Dies,” New York Times, November 12, 1961, 86. 30. William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 78, 251. 31. Barbara Ward, “A Crusading Faith to Counter Communism,” New York Times Magazine, July 16, 1950, 32. 32. Lederer and Burdick, Ugly American, 108. 33. Borlaug interview with William C. Cobb, Rockefeller Foundation, June 28, 1967, Rockefeller Foundation Archive Center, Tarrytown, NY, p. 335. 34. Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London: Verso, 2012), 81. 35. Stanley K. Sheinbaum, “The University on the Make,” Ramparts, April 1966, 11–22. 36. Harry Browne, The Frontman (London: Verso, 2013). 10. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965

The author wishes to thank Paulina Alberto, Brooke Blower, and Mark Bradley for their comments and suggestions, and Elyse Brogdon for research assistance. 1. “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965,” http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/ johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp. 2. United States, Amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for Other Purposes (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), http://www.lexisnexis. com/congcomp/getdoc?SERIAL-SET-ID=12662–5+S.rp.748; United States, Immigration and Nationality Act, Conference Report on Immigration and Nationality Act (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), http://www.lexisnexis.com/ congcomp/getdoc?SERIAL-SET-ID=11577+H.rp.2096. 3. Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 927; Edward M. Kennedy, “The Immigration Act of 1965,” Annals of the

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American Academy of Political and Social Science 367 (September 1, 1966): 137–49, doi:10.2307/1034851; Mae M. Ngai, “Oscar Handlin and Immigration Policy Reform in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of American Ethnic History 32, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 62–67. 4. Edward L. Ayers et al., American Anthem: Reconstruction to the Present (Orlando, FL: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2009), R15. 5. Campbell J. Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on the ForeignBorn Population of the United States: 1850–2000, Population Division Working Paper (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, February 2006), http://www.census.gov/ population/www/documentation/twps0081/twps0081.html; Elizabeth M. Grieco et al., The Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2010, American Community Survey Reports (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, May 2012). 6. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 7. See the useful summary of conversations about this in “Three Decades of Mass Immigration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Center for Immigration Studies, http://www.cis.org/1965ImmigrationAct-MassImmigration. 8. For refugees and immediate relatives see reports and yearbooks of the Immigration and Naturalization and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Services (INS Statistical Yearbooks). For estimates of undocumented immigration see Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (March 2012): 1–29, doi:10.1111/j.1728–4457.2012.00470.x. 9. George J. Sanchez, “Race, Nation, and Culture in Recent Immigration Studies,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 4 (July 1, 1999): 66–84, doi:10.2307/27502471; Nina Glick Schiller, “U.S. Immigrants and the Global Narrative,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 2 (1997): 404–8, doi:10.1525/aa.1997.99.2.404; Nina Glick Schiller, “Transnational Social Fields and Imperialism: Bringing a Theory of Power to Transnational Studies,” Anthropological Theory 5, no. 4 (December 1, 2005): 439–61, doi:10.1177/1463499605059231. 10. Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony, “1898, U.S. Militarism, and the Formation of Asian America,” Asian American Policy Review 19 (2010): 67–71; Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1348–91. 11. United States Navy, Bureau of Naval Personnel, Filipinos in the United States Navy, October 1976, http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/filipinos.htm; Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); INS, Statistical Yearbooks. 12. Choy, Empire of Care, 4. 13. See also Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 14. Madeline Y. Hsu, “The Disappearance of America’s Cold War Chinese Refugees, 1948–1966,” Journal of American Ethnic History 31, no. 4 (2012): 12–33. 15. Susan Zeiger, Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2010).

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16. Mae M. Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration during the Cold War Years,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 1 (October 1, 1998): 3–35; Hsu, “Disappearance.” 17. Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion”; Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 18. Pyong Gap Min, “The Immigration of Koreans to the United States: A Review of 45 Year (1965–2009) Trends,” Development and Society 40, no. 2 (December 2011): 195–223. 19. Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Silvia Pedraza, “Cuba’s Refugees: Manifold Migrations,” in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, ed. Silvia Pedraza and Rubén G. Rumbaut (Cengage Learning, 1996), 263–79; Nhi T. Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). For statistics on refugees after 1980 see annual ORR Reports to Congress, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/resource/annual-orr-reportsto-congress. 20. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 21. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 22. Susan Bibler Coutin, “Falling Outside: Excavating the History of Central American Asylum Seekers,” Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2011): 569–96, doi:10.1111/j.1747–4469.2011.01243.x; María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 23. See, for instance, George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 24. Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences.” Statistics are drawn from Immigration and Naturalization Service Annual Statistical Reports. 25. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Christopher Wilson, “Working Together: Economic Ties between the United States and Mexico,” Wilson Center, Mexico Institute, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/ working-together-economic-ties-between-the-united-states-and-mexico. 26. Jorge Durand, Douglas S. Massey, and Emilio A. Parrado, “The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (September 1, 1999): 518–36, doi:10.2307/2567043. 27. M. C. Madhavan, “Indian Emigrants: Numbers, Characteristics, and Economic Impact,” Population and Development Review 11, no. 3 (September 1, 1985): 457–81, doi:10.2307/1973248; Sharmila Rudrappa, “Cyber-Coolies and TechnoBraceros: Race and Commodification of Indian Information Technology Guest Workers in the United States,” University of San Francisco Law Review 44 (2009/2010): 353; Philip Kretsedemas, “The Limits of Control: Neo-Liberal Policy Priorities and the US Non-Immigrant Flow,” International Migration 50 (2012): e1–e18, doi:10.1111/ j.1468–2435.2011.00696.x.

