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What is American literature? What are the distinctive voices and styles in American literature? How do social and political issues influence the American canon?
Video Comprehension Questions: What changes in literary style are discussed in the video? Why did some Jewish American critics condemn Philip Roth’s novels as anti-Semitic while Ellison was charged with not “being black enough”? Why is N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain hard to classify?
Context Questions: What traditions influenced each of these writers? How are these writers’ ethnic traditions reflected in what and how they write?
Exploratory Questions: Ellison’s Invisible Man has been hailed as a classic novel of American literature. What makes a piece of literature a classic?
How are American myths created, challenged, and reimagined through this literature?
Video Comprehension Questions: How is the concept of “the American Dream” challenged in this unit? Why do so many people still think of the 1950s and 1960s as a wonderful, peaceful time, as envisioned in sitcoms like Happy Days or movies like American Graffiti? Who is excluded from these scenarios?
Context Questions: Ellison, Roth, and Momaday explore the role of minority Americans in the armed forces, particularly in World War II. How does this war inform the construction of the American hero during the 1950s and 1960s?
Exploratory Questions: What American myths do you associate with the 1950s and 1960s? Some possibilities might be the idyllic imaginary world that television provided in programs like Leave It to Beaver or My Three Sons. Others might include the notions that “popularity leads to success in life,” that “good always wins and evil always loses,” or that “everyone has a fair chance at success if they just try hard.” How do these myths relate to the authors and events covered in the video?
What is an American? How does literature create conceptions of the American experience and American identity?
Video Comprehension Questions: How do Roth, Ellison, and Momaday define America or Americans? Why does the Invisible Man leave the South? What is he looking for, and what does he find when he arrives in 1930s New York City? What does N. Scott Momaday mean when he describes his childhood as a “Pan-Indian experience”?
Context Questions: How do the themes and styles of these writers reflect economic, cultural, and political changes in American culture in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? Consider changes occurring with the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the social rebellion sparked by the Vietnam War that extended to the needs of women, gay and lesbian Americans, and members of other minority groups..
Exploratory Questions: Ellison, Roth, and Momaday use ethnic stereotypes. When is using stereotypes useful and when is it not?
“How can I get my students to think?” is a question asked by many faculty, regardless of their disciplines. Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method that challenges students to “learn to learn,” working cooperatively in groups to seek solutions to real world problems. These problems are used to engage students’ curiosity and initiate learning the subject matter. PBL prepares students to think critically and analytically, and to find and use appropriate learning resources.” — Barbara Duch, University of Delaware
These diverse veterans of World War II had hoped that their loyalty and service to the country might demonstrate that the stereotypical and racist attitudes held by many white Americans were unfair and undeserved. As with the war years, the decades beyond the war continued to be a time of segregation and discrimination in the United States. It took a threatened coordinated march on Washington and other major cities by African Americans in June 1941 before Franklin Roosevelt would issue Executive Order 8802, mandating full and equitable participation in defense industries, without discrimination due to race, creed, color, or national origin. This order was, however, rarely enforced over the next few years. Even after the United States entered the war, the War Department refused to integrate military units “on the grounds that it would undermine the morale of white soldiers” (Oxford Companion to World War II 5). African Americans who did enlist early during the war were mostly forced into servile support roles in both the army and the navy. The Army Air Corps resisted accepting African Americans until compelled to do so. Eventually, the 99th Fighter Squadron, an African American unit based in Tuskegee, Alabama, would go on to gain fame in the Mediterranean. Many other such units and individuals distinguished themselves in service to their country. By the war’s end in 1945, great gains had been made in increased service and command opportunities for soldiers of color.
After the war was over, many minority veterans returned to the United States with expectations of social and cultural change, yet in instance after instance they encountered heavy resistance from whites who were determined to return race relations to a prewar state. Just as most of the women who worked in factories during the war were expected to give up their jobs and return to the home, African American workers were also expected to leave industrial jobs that had previously been held by whites who had gone off to war. Fights and riots related to these issues broke out in Detroit, New York, Mobile, and other cities and towns in the United States. Still, by the late 1940s, African Americans had, by working in industry, government, and military positions, made great strides economically, forming the beginnings of a black middle class. Also, in moving to northern, midwestern, and western urban areas to seek better jobs, they left many of the restrictions and the racist culture of the Jim Crow South behind. Many of these themes are seen in the works of Ralph Ellison and Gwendolyn Brooks.
