Last night the BCC did some collective magazine reading. We determined that the New Yorker subscription has paid for itself with this one recent set of Thanksgiving covers. We received the Family one, with the favorite scene of "Check that guy out, he is so emo. DUDE, YOU ARE SO EMO!" Fantastic.
I also concluded that I don't know why I'm subscribing to the Atlantic, though I usually like it okay (it's no Harper's, but it'll do.) This month's cover story is on the one hundred most influential Americans. They amassed a panel of historians to put it together. It shames me that these are my people. And some of them I respect a great deal, so I'm just hoping they got outvoted by the overwhelmingly white maleness of the rest of the panel. Yeah. 82 out of the 100 "most influential Americans" are white men. Malcolm X doesn't even appear, and there are no women of color of any kind. Fannie Lou Hamer? Sojourner Truth? Seriously, nothing? No Cesar Chavez? Bayard Rustin totally unmentioned, so they can tokenize MLK as the sole non-white man in the top ten?
Nor, as one of the women historians acknowledged, are there any Asian Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos at all. Are we supposed to conclude that not a single Native American influenced our history? At least not "majorly"? J.P. Morgan, Walt Whitman and Walt Disney are ranked well above W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass? I know I'm probably taking it too personally -- it's a magazine! -- but, as is constantly being pointed out to me, I am the eternal optimist. I expect better of people. The fact that the inside story begins with a full-page spread entitled "They Made America" kind of says it all. And here I thought slave labor and Chinese railroad workers and immigrants made America. I really hate the great man theory. I don't think there's any way to do an arbitrary exercise like this list without it becoming a pointless reiteration of the majority culture's self-absorbed idol-worshipping. Rant over.
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7 comments:
I had trouble picking out which two African American "greats" to present to my English class (they were doing a unit on Black Americans) and I eventually settled on Shirley Chisholm (because I like her) and Booker T. Washington (because Tuskegee is important to know about). They already study MLK and they have a doodad on Louis Farrakhan in their books. It's hard to choose.
Half of the top ten are presidents - not so sure about that. Ten of the 100 are women - token feminists, really. AND SAM WALTON?! Sam WALTON is a great American??? What does THAT say about America that the statistical analysis of this list doesn't already say? And you say historians came up with this? Maybe they had better things to do and just came up with some off the top of their head. Maybe that's why it's such an odd - and rather offensive - list.
And Elizabeth Cady Stanton doesn't even appear until number thirty. And I like Uncle Tom's Cabin, but if they wanted woman/slavery mix, they could have chosen Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman instead. What an annoying list.
Cabiria, maybe you misread the article. It wasn't a hall of "shame" instead of a hall of "fame," was it? That is what I would like to see in the Atlantic Monthly - a list of "The Unsung Villain in U.S. History."
Let's see: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would definitly be there for back-tracking on the idea of liberty for which they risked their lives. FDR too for E.O. 9066. Hamilton, also, for helping to fuse rabid capitalism with "American republicanism" (read: wealthy white guys can do whatever it takes to increase their wealth). Ben Franklin (and MLK) get on the list for their misogyny. Woodrow Wilson for his bigotry and "[making] the world safe for U.S. interventionism." (What kind of reputable magazine celebrates Wilson for US economic imperialism!!?!!) Personally, I would put Reagan at the top of my list.
Let's see... who else...?
heh... it is rather amusing to think that these men - the ones who 'Made America' - are thus the ones who made America into the country it is today. *snicker* Wouldn't we all like to take credit for that??
Fighting over who gets the "credit" for America -- that is a pretty funny cage match. Reminds me of the perennial question in Atlantic world history -- who gets "credit" for the Enlightenment/modernity? My question: who would want credit? :)
V -- I love that reading. I just wish it was their intention -- alas Joyce Appleby, I don't know why I'm even surprised. They did comment on the "Hitler problem" with listing "influential" people -- getting themselves out of trouble for Calhoun being on the list, but then they didn't vote for McCarthy or other "villains" because they like to think they're choosing heroes. Here is a sad, sad quote from the article: "In a sense, perhaps, the final list is a testament to the absence of true villains from the American past."
Does anyone else experience this: you do something and later think, "Maybe that will come back to haunt me"?
Anyway, I was SO annoyed by the quote from that article that I send a letter to the editor of the magazine (maybe I should have read the entire article first, but I don't think it would have improved my opinion). This is what I sent:
Your article's observation that "In a sense, perhaps, the final list is a testament to the absence of true villains from the American past" is abominable. It serves as proof that your selection panel as well as the magazine’s editors are more interested in offering paeans to the myth of “American Exceptionalism” and in lionizing men and women who were human. As such, many of the individuals on your list participated in commendable AND reprehensible activities during their lifetimes. In the future, I hope you’ll acknowledge their complexity and, in turn, our appreciation for the complicated history we've inherited.
Nice letter V! Yeah, I totally do that, writer's remorse I guess you'd call it. I think it happens especially to women when expressing any sort of anger at something. It's the "that's inappropriate! nice girls don't get mad!" training kicking in a minute too late.
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