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28. John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), xi, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015035331761; Ngai, “Oscar Handlin”; Ann Coulter, “America Plays Patsy in Immigration Drama,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, April 16, 2006. 11. President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Address

I would like to thank Marilyn Young, Carol Anderson, Barbara Keys, Sarah Snyder, and Brooke Blower for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. Inaugural Address of Jimmy Carter, January 20, 1977, http://www.jimmy carterlibrary.gov/documents/speeches/inaugadd.phtml. 2. James Wooten, “A Moralistic Speech,” New York Times, January 21, 1977, 1; James Reston, “A Revival Meeting,” New York Times, January 21, 1977, 18; Hedrick Smith, “A Call to the American Spirit,” New York Times, January 21, 1977, 1. 3. Jimmy Carter, White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 10. See also “Crowd Delighted as Carters Shun Limousine and Walk Home,” New York Times, January 21, 1977, 1. 4. Barbara Keys, “Kissinger, Congress and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 5 (November 2010): 823–51. 5. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 145. 6. American Public Opinion on Human Rights, May 1977. Retrieved August 6, 2013, from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.ezproxy.library. wisc.edu/data_access/ipoll/ipoll.html. 7. Anthony Lewis, “A Craving for Rights,” New York Times, January 31, 1977, 16; Carter, Keeping Faith, 143; Ronald Steel, “Where the Old Left Meets the New Left: Motherhood, Apple Pie, and Human Rights,” New Republic, June 4, 1977, 14. 8. Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1. Along with Keys, perspectives on the Carter-era turn to human rights that emphasize the domestic emerge in Sandy Vogelsang, American Dream, Global Nightmare: The Dilemma of U.S. Human Rights Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980); Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986); Joshua Muravchik, Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Press, 1986); David P. Forsythe, “Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect,” Political Science Quarterly 105, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 435–54; Burton I. Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Scott Kaufman, Plans Unraveled: The Foreign Policy of the Carter Administration (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 27–46; and Julian E. Zelizer, Jimmy Carter (New York: Times Books, 2010), 61–62. 9. Joe Aragon to Hamilton Jordan, White House memorandum, July 7, 1978, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 391, http://www.gwu. edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB391/. 10. Elizabeth Drew, “A Reporter at Large: Human Rights,” New Yorker, July 18, 1977, 36–61. It is revealing that the index to Jules Whitcover’s meticulous 684-page

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account of the 1976 presidential campaign, Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972–1976 (New York: Viking, 1977) has no entry for “human rights.” In one sign of how little popular attention was paid to human rights before 1977 in the United States, iPOLL contains only one survey question on human rights between 1960 and 1976 in its database, in which respondents expressed considerable reservations about how strongly the United States should put pressure on other countries about human rights; see Harris/CCFR Survey of American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1974, December 1974. By contrast, forty-one questions about human rights are in the database for 1977 to 1980, with the numbers of questions on the issue growing exponentially in subsequent decades. Retrieved August 6, 2013, from the iPOLL Databank, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/data_access/ ipoll/ipoll.html. 11. Transcript, “Debate between Jimmy Carter and President Gerald Ford on Foreign and Defense Issues,” October 6, 1976, http://millercenter.org/president/ speeches/detail/5538. 12. Jimmy Carter, Address at Commencement Exercises at the University of Notre Dame, May 22, 1977, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid= 7552. 13. The significance of the human rights moment of the 1940s has received differing treatments in Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), chap. 2. I explore its complexities in The United States and the Twentieth-Century Global Human Rights Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), chaps. 1–4. 14. Samuel Moyn, “From Antiwar Politics to Anti-Torture Politics,” in Law and War, ed. Douglas Lawrence and Sarah Austin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming); Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue, 58. 15. Jeri Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 74. 16. On the global explosion of human rights talk in the 1970s see The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Moyn, Last Utopia, chap. 4; James Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Stern J. Stern, “Witnessing and Awakening Chile: Testimonial Truth and Struggle, 1973–1977,” and “Digging In: Counterofficial Chile, 1979–82,” in his Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 81–136, 196–230; Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Emma Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Benjamin Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Volpin and the Idea of Rights under ‘Developed Socialism,’” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 630–63, and his “Soviet Rights Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),

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166–90. My thinking about human rights as guest language is influenced by Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), and Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon, ed. Carol Gluck and Ann Lowenhaupt Tsing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 17. Bernard Levin, “We Must Not Leave It to That Nice Mr. Brezhnev,” London Times, October 2, 1973, 16, cited in Robert Horvath, “‘The Solzhenitsyn Effect’: East European Dissidents and the Demise of Revolutionary Privilege,” Human Rights Quarterly 29, no. 4 (November 2007): 880. Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985) and Joshua Rubenstein’s Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), widely read activist accounts (Alexeyeva was a founding member of Moscow Helsinki Watch and later emigrated to the United States; Rubenstein was a regional director for Amnesty USA), helped reinforce the prevailing heroic American perspectives of the Soviet dissident movement. While their studies remain foundational, Benjamin Nathan’s forthcoming work on Soviet dissidents promises to offer a more critical historical perspective. 18. On Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet state see Michael Scammell, introduction to The Solzhenitsyn Files (Chicago: Edition Q, 1995), xvii–xxxv. 19. On the avalanche of U.S. press coverage on Solzhenitsyn’s exile from the Soviet Union see “7 Russians Make Forcible Arrest of Solzhenitsyn” and “Solzhenitsyn Exiled to West Germany,” New York Times, February 13 and 14, 1974. The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times ran similar front-page stories on February 14 and 15, 1974. ABC, NBC, and CBS news broadcasts devoted major coverage to Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and deportation on February 12, 13, and 14, 1974; Vanderbilt Television News Archive. 20. New York Post, April 12, 1976; Jesse Helms, “Honorary Citizenship for Solzhenitsyn,” East Europe, July 1974, 5; “Reagan’s Plank Criticizes Ford-Kissinger Policies, New York Times, August 17, 1976, 1, 48; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Solzhenitsyn We Refuse to See,” Washington Post, June 25, 1978, D1. The best short survey of Solzhenitsyn’s place in the American Cold War political imagination remains John D. Dunlop, “Solzhenitsyn’s Reception in the United States,” in Solzhenitsyn in Exile, ed. John B. Dunlop et al. (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 24–55; see also Kathleen Parthé, “The Politics of Détente-Era Cultural Texts, 1969–76,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 4 (September 2009), 723–33. 21. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), x, 4–5, 587. 22. Joshua Rubenstein, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” New Republic, June 22, 1974, 22. Gulag’s sales are chronicled in Edward E. Ericson Jr., introduction to Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, abridged ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), xi–xii. The initial visibility of Gulag was heightened by a series of excerpts that began to run in the New York Times on December 30, 1973. Among the feature reviews of volume one of Gulag that hailed it as a major political and cultural event were the New York Times Book Review, June 16, 1974, 1; Time, July 15, 1974, 90; Newsweek, July 1, 1974, 65; Saturday Review, April 20, 1974, 22; and New York Review of Books, March 12, 1974, 3.