The 1950s would see African Americans and other minorities strive for even more gains on cultural, political, and economic fronts in the United States. In December 1955 Rosa Parks initiated a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and one year later the Supreme Court made bus segregation illegal. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower sent U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the desegregation of its public schools. In August 1957, Congress passed the Voting Rights Bill, attempting to ensure equal voting privileges for minorities. In early 1960, the Greensboro sit-ins began, with students protesting segregation policies at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Such protests spread to many other towns in the South. In the 1960s, mostly under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., Freedom Rides in the South and marches on Washington helped make the civil rights movement one of the major cultural events of the twentieth century. Still, racial discord and strife continued throughout the 1960s.
World War II also had a major impact on Japanese Americans, especially those living and working in the western United States. With the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II. Fears about national security, especially on the West Coast, influenced by racial ideology, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. All persons of Japanese ancestry, both citizens and aliens, were ordered out of the Pacific military zone to inland internment camps. Roosevelt’s order affected 117,000 people, two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens of the United States. There was no distinction made between designated aliens from Japan, Japanese immigrants, and second-generation American-born citizens of Japanese descent. Many families lost their homes and possessions in the move, as they were unable to work in order to pay rents and mortgages. The struggling United States economy was greatly affected, as Japanese American farmers on the West Coast had been producing a significant amount of the country’s vegetables and fruits. The effects of the Executive Order were far-reaching. Medical and legal licenses were revoked, life insurance policies canceled, and bank accounts confiscated.
The inland internment camps were little more than primitive prisons, often located in remote areas. Multiple families were housed in quickly constructed and poorly made barracks with little or no privacy. Some have compared these places to European concentration camps. It took until 1945 for the order barring Japanese Americans from the West Coast to be terminated. Though many Japanese Americans were greatly angered by this treatment and some renounced their citizenship, a large number volunteered to serve in the armed forces.
It was decades before the United States government would admit to its error in this decision. In 1989, nearly fifty years after the fact, President George Bush signed the Internment Compensation Act, which awarded twenty thousand dollars to each surviving victim of the camps. A class-action lawsuit in 1993 also recognized that these citizens’ constitutional rights had been violated. Many nonfiction works have been written on the subject of Japanese American internment camps, such as Farewell to Manzanar (1973) by Jeanne Wakatsuki Huston. Fiction dealing with this subject includes works like Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey Home (1978) and Margaret Poynter’s A Time Too Swift (1990).
[3035] Chicago Daily Defender, Newspaper Headline: “President Truman Wipes out Segregation in Armed Forces” (1948),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [microfilm 1057].
A major victory against segregation, Truman’s executive order eliminated segregation in the military after thousands of African American veterans threatened to march on Washington in protest. African American veterans found the return to life in Jim Crow America especially difficult after the relative freedom and enlightened racial attitudes they experienced in Europe during World War II. Many of these men became local leaders in civil rights struggles in the South.
[4087] Arthur S. Siegel, Baltimore, Maryland. Women Learning to Use (?) a Pantograph and Template for Cutting at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyards (1943),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USW3-028672-C].
In order to sustain the massive war production needed for fighting on both the European and the Pacific fronts, women were hired in many factory and heavy industry jobs-positions from which they had been previously excluded. Such independence and civic participation helped bolster women’s organizing after the war, including protests for equal rights and welfare reform.
[5079] NAACP, Sign Reading ‘Waiting Room for Colored Only, by Order Police Dept.’ (1943),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-120260 (b&w film copy neg.)]
Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant orator. His skill with language was one of his most powerful weapons in the fight for civil rights. King’s fight for equality was crucial to ending the “separate but equal” policy that had reigned in the southern states following Reconstruction.
[7865] Charles Keck, Statue of Booker T. Washington (1922),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-103181].
