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

By Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and William Howard Taft’s underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780801455452

Book preview

THE FAMILIAR MADE STRANGE

AMERICAN ICONS AND ARTIFACTS AFTER THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN

EDITED BY BROOKE L. BLOWER AND MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

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

Introduction

BROOKE L. BLOWERAND MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

1. Watson and the Shark

BRIAN DELAY

2. Oh! Susanna

BRIAN ROULEAU

3. Mary Lyon