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23. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag, 4–5; Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Two (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 383, 385. My reading of Gulag in this and the following paragraph is informed by Susan Richards, “The Gulag Archipelago as ‘Literary Document,’” in Dunlop et al., Solzhenitsyn in Exile, 145–63. 24. The classic formulation of the New Journalism appears in Wolfe, “The Birth of the New Journalism,” New York, February 14, 1972. 25. Hedrick Smith, “The Intolerable Andrei Sakharov: Ideological Bombshells from an Atomic Scientist,” New York Times Magazine, November 4, 1973. Smith’s characterizations of Sakharov were common throughout the 1970s. See, for instance, “Sakharov / Soviet Dissidents,” ABC Evening News, July 3, 1974; “Sakharov,” CBS Evening News, November 19, 1975; and Time magazine’s February 21, 1977, cover stories on the “painfully modest” Sakharov titled “Human Rights: Dissidents v. Moscow” and “Pilgrim of Conscience.” 26. “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” New York Times, July 22, 1968, 14. On reception see Jay Bergman, Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 135; Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov, eds., The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 1–2; and Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 288. 27. Andrei Sakharov, “Peace, Progress, Human Rights,” Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1975, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1975/sakharovlecture.html. 28. Andrei Sakharov, My Country and the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), iv, 108. 29. Sakharov to Carter, January 21, 1977, New York Times, January 29, 1977, 2; Carter to Sakharov, February 5, 1977, New York Times, January 18, 1977, 3. See also Rubenstein and Gribanov, KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, 222–24; and Sakharov, Memoir, 462–70. 30. “The Charter 77 Declaration,” New York Times, January 27, 1977, 16. On Havel see John Keane, Václav Havel, A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (New York: Basic Books, 2000), and Eda Kriseová, Václav Havel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). For the local particularities of human rights in 1970s Czechslovakia more generally, see Jonathan Bolton’s marvelous Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 31. “Department Comments on Subject of Human Rights in Czechoslovakia,” Department of State Bulletin, January 26, 1977, 154; “US Asserts Prague Violates Covenants about Human Rights,” New York Times, January 27, 1977, 1; “Prague’s War of Nerves,” Washington Post, January 22, 1977, A1; “Czechoslovakia / Human Rights Movement,” CBS Evening News, January 10, 1977, Vanderbilt Television News Archive. See also “Man in the News: A Thoroughly Politicized Czech Playwright,” New York Times, October 25, 1979, and “Portrait of a Playwright as an Enemy of the State,” New York Times, March 23, 1986, H1. 32. Havel provides an extended discussion of the concern with “legality” in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” originally written in 1977 and circulated in samizdat form; see Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 181–92. For a more critical perspective, see Bolton, Worlds of Dissent, 220–38.

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33. The Plastic People and their significance for Charter 77 are best approached through Bolton, chap. 4. See also Václav Havel, “The Trial (October 1976),” in Open Letters, 102–8; The Plastic People of the Universe (Jana Chytilová, dir., 2001); Richie Unterberger, Underground Legends of Rock ’n’ Roll (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1998), 190–96; and Tom Stoppard, Rock ’n’ Roll (London: Faber and Faber, 2007). On the broader rise and significance of a global counterculture in the 1960s see contributors to the “AHR Forum: The International, 1968,” parts 1 and 2, American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (February 2009): 42–135, and vol. 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–404, and to Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe from 1957 to the Present, ed. Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012). 34. “Stage: Havel’s Private View Opens,” New York Times, November 21, 1983, C16; John Simon, “Farcical Worlds,” New York, December 5, 1983, 149–50. See also New Yorker, December 5, 1983, 183; New Leader, December 26, 1983, 16–17; and New Republic, March12, 1984, 27–29. The most complete production histories of Havel’s plays are in Helena Albertová’s “A List of Theatrical Productions of the Plays of Václav Havel,” in Václav Havel: A Citizen and a Playwright (Prague: Divadelní ústav, 1999). On theater of the absurd and Havel see Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), and Carol Rocamora, Acts of Courage:Václav Havel’s Life in the Theater (Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2004). 35. Václav Havel, Protest, in The Garden Party and Other Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 262; New York Times, November 21, 1983, C16. 36. Daily newspapers including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor offered featured reviews of collections of Havel’s political writings beginning in the mid-1980s, as did periodicals such as the Economist, National Review, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. My discussion here is informed by a penetrating, and rare, analysis of Havel’s work that explores the overlapping concerns of his plays and political writing: D. Christopher Brooks, “The Art of the Political: Havel’s Dramatic Literature as Political Theory,” East European Quarterly 39, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 491–521. 37. Havel, “Power of the Powerless,” 132, 134, 135, 136, 143, 146. 38. Ibid., 147, 150, 166, 161, 192, 194, 134. 39. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 40, 17. See also Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 122–74. 40. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009), 190. On 1970s therapeutic sensibilities, individualism, and identity politics see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 78–101; Douglas Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 335–46; and Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, August 23, 1976, 26–40.