“I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. Ellison’s narrator’s comment reflects the debate over how African Americans should be educated. Born into slavery but freed after the Civil War, Booker T. Washington devoted his life to the advancement of African Americans. Although he was respected by both blacks and whites, Washington came under criticism for his willingness to trade social equality for economic opportunity.
[8522] Ansel Adams, Manzanar Relocation Center from Tower (1943),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Ansel Adams Manzanar War Relocation Photographs [LOT 10479-2, no. 8].
In 1943 one of America’s best-known photographers, Ansel Adams, documented the daily life of the Japanese Americans interned at the Manzanar Relocation Center in the high desert of California.
[8523] Ansel Adams, Loading Bus, Leaving Manzanar for Relocation, Manzanar Relocation Center, CA (1943),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Ansel Adams Manzanar Relocation Photographs [LOT 10479-2, no. 14].
The Manzanar Relocation Center was one of nine Japanese internment camps. In what would come to be seen as among the greatest mistakes made by the U.S. government during World War II, thousands of Japanese citizens were held in camps against their will.
[8598] War Relocation Authority, Relocation of Japanese Americans (1943),
courtesy of Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University.
On February 19, 1942, just over two months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed the Japanese Relocation Act and created the War Relocation Authority. The WRA removed and detained some 120,000 Japanese over the next four years. Over 60 percent of the internees were U.S. citizens; many others had resided in the country for decades.
[8600] Earl A. Harrison, Americans of Foreign Birth in the War Program for Victory (1942),
courtesy of special collections, Michigan State University Library.
Speech delivered in 1942 by Harrison to the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born addressing the special role of millions of non-native-born Americans in the war effort. The speech commends this group’s loyalty and help to their new country. Though non-U.S. citizens could not fight in the war, they helped “provide the armed forces and the military supplies to facilitate the development of a second military front on the battlefield of Europe to ensure the complete defeat of the Nazi army.”
Not surprisingly, these housing developments tended to contain only white middle-class families. Black families were not welcome, and the sameness of the homes enforced, at least outwardly, the sameness of the lives lived inside them. The explosion of areas like Levittown, and suburban areas outside core cities around the country, came in large part from returning World War II veterans taking advantage of the G.I. Bill. The benefits of having served in the armed forces included money for a college education and a down payment on a new home. Federal Housing Administration mortgage policies and a better transportation infrastructure also helped accelerate the growth of suburbs. For these new homebuyers, many from lower- and middle-class backgrounds, obtaining such a home was partial fulfillment of the American Dream. Still, Levittown, social historians have said, was emblematic not only of the successes of the American Dream in the prosperous years following World War II, but also of its quieter, more insidious failures. As part of white flight from more ethnically diverse urban areas, suburban subdivisions became notorious for continuing and solidifying a trend of ethnic and class segregation across the entire nation, as well as the neglect of economically challenged and rapidly deteriorating city centers.
Intrigued and alarmed by the paradoxical nature of these communities, a handful of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s explored the ramifications of life within suburbia. Most were critical. While authors such as John Cheever and John Updike focused on upper-middle-class suburbs and the stifled emotional and intellectual milieu of the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) within them, Jewish American writers looked at the suburbs from a different perspective: both in appreciation of the respite they afforded Jewish Americans striving to leave the chaotic, dirty cities and with concern about the consumerism and conformity that such communities seemed to promote. Most vexing for Jewish American writers was the move away from the expression of any distinctive religious and cultural identity that necessarily accompanied relocation into towns such as Levittown, Scarsdale, or Short Hills. Philip Roth in particular explored the uneasiness of such an assimilated Jewish American suburban family. In Goodbye, Columbus (1959), protagonist Neil Klugman, a Newark, New Jersey, resident, partakes enthusiastically of the tennis courts, houses, and country club girls of suburban New Jersey, only to find that that world contains as much hypocrisy and pain as the cramped apartments of the inner city. Published a decade later, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) harnesses the somewhat fond and lyrical observations of his earlier work to wickedly dissect the suburban American Dream. Portnoy’s Complaint satirizes the consumption and assimilation that had become the hallmark of the good Jew, especially the good Jew outside of the city. Touching directly on “cookie-cutter” communities such as Levittown, Alex Portnoy’s mother extols her nephew, the “biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere,” whose genius is confirmed by his possession of “six different split-level ranch type houses.” Granted, her annoying praise makes us laugh, but its comical partnering of enormous professional success with duplicate dull-as-dishwater house ownership points to some of the complexities of America’s suburban dream, complexities felt early in the remarkable attractions of Levittown. Issues such as the struggle over neighborhoods can be seen in other literary works, among them Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Jo Sinclair’s The Changelings (1955).