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41. If Soviet and Eastern European dissidents occupied one crucial element of 1970s American human rights consciousness, the victims of human rights abuses in the Americas provided the other. In the print media, along with art, music, and literature, their testimonials powerfully shaped an American individualistic understanding of human rights. See Bradley, United States, chap. 6. 42. “Battle over Gay Rights,” Newsweek, June 6, 1977; Jocelyn Olcott, “Globalizing Sisterhood: International Women’s Year and the Politics of Representation,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 281–93. The only major exception were Native Americans, who increasingly framed challenges to tribal sovereignty, self-government, and cultural autonomy by the American state in the language of collective self-determination that was at the center of the human rights vocabulary of the decolonizing global South and of other indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world; see Brad Simpson, “The United States and the Curious History of SelfDetermination,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (2012): 691–93, and Daniel Cobb, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). Conclusion

1. Peter Brown, “A Dark Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclast Controversy,” English Historical Review 88, no. 346 (January 1973): 7. 2. Kevin Sharp, “Whistler’s Mother on Tour in America, 1932–4,” in Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon, ed. Margaret F. MacDonald (Aldershot, UK: Lund Humphries, 2003). 3. Margaret F. MacDonald, “The Painting of Whistler’s Mother,” in MacDonald, Whistler’s Mother. 4. Karal Ann Marling, Norman Rockwell (New York: Harry W. Abrams, 1997); Laura Claridge, A Life of Norman Rockwell (New York: Random House, 2001). 5. Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty (New York: Penguin, 1986); Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Yasmin Sabina Khan, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Albert Berenson, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 6. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Lady and the Huddled Masses: The Statue of Liberty as a Symbol of Immigration,” in The Statue of Liberty Revisited, ed. Wilton S. Dillon and Neil G. Kotler (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

Contributors

BROOKE L. BLOWER is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. She is the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (2011), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize and the James P. Hanlan Book Award. She is currently writing a book about the “hidden fronts” of World War II. Research related to this project has been published in Diplomatic History and the American Historical Review.

is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of International History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies; Vietnam at War (2009); and is the coeditor of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008) and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley is currently completing a book that explores the place of the United States in the twentieth century global human rights imagination and serves as a coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series The United States in the World. MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

is Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States–Philippine Relations (1994), Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala (2006), and The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (2010), which won the Ellis W. Hawley and Robert H. Ferrell book prizes. He is currently researching the early history of the CIA and the contradictions between American commitments to pluralism and the centralization of intelligence.

NICK CULLATHER

BRIAN DELAY is Associate Professor of History at the University of

California– Berkeley. He is the author of the multiple-prize-winning War of a Thousand Deaths: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (2008). He is currently working on a new project titled Shoot the State: Arms, Business, and Freedom in the Americas before Gun Control.

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CO N T R I B U TO R S

MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL is Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University. He is the author, most recently, of Seeing Race in Modern America (2013) and Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (2014). JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF

is Associate Professor of American Culture and History as well as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. He is the author of A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (2008). His current work explores the problem of color in colonial and postcolonial Puerto Rico.

is the Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of History and Vice Provost for International Affairs at Cornell University. He is the author of three books that explore the histories of the Vietnam War and the Cold War: Choosing War (1999), which received the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, among other prizes; America’s Cold War, coauthored with Campbell Craig (2008); and most recently Embers of War (2012), which received the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize, among other awards.

FREDRIK LOGEVALL

MARY A. RENDA

is Associate Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of the multiple-award-winning Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (2001). Her recent essays may be found in the anthology Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and American Empire, 1812–1938 (2010) and in the Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories (2012). Her current work examines the relation of Mary Lyon and women’s higher education to the history of U.S. empire building for a book project titled “Empire and the Promises of Sovereignty.”

DANIEL T. RODGERS is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of four prize-winning books, including The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (1978), Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics (1987), and Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998). His most recent book, Age of Fracture (2011), a history of social ideas and arguments in America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, was awarded the Bancroft Prize. ANDREW J. ROTTER

is Charles Dana Professor of History at Colgate University. He is author of Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (2009). He is now at work on a book on the five senses and two empires: the British in India, and the American in the Philippines.

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is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is the author of With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (2014) and has published in Diplomatic History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

BRIAN ROULEAU

NAOKO SHIBUSAWA is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at

Brown University. She is the author of America’s Geisha Ally: Re-Imagining the Japanese Enemy (2006). Her current book project explores the orientalism in Cold War homophobia and seeks to understand why sexual practices became important to national security in the 1940s and 1950s.

Index

abolitionists, 30–31 Academy Award nominations, 118 Acheson, Dean, 108 Africa, 37, 39, 49, 61–62, 67, 92, 103, 120, 123–125, 127, 130; African dialect, 23; colonization of, 92–93 African Americans, 59, 61, 63–66, 69, 119, 185 n 36; representations of, 64, 67, 171 n 5 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 48, 51 AIDS, 102–103 Akosombo dam, 121 Alger, Horatio, 64 American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, 39 American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), 113 American Gothic (painting), ix, 2, 1–5, 7, 148 American Revolution, 6, 14, 16, 18, 43 American War Mothers, 156 Amherst College, 36 Amnesty International, 143, 145 Anchors Aweigh (film), 74, 86 Anderson, Warick, 54 Anschluss, 79 anticommunism, 107 Antoinette, Marie, 38 Apple Inc., 165 Argentina, 93, 154; Argentinisches Tageblatt, 93 Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (painting), 156–157 Associated Press, 71, 93 Atlantic world, 6, 8–9, 18 atomic age, 80, 91 atomic bomb, 70, 91, 99 Auken, Kirsten, 94 Auschwitz, 79 Australia, 92, 121; Australians, 75 Austria, 79, 94 AWOL, 78

bananas, 8, 62, 66–69, 135 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 160, 163 Bay of Pigs, 134 Beat writers, 77 Becket, Samuel, 151 Beecher, Catharine, 35, 38 Bellow, Saul, 151 Bender, Thomas, 5 Bergdorf Goodman, 118 Bergman, Ingrid, 116 Berman, Marshall, 73 black Atlantic, 59, 64 black nationalism, 32 blackface. See minstrelsy Blum, Robert, 107 Bogart, Humphrey, 118 Bono, 124 Borlaug, Norman, 123 Boston, 12, 14, 18–20, 85, 107 Boston Fruit, 66 Boston Globe, 85, 198 n 19, 200 n 36 Boston Herald, 85 Boston Tea Party, 19, 170 n 19 Bracero Program, 130, 136 Brazil, 145, 154 Breaking Bad (TV show), 1 Brent, Bishop Charles Henry, 52, 57 Brezhnev, Leonid, 146 Broadway Journal, 25 Brooklyn, 90, 95 Brooklyn museum, 45 Brooklyn Navy Yard, 77 Brown, Peter, 155 Brown, William Wells, 30 Bruce, David, 108 Burdick, Eugene, 122; The Ugly American, 122–123 Bushman, Richard and Claudia, 57