Archive
[2165] Ludwig Baumann, Home Furnishings Exhibit (1952),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-G612-62235].
“Cookie-cutter” communities like Levittown spread rapidly in postwar America, characterized by not only homogeneous architecture but also homogeneous furniture and lifestyle. Writers like John Cheever, John Updike, and Arthur Miller critiqued suburban life.
[2749] John Collier, Store Dummy Displaying Daniel Boone Hat, Fur Trimming Detachable, Suitable for Auto Aerial Plume (Advertisement). Amsterdam, New York (1941),
courtesy of the Library of Congress. [LC-USF34-081569-E].
Suburban children in 1950s America were obsessed with cowboys and romanticized stories of the Wild West; one of their favorite games was “Cowboys and Indians,” and stores had a hard time keeping coonskin caps in stock.
[3024] Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., Levittown House of Mrs. Dorothy Aiskelly, Residence at 44 Sparrow Lane (1958),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-G613-72794].
The postwar generation saw the development of so-called “Levittowns,” homogeneous suburbs that were first conceptualized by William Levitt in response to the postwar housing crunch. These communities were typically middle-class and white. Jews, who were only recently being considered “white,” also flocked to the suburbs during this era. Philip Roth satirizes Jewish suburban life in Goodbye, Columbus, and Arthur Miller dramatizes the suburban plight of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
[3062] Carl Mydans, House on Laconia Street in a Suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio (1935),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-000658-D].
Suburban scene of houses, street, and sidewalk. This is an early example of the type of suburban neighborhood that flourished immediately following World War II.
[8844] Pancho Savery, Interview: “Becoming Visible” (2003),
courtesy of American Passages and Annenberg Media.
Professor Pancho Savery discusses life in 1950s America.
Much controversy surrounds the issues associated with uranium mining. Native Americans point out that the government did not tell the Navajos about the dangers of radiation sickness for the men working in the mines and with the tailings. While studies show that cancer rates among the Navajo living near the uranium mine tailings are much higher than the national average, some government studies from the 1980s denied that there was any widespread problem with radiation contamination. Native American writers, from Leslie Marmon Silko to Sherman Alexie, have documented the trouble caused by uranium mining, with many of these pieces collected in American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (2001).
Native Americans had other issues to address in the United States. By 1953, Native American unemployment was a major fact of reservation life. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) attempted to solve this problem by persuading large numbers of Indians to relocate into urban areas, using the lure of job training and housing brochures depicting Indian families leading a middle-class life. While the initial response was enthusiastic, within five years 50 percent of those who moved had returned to their reservations.
Ironically, as with many other minority groups, Native Americans played important roles in helping to win World War II, only to be relegated to their previous status after the war was over. The story of the Navajo code-talkers is a fascinating one. This top-secret project consisted of Navajo men who joined the Marine Corps to allow their language to act as a code in military communications. Classified information was able to be more readily communicated using the Navajo code-talkers than through previous encryption methods. Windtalkers, a 2002 movie, uses the history of the code-talkers for its underlying story.
The story of uranium usage and atomic power in the United States also touches on the cultural paranoia that was evoked by a fear of atomic weapons. As Paul Boyer puts it in By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985), “American culture had been profoundly affected by atomic fear, by a dizzying plethora of atomic panaceas and proposals, and by endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality.” The culture of the Cold War, with political adversaries such as the Soviet Union after World War II, and later communist China, convinced much of the American public that a homeland attack was not just a possibility but, indeed, a probability. The arms race became all the more serious after the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and developed the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s. Americans and the world were all too familiar with the destructive power of nuclear weapons after they had been used against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring World War II to an end. American policy on the use of atomic weapons wavered over the decades. Truman vowed never to use them again as a “first strike” weapon; but the Korean War caused reconsideration of this policy. Both Truman and Eisenhower maintained that a major stockpiling of atomic weapons was necessary in the face of an expanding communist threat.