Bailey, Beth, 75 Baker, Jean-Claude, 62 Baker, Josephine, 5, 7, 59–69, 162–163 Balbriggan underwear, 46, 47, 57 banana skirt, 5, 59–64, 66, 68–69, 162–163

California, 24, 27–28, 76, 130, 138 capitalism, 8, 26–27, 91, 97–98, 100–101, 103, 133, 149, 163 Capote, Truman, 148; In Cold Blood, 148 Carnegie, Andrew, 66 207

208

INDEX

Carter, Jimmy, 5, 7, 141, 142, 143–145, 150–151, 153–154, 162 Castles, Stephen, 137 Cedar Rapids, 4 Chapman, Eric, 65 Charter 77, 150–152, 200 n 33 Chauncey, George, 77 Chicago, 85, 87, 144; Century of Progress Fair (1933), 1; World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 42 Chicago Sun-Times, 110 Chicago Tribune, 85, 198 n 19, 200 n 36 Child’s Restaurant, 70 Chile, 142, 144–145, 154, 189 n 23 China, 129, 132, 139, 182 n 9; China market, 49; China Post, 91; Chinese Revolution, 120; immigrant-sending country, 131–133; People’s Republic of China, 131, 189 n 42 Chinatowns, 131 Chinese Exclusion Act (1943), 132 Chiquita, 68 Christianity, 39, 43–44, 49, 99, 103, 155, 164; Christian civilization, 41, 90, 101; education, 38; transnational engagements, 39, 45, 163; U.S. as a Christian nation, 40, 101 Christy, E. P., 24, 30 Cincinnati, 23, 46, 178 n 1 civil rights, 92, 150, 154, 168; civil rights movement, 6, 65, 126, 154, 157 Civil War, American, 6, 30, 42, 48, 161, 168 n 11 civilization, 43, 49, 51, 58, 64, 119, 178 n 6; Christian civilization, 41, 90, 101 Classen, Constance, 50 Cleveland, Harlan, 122 Coca-Cola, 165 Cold War, 6, 92, 109, 120, 129–131, 133, 140–141, 144, 146, 149–150, 162; immigration, 131–136; refugee policy, 133–135 Colin, Paul, 62, 64, 69; Le Tumulte Noir (lithograph), 60 colonialism, 102, 107–109, 114, 131. See also empire Columbia County Historical Society, 45 Columbia Pictures, 119 Columbia University, 65 Commentary, 143 communication networks, 27–28, 52, 92–93, 172 n 10 communism, 107–108, 114, 120, 135 Communist International, 98

Communist Manifesto, 27 Communist Party, 68, 132 Communists, 98, 106, 108, 111–112, 125, 133–134, 151 Conger, Emily, 57 Cook, James, 39 Cooke, Alistair, 75 Cooper, Frederick, 7, 168 n 11 Cooper, James Fenimore, 182 n 13 Coors Light, 1 Copley, John Singleton, 5–6, 8–16, 18–20, 162, 170 n 8, 170 n 19; biography, 12–13; Boston Tea Party and, 19, 170 n 19; escape to London, 19; Watson and the Shark (painting), 10 Cream of Wheat, 67 Cuba, 15–17, 41, 48, 103, 128, 129, 130, 133–135 Currier and Ives, 3; James Ives, 40; Nathaniel Currier, 40–41, 41 Czechoslovakia and Czechs, 150–152, 154, 199 n 30; exiles and dissidents, 162 Daughters of the American Revolution, 43–44 Day, Doris, 5, 7, 116, 117, 118, 124, 162 decolonization, 6, 91, 120, 138, 144, 201 n 42 Delany, Martin, 31–32 demobilization, 73–74 Democrat, The, 170 n 23 Democratic Party, 30, 90, 161 détente, 146 Devins, John Patrick, 51, 53 Dewey, George, 48 DeYoung, Brian, 1; The Heisenbergs (painting), 1 Diem, Ngo Dinh, 113–114 dirigisme, 123 disease, 39, 51, 53–56, 58, 103, 120, 184 n 28 Dominican Republic, 129, 134–135; U.S. intervention, 135 domino theory, 108 Dulles, John Foster, 97–98 Duning, George, 116 Dwight, John, 29 East India Company, 18–19 Eastern Telegraph Company, 93 Economist, The, 121, 200 n 36 economists, 119–120, 122–124 Edwards, Anna, 43 Egypt, 43, 120, 160; Egyptian cotton, 47; Egyptian Gazette, 89

INDEX Eiffel, Gustave, 160 Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 5, 7, 71–75, 77, 78–84, 82, 86–87 El Salvador, 135 empire, 6, 14–15, 17, 39–40, 47, 49–51, 59–61, 66–67, 69, 108, 114, 120, 163–164; British, 15, 17, 108; cultural imperialism, 32; evangelical imperialism, 163; French, 61, 69; Japanese, 120; Ottoman, 102; Roman, 99; Spanish, 17; U.S., 66, 130. See also colonialism, decolonization Empire State Building, 156 Enlightenment, 25, 38, 101–102, 120, 164 Ethiopian Serenaders, 22 evangelicalism, 38, 39, 163. See also Christianity Evans, R. Tripp, 3–4 Fancy Free (ballet), 74 Farber, David, 75 Fischer, David Hackett, 87 Fleet’s In, The, (film), 74 Folies Bergère, 59 folk heroes, 155 folk music, 171 n 5 folktales, 62, 64 Food and Agriculture Organization, 121 Forbes, William Cameron, 52 Ford, Gerald, 144–146 Ford Foundation, 119 Fortune, 1 Foster, Stephen, 5, 23–32, 171 n 5 Four Freedoms, 164 France, 3, 6, 13–14, 26, 37, 45, 58, 61, 63, 65, 68–69, 76, 93, 104, 107–108, 161; French advertisements, 67; French servicemen, 75, 79, 108; French war in Vietnam, 106–109, 114–115; Frenchwomen, 76. See also Paris Franco-Prussian War, 106, 161 French Indochina, 61, 104, 107–109, 115, 128, 134. See also Vietnam Freud, Sigmund, 91 Frost, Robert, 156 G-8 summit, 124 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 122 Galdorisi, George, 72, 80 Galt, Rosalind, 62 Garvey, Marcus, 66 gay rights movement, 154 Geldof, Bob, 124 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 137