The average American’s fear of a nuclear attack increased even more when the Soviet Union successfully pulled ahead of the United States in what was the beginning of the “space race” by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Both countries had been improving their ability to launch and control rockets since World War II, and the success of Sputnik added to the fear that a Soviet attack could come from outer space itself.
The government and the popular press urged average Americans to construct their own backyard bomb shelters to protect against a nuclear attack. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Life ran articles about shelter designs and described how Americans could seek refuge from falling atomic bombs. Many public and government buildings were designated as nuclear fallout shelters, and schools and civic organizations regularly practiced defensive drills for a possible attack. In “Cultural Aspects of Atomic Anxiety,” Alan Filreis suggests that “the bomb generally made mid-century Americans fear more acutely what they always already feared: that things that had been whole in their lives would now split, and that such splitting could not be controlled. Fragmentation was one fear. The loss of control was another. The bomb symbolized the two fears in one.” Fragmentation, disjunction, and broken verse were modernist innovations (e.g., the poetry of Gertrude Stein or the visual break-up in cubist paintings); however, the atomic bomb “took cultural or aesthetic aspects of modern life-a ‘modernism’ that could be safely imagined as something threatening but very far-off or at least contained, in Paris or New York-and seemed now to bring that incoherence dramatically home, or, indeed, into the home.”
In late 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the edge of an all-out nuclear conflict due to the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union had constructed a number of missile sites within Cuba, allowing for a much quicker first strike against the U.S. mainland. The United States demanded that these weapons be removed, and over the course of thirteen days of threats and negotiations, Americans prepared for a nuclear war. This incident marked perhaps the height of American fears of nuclear annihilation. Just a few years later, movies such as Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Fail-safe (1964) demonstrated how these fears continued to be a part of the culture of the times. Interestingly, the documentary film The Atomic Café (1982) nostalgically explores the world of living with the atomic bomb during the 1950s and 1960s.
Archive
[5066] Anonymous, First 29 Navajo U.S. Marine Corps Code-Talker Recruits Being Sworn In at Fort Wingate, NM (n.d.),
courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.
The Native American contribution to the Allied victory in World War II cannot be underestimated. Navajo “code-talkers” drew on their native language as a code for military communications; many Navajo words change meaning with their inflections, and to the untrained listener the language is incomprehensible.
[5656] Anonymous, Eight Indian Marine Fighters Serving with the Marine Signal Unit (1943),
courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Photograph of Native American soldiers. Despite significant and multifaceted contributions to the war effort, Native Americans continued to be mistreated by the United States government. Many Navajo men, struggling economically after the war, took jobs mining uranium in the 1950s, with no warning about the dangers associated with working in these mines. Writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie have documented the trouble caused by uranium mining.
[6467] U.S. Army, Frenchman’s Flat, Nev. Atomic Cannon Test (1953),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-117031].
Atomic detonation and resulting fireball. After the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, poets, novelists, and other artists began to explore the ethical issues surrounding the use of such weapons. John Hersey’s Hiroshima depicts the horrors of August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima.
[6635] Skeet McAuley, Fallout Shelter Directions (1984),
courtesy of “Sign Language, Contemporary Southwest Native America” Aperture Foundation, Inc.
Nuclear weapons have been tested in the Southwest for over half a century. For writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, weapons-testing is not respectful to the natural world and dims humanity’s hopes for renewal and regeneration.
The history of jazz is rich and complex. As a musical art form, its roots go back to African and African American musical traditions, spanning tribal drumming, slavery field chants, gospel, ragtime, and the blues. Once it entered the mainstream, jazz and the blues, often referred to together, quickly became recognized as one of the first truly original American art forms. In the 1920s, a time known as the “Jazz Age,” and beyond, this musical form has enjoyed a widespread public popularity in the United States and Europe.
There are a variety of jazz styles, but most jazz is characterized by improvisation. Rhythmic jazz typically has a forward momentum called “swing” and uses “bent” or “blue” notes. Jazz often includes “call-and-response” patterns in which one instrument, voice, or part of the band answers another. Jazz musicians place a high value on finding their own sound and style, and that means, for example, that trumpeter Miles Davis sounds very different from trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Since jazz musicians play their songs in their own distinct styles and often improvise, a dozen different jazz recordings of the same song will each sound different.
The influences of jazz on the literature of the 1950s were extensive. Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin were among the midcentury writers who incorporated jazz motifs into their works. The use of jazz may also apply more generally to postmodern notions of pastiche and rebellion. Visual artists, such as Romare Bearden, were also influenced by jazz and used it as a subject in their work.
Archive
[3071] William P. Gottlieb, Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt (Milton) Jackson, and Timmie Rosenkrantz, Downbeat, New York, N.Y. (1947),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Memory, William P. Gottlieb Collection [LC-GLB23-0285 DLC].
During the 1940s and 1950s, America was still a segregated nation, but jazz was one of the few areas where African Americans were accorded respect, and black and white musicians played together.
[3074] William P. Gottlieb, Portrait of Louis Armstrong, Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y. (1947),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Memory, William P. Gottlieb Collection [LC-GLB23-0024 DLC].
Audiences and musicians have called Armstrong the greatest jazz musician of all time. Raised in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, Armstrong was a huge influence on jazz and on later trumpet players such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Equal parts great musician and performer, he was sometimes criticized for his shuffle-along down-South stage personality “Satchmo.” See “Note on Commercial Theatre” by Langston Hughes for a comment on the “whiting” of black culture. Jazz was crucial to the poetry of the Black Arts movement.
[3075] William P. Gottlieb, Portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister Downbeat, New York, N.Y. (1947),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Memory, William P. Gottlieb Collection [LC-GLB23-0428 DLC].
Known as “Lady Day,” jazz legend Billie Holiday got her start in obscure Harlem nightclubs. The white gardenias in her hair in this photo were one of her trademarks. Gottlieb’s collection includes portraits of jazz greats such as singers Sarah Vaughan and Cab Calloway, guitarist Django Reinhardt, and pianist Art Tatum. For a depiction of female blues singers, see Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Queen of the Blues.”
[3548] Anonymous, Louis Armstrong Conducting Band, NBC Microphone in Foreground (1937),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-118977].
Louis Armstrong was one of the best-known jazz musicians of the 1930s. Jazz was an important theme in modernist writing and visual art. Jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow, nicknamed “Little Louis” due to her Armstrong-like playing style, is eulogized in Colleen McElroy’s poem “It Ain’t Blues That Blows an Ill Wind.”
[5479] Winold Reiss, Drawing in Two Colors (c. 1920),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC4-5687].
Offset lithograph of African American man dancing. Also titled Interpretation of Harlem Jazz I. German-born Winold Reiss (1886-1953) studied in Munich before moving to New York in 1913. He is best known for his portraits of African Americans and Native Americans. Poets, novelists, and painters incorporated imagery and rhythms from jazz in their work. In 1924 Aaron Douglas began studying with Reiss: the style and colors of Douglas’s work reflect Reiss’s influence.
The turn of the century saw the creation of the American League and the two-league system that we are familiar with today. Though professional baseball players in the early part of the twentieth century were largely drawn from colleges, by the 1920s professional players were much more likely to come from the lower and middle classes. Sons of immigrants and midwestern farm boys could rise through the expanding professional farm system and eventually shine on the diamond. These rising stars in baseball helped solidify yet another version of the popular “rags to riches” story. In the 1950s, a number of teams finally moved west, to Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, making the sport more locally available to a wider audience. Baseball often mirrored society at large and reflected its overall attitudes, values, and trends. Organized baseball was racially segregated for decades after its creation. Many cities created their own separate Negro baseball teams that featured outstanding players such as Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, and Satchel Paige.