209

germ theory, 53–54 Germany, 3, 32, 49, 74, 93–94, 97, 120, 182 n 9, 189 n 23; Germans, 29, 32, 71, 75, 93, 120, 162; Prussia, 26 Gilroy, Paul, 60, 64 Girl in the Café, The, (film), 124 globalization, 139 Gold Dust Twins, 67 Gold Rush, 24, 29, 173–4 n 14 Golden Globes, 118 Good Morning America (TV show), 63 Grant, Cary, 7, 116, 117, 121, 124, 163 Grant, Zilpah, 35, 38 Great Britain, 6, 13, 15–18, 28, 94, 161; British colonies, 12, 17, 92–93, 120, 130, 138; British colonists, 39, 52, 56, 108, 130; British soldiers, 47, 75, 79; British traits and characters, 14, 96, 106, 110, 124, 164; British writers and critics, 5, 93, 96–97, 110–111. See also London Great Depression, 2, 4, 6, 65, 77, 136, 157, 174 n 9 Great Society, 119 Greatest Generation, 72 Green Revolution, 123 Greene, Graham, 5, 6, 7, 104–115, 164; antiamericanism, 106, 109–110, 164; The End of the Affair, 106, 107; influence of European colonialism, 108–109; The Name of Action, 109; Ways of Escape, 112 Guatemala, 135–136 Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner (film), 119 Gullion, Edmund, 107 Halberstam, David, 104, 114 Haldane, J. B. S., 93, 94 Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 36, 41–44 Hanoi, 108, 164 Hariman, Robert, 73, 80 Harlem Renaissance, 65 Harrison, Francis, 57 Harvard University, 90, 102, 112, 124 Havana, 11–15, 17, 132, 162 Havel, Václav, 145–146, 150–153, 199 n 32, 200 n 36; his plays, 151–152; “The Power of the Powerless,” 152–153, 199 n 32; Protest, 152 Hawaii, 39–41, 75, 93, 130, 163, 186 n 41 Heath, Donald, 108 Heller, Louis B., 90 Helms, Jesse, 146 Helsinki Accords, 144–145, 150

210

INDEX

Hepburn, Audrey, 118 Hepburn, Katharine, 119 Herder, Johann, 25 heteronormativity, 98 Hill, Daniel Delis, 47 Hitchcock, Edward, 36 Hitchcock, Orra White, 39 Ho Chi Minh, 104, 106, 108 Hochstetter, Leo, 107 Hoffman, Paul, 119 Hoganson, Kristin, 48 Hollywood, 74, 76, 89, 96, 112–113, 116, 119, 124 Hughes, Emmet John, 107 Hughes, Langston, 63, 65 human rights, 7, 102, 141, 142, 142–154, 162, 164, 197–198 n 10, 197 n 13, 201 nn 41–42 Human Rights Watch, 145 Immigration Reform Act (1965), 7, 125, 126, 139, 164 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) (1986), 128, 138 Imperial British East Africa Company, 92 India, 28, 37, 39, 47, 50, 56, 93, 102, 119, 121–122, 129, 136, 138–139, 189 n 23; Green Revolution, 123; immigration to the U.S. 138–139 Indian Statistical Institute, 93 Indiana University, Bloomington, 89 Institute for Sex Research, 91, 97 Ionesco, Eugène, 151 Irving, Washington, 45 Israel, 93–94, 97; Davar, 93 Italy, 45, 79, 96; Italian Renaissance, 42, 160. See also Rome Ives, James, 40 Iwo Jima, 70 Jackson, Sir Robert, 121, 123 Japan, 28, 30, 49, 70, 74, 79, 92, 94, 102–103, 120, 123, 132, 188 n 16, 189 n 23; Meiji Restoration, 102–103 Jim Crow, 24, 28, 59, 63–64 Johannesburg Star, 93 John Shillito Company, 46–47 Johnson, Lyndon B., 114–115, 119, 122, 125, 126 Judson, Adoniram, 39 Judson, Ann, 39 Kelly, Gene, 86 Kelly, Grace, 116

Kennard, James, 29 Kennedy, John F., 114, 120–122, 134, 139, 191 n 16; A Nation of Immigrants, 139–140 Kennedy, Ted (Edward), 140 Kenya, 92, 124 Kerouac, Jack, 77 KGB, 146 Kimmelman, Michael, 72 King and I, The, (film), 118 Kinsey, Alfred, 78, 88–92, 99, 100, 103 Kinsey, Clara “Mac,” 92 Kinsey Institute, 91–92, 188 n 17 Kinsey Reports, 5, 7, 88, 89, 91–93, 96, 98–99, 162; 164; criticism, 94–97, 101; praise, 93–94 Kissinger, Henry, 143 Knickerbocker Magazine, 24 Knowles, Beyoncé, 63 Knox, Frank, 79 Korea, 108, 123, 129, 133–134, 138–139, 145; Korean immigration, 133; Korean War, 130, 133 Kramer, Stanley, 119 La Revue Nègre, 64 Laber, Jeri, 144–145 Lady Gaga, 165 Lange, Dorothea, 8 Lansdale, Edward, 113 Lapeer, William, 55 Lawrence, Amos, 36 Lawton, Henry, 51, 113 Lazarus, Emma, 161 Lederer, William, 122; The Ugly American, 122–123 Leica Camera, 71 Lewis, Anthony, 142 Lewis, Sir W. Arthur, 121, 123 liberty ports, 74–75, 77 Life, 72–73, 75, 84–87, 107–108, 182 nn 9–10, 186 n 41 Lincoln Memorial, 156 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 53 London, 12–16, 18–20, 28, 66, 76, 87, 157; Christ’s Hospital, 17; Lloyd’s of London, 19; London Times, 112; Stock Exchange, 93 Loren, Sophia, 116 Lover Come Back (film), 116 Loving v.Virginia, 119 Lucaites, John, 73 Luce, Henry, 107 Lyon, Mary, 33, 34, 35–45, 163

INDEX MacArthur, Arthur, 53 Macdonald, Dwight, 117 MacDonald, Kelly, 124 Mad Men (TV show), 117 Madison Square Garden, 42 Magnificent Seven, The, (film), 118 Malaya, 107–108 Mangone, Gerard, 122 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 112, 113 Mansfield, Jayne, 116 Mansfield, Mike, 113–114 Marshall Plan, 119 McCarthy, Joseph, 98; McCarthyism, 109 McKinley, William, 48 McNamara, Robert, 121 Mendonsa, George, 70–71, 80, 86, 185 n 36 Mexico, 123, 129–130, 136–140; immigration to U.S., 136–138 Michelangelo, 158–159; Prophet Isaiah (painting), 158, 159 Migrant Mother (photograph), 8 Miller, Arthur, 151 Miller, Arthur L., 98 Miller, Mark J., 137 minstrelsy, 23–31, 28, 62, 69, 162, 163, 171 n 5, 172 nn 9-10, 172 n 13 Monroe, Marilyn, 116–117 Montreal, 37 More, Hannah, 38 Mosse, George L., 100 Mother’s Day, 156 Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, College, 5, 7, 33–36, 38, 40, 41, 42–45, 163 My Lai massacre, 144 Myrdal, Gunnar, 121, 123 National Security Council, 120 Native Americans, 15, 37, 201 n 42 Naval Shore Patrol, 76, 78 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 119, 122 Neiman, LeRoy, 76–77 neoliberalism, 124 Neue Sachlichkeit art, 3 New Deal, 6 New England’s Evangelical Ministerial Brotherhood, 39 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 124 New Journalism, 148 New Republic, 143 New York, 24–25, 30, 45, 63, 65, 67, 70, 73–80, 84, 86–87, 152, 156, 164 New York Review, 143 New York Times, 72, 110, 142–144

211

New York University, 41 New York World, 55, 161 New Yorker, 1, 110 Nicaragua, 129, 135 Nightingale, Florence, 38 Nixon, Richard, 141–143 Nobel Prize, 121, 123, 146, 149–150 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 137 “Oh! Susanna” (song), ix, 5, 7, 21–32, 22, 160–163 Ohio River, 23, 26–27 Okinawa, 45, 70, 74, 186 n 41 On the Town (film), 74 Oppenheimer, Robert, 149 Orr, Sir John Boyd, 121 Orwell, George, 50 Pajama Game, The, (film), 116 Pakistan, 89; The Dawn, 89 Panama, 28, 30, 66, 129, 130 Panic of 1837, 27 Paris, 12, 59, 61–65, 67, 69, 76, 87, 108, 146, 157; Exposition Coloniale Internationale (1931), 61; Paris Bourse, 93; Paris Match, 108; Saigon as the “Paris of the East,” 108 Pasha, Isma-il, 160 Patton, George S., 76 Payne, Robert, 121; The Revolt of Asia, 121 Peace Corps, 123 Pennsylvania Station (New York), 80, 82 People’s Republic of China. See China Pérez, Louis, 6 Perry, Matthew C., 28, 30, 172 n 12, 173 n 16 Persia, 37, 43 Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exhibition (1876), 42 Philippines and Filipinos, 41, 46–49, 51–58, 87, 90, 129–135, 189 n 23; annexation by U.S., 48–49; Culion Island, 56; emigrants, 129–131; Philippine-American War, 48–49; sanitation, 53–55, 57 Pillow Talk (film), 116 Pittsburgh, 23–24, 27, 31, 171 n 5 Plastic People of the Universe, 151, 200 n 33 Plessy, Homer, 50 PM, 84 Poitier, Sidney, 119 polka, 25–26, 162–163, 172 n 8 Pope Paul VI, 121 Popular Front, 5, 68 Port Moresby, 75, 79 poverty, 1, 8, 50, 63–64, 117, 120

212

INDEX

Prada, 62 Prague, 152 Prohibition, 77 Puerto Rico, 130, 135 Pulitzer, Joseph, 161 Quiet American, The (film), 112, 113 Quiet American, The (novel), 5, 7, 104, 105, 106, 109–110, 112, 114–115, 164 race, 31, 36, 42–44, 50, 66, 68, 119, 121, 126–127, 176 n 45 racism, 1, 60, 64–65 Radio City Music Hall, 70, 118 Radio Moscow, 97 Ramparts, 124 Reagan, Ronald, 124, 132, 138, 146 Reed, Ishmael, 63 Rembrandt, 160; Man in a Golden Helmet (painting), 160 republican motherhood, 38 Republican Party, 48, 98, 146, 161 Revolutions of 1848, 26 Reynolds, Debbie, 117 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth, 23 Robbins, Jerome, 74, 77–78; Fancy Free (ballet), 74; On the Town (musical), 74 Roberts, Mary Louise, 75 rock ’n’ roll, 22–23, 151 Rockefeller Foundation, 91, 97, 122–123 Rockwell, Norman, 157, 159–161, 163; The Problem We All Live With, 157; Rosie the Riveter, 157, 159; Shuffleton’s Barbershop, 160; Southern Justice, 157; Triple SelfPortrait, 160 Rodgers, Daniel T., 7, 153, 168 n 12 Rome, 12, 37, 109 Rosecliff Mansion, 42 Ross, Diana, 63 Ross, Sir Ronald, 54 Rusk, Dean, 119 Russian revolution, 90 Sabrina (film), 118 Saigon, 104, 106, 108, 112, 114, 124, 132 sailors, 15, 28, 45, 70, 71, 75, 77–80, 82, 83, 84–85; as icons, 74, 86, 182 n 13 Sakharov, Andrei, 145–146, 148–150, 153; My Country and the World, 150 Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (film), 124 San Francisco, 43, 70, 75, 85 San Francisco Chronicle, 85 Sandusky, Ohio, 118, 123 Sandwich Islands, 37