World War II caused people to question segregation practices and led to the opening of the game to new types of players. One important wartime innovation was the All-Girls Professional Baseball League, in existence from 1943 to 1954. Since many professional male ballplayers and other young men were off serving in the military, women were recruited to play baseball on teams mostly located throughout the Midwest. However, these careers, too, reflected trends in society at large. The codes of conduct and rules of play for these women were much different than they were for male professional players. When the men returned from the war, women baseball players were expected to return to their previous professions and lives, as were the women who took over assembly-line work during the war.
In 1947 Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) became the first African American to officially play in the major leagues. His breaking of the color line was just the beginning of a long struggle for equal status and pay. Racist comments, hate mail, segregated housing, and death threats were to be an everyday part of the game for African American major league players for years to come. When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, he too received racial slurs and death threats. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that African Americans entered the ranks of major league baseball management. The game of baseball tended to reflect in a highly visible public forum some of the backlash against the civil rights movement and the exclusion of people of color from other venues of society.
Jewish players had not been strictly prevented from playing baseball-Hank Greenberg played for the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s and made no effort to hide his religion-but Sandy Koufax, a pitcher for the Dodgers from 1955 to 1960, proved that Jews too could be sports heroes in American postwar culture. Other Jewish players also made a name for themselves. Buddy Myer, an infielder for the Senators, won the batting title in 1935. Al Rosen was a four-time All-Star third baseman for the Indians in the 1950s, and Steve Stone, pitching for Baltimore, won the 1980 Cy Young Award. Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen begins its investigation into the conflict between modern orthodox and Hasidic Jews with a baseball game played by teams from the two groups.
Baseball not only reflected changes in race relations in this country, but also brought the subject of labor relations into a much broader cultural context. The “reserve clause” in baseball basically bound a player to one team throughout his career. It took away any right of “free agency,” whereby a player could offer himself to the highest bidder. A Supreme Court ruling in November 1953 kept baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws in place and the reserve clause in effect. In 1964, players formed a union, the Major League Baseball Players Association, and it took twenty-five more years before a form of “free agency” became available to major league players. These struggles between players and team owners reflect some of the conflict that occurred between labor unions and industry or powerful landowners that is discussed in Unit 12.
Not surprisingly, baseball functions as an important trope in the literature of this era. It stands as an icon for something truly “American.” It also, along with other sports, emphasizes the skills and importance of the individual along with the necessity of group organization and collaborative cooperation. Many major American writers have used baseball as subject matter, as exemplified by Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel.
Archive
[1992] Anonymous, African American Baseball Players of Morris Brown College, with Boy and Another Man Standing at Door, Atlanta, Georgia (c. 1900),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-114266 DLC].
At this traditionally African American institution in Atlanta, baseball has a long and proud history. During the second half of the nineteenth century, playing baseball became an important symbolic activity in America, as teams tied to-gether communities and defined a new way of belonging. The sport was featured in novels such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
[5162] Dorothea Lange, Fourth of July, near Chapel Hill, North Carolina (1939),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-020010-E DLC].
Although baseball had been played widely throughout the United States, using local rules, since the early 1800s, it is said to have been “invented” when Alexander Cartwright formulated formal rules and regulations in 1845; by the 1860s it was widely thought of as America’s “national pastime.” People from all walks of life played baseball, from immigrants in the late nineteenth century to the depression-era men pictured here.
[6732] Kenji Kawano, Navajo Indian Boys Playing Baseball (2001),
courtesy of Kenji Kawano.
For over two centuries, baseball has been a popular American sport that has attracted players from a number of ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds. It wasn’t until 1947, however, that major league baseball allowed non-white players.
[8500] Anonymous, Gary Works Baseball Team (1912),
courtesy of the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest.
Members of the baseball team sponsored by the U.S. Gary Steel Works in Indiana. Workers tried out for such teams and practiced in their free time.
[8526] Ansel Adams, Baseball Game (1943),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Ansel Adams Manzanar War Relocation Photographs [LOT 10479-4, no. 22].
Photograph of a baseball game in one of the Japanese internment camps. In spite of the discrimination against Japanese Americans during World War II, many claimed to wish for a chance to prove their loyalty.