Saturday Evening Post, 157 Scott, Paul, 121; The Jewel in the Crown, 121 Scott, Sir Walter, 23 Sears, Roebuck & Co., 3, 47 Seven Years’ War, 13, 15–16 Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, 88. See also Kinsey Reports Sexual Behavior of the Human Male, 88, 95. See also Kinsey Reports Shain, Edith, 84 Shanghai, 30, 93 Shapiro, Stanley, 117–118 Shaw, Albert, 2 Shepard, Helen Gould, 41, 43, 176 n 37, 177 n 48 Sistine Chapel, 158–159 Slocum, Harvey, 134 Smith, Adam, 101 Smith, Gibson Guy, 119 Smith, Hedrick, 148–149 Smith, James M., 52 Smith, Mark M., 49 Smith, Rebecca, 44 smuggling, 17–18 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 144–148, 150–151, 153; Cancer Ward, 146; First Circle, 146; The Gulag Archipelago, 146–148; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 146 South Africa, 90, 93–94, 96 Soviet Union, 120, 129, 132, 134, 144–146, 149–150, 154, 189 n 42; 1956 Aid Offensive, 120; Soviet dissidents, 198 n 17, 201 n 41; Soviet hydrogen bomb, 88, 149; Stalinism, 108, 149; Soviet Writers Union, 146 Spain, 17–18, 41, 48–49, 109 Spanish-American War, 41, 48, 129–130, 134 Spivak, Gayatri, 62 St. Louis, 63, 69; 1917 riot, 63 Staël, Madame de, 38 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 45 Statue of Liberty, 125, 160–161, 163 Suez Canal, 160 Sylvester, Ida Pond, 42–43 Taft, William Howard, 5–6, 46–49, 51, 53, 57, 58, 163 Taylor, Bayard, 24, 28 Taylor, Elizabeth, 117 Teller, Edward, 149 Thackeray, William, 29 That Touch of Mink (film), 7, 116, 117, 118, 123–124

INDEX Thayer, William Makepeace, 36–38, 42 theater of the absurd, 151, 200 n 34 Third World, 118, 121, 124, 127, 140; in films, 118–119 Thompson, Hunter, 148; Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 148 Thurston, Persis, 40 Time, 107, 148–149 Times Square, 5, 7, 8, 70–75, 77–79, 81–84, 86–87, 162, 164, 184 n 28 Tokyo, 28, 93, 94 Tracy, Spencer, 119 Trujillo, Rafael, 134 Truman, Harry, 108 Tubman, Harriet, 30 Tucker, Sophie, 86 Tunnel of Love, The (film), 116 Twain, Mark; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (novel), 8 Twentieth Century-Fox, 116 Tyrrell, Ian, 29 Ugly American, The, 122–123 United Fruit Company, 66, 68, 135 United Nations, 121 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 122, 144, 164 Universal Studios, 116 Updike, John, 117 U.S. Congress, 53, 90, 95, 102, 107, 114, 120, 125, 131–132, 139–140 U.S. Marines, 76, 85, 135 U.S. Navy, 78, 130; Secretary of the Navy, 79 U.S. Philippine Commission, 46, 48, 54 USS Lyon, 45 USS Susan B. Anthony, 45 USS The Sullivan’s, 70 V-E Day, 78 Van Buren, Martin, 45 Velvet Revolution, 151 Velvet Underground, 151 Verria, Lawrence, 72, 80 Viet Minh, 106–108, 111 Vietnam, 104, 106–109, 111–115, 128–130, 133–134, 141–142, 144; Kennedy in Vietnam, 191n16; Vietnam War, 72, 106, 130, 134, 143, 144; Vietnamese nationalists, 164 V-J Day, 72–73, 82–86, 162, 164 V-J Day, 1945, Times Square (photograph), 5, 7, 71, 81

213

Vogue, 47 Volk, 5, 25 Vonnegut, Kurt, 151 war brides, 184n28, 186n41 Ward, Barbara, 121–123 Warner, Susan, 45; The Wide, Wide World, 45 Warner Brothers, 116 Washington, Martha, 37, 43, 44 Washington Post, 84, 198n19, 200n36 Washington Square Arch, 42 Watergate, 141, 143 Watson, Brook, 11, 13–20, 169 n 3, 170 n 13, 170 n 23 Watson, Ella, 1 Watson and the Shark (painting), 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19–20, 162 Wells, Herman B., 91 West, Benjamin, 13, 15–16; Death of General Wolfe (painting), 13, 15 West, Richard, 111–112 Westbrook, Robert, 73, 86 Western Union, 93 Whistler, James McNeill, 156–157 White, Stanford, 42 Whitman, Walt, 25 Wilde, Oscar, 157 Wilder, Billy, 118 Willard, Emma, 35 Wilson, Julie, 89 Wolfe, Tom, 153 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 38, 45 Wood, Grant, ix, 1–5, 7, 148; American Gothic (painting), 2; Stone City, Iowa (painting), 4 World Bank, 122–124 World Health Organization, 119 World War I, 66, 71, 83, 156 World War II, 1, 45, 72, 77, 98, 120, 123, 130, 134, 144, 164; aftermath, 96, 137, 182n9; aggression against women during, 74–75, 86–87; in American memory, 182n4; “the good war,” 72–73, 185 n31. See also V-E Day, V-J Day world’s fairs. See individual cities Wright, Fannie, 38, 45 Young Women’s Christian Association, 41 Zappa, Frank, 151 Ziegfeld Follies, 68 Zimmer, Greta, 79–80, 86 zoot suits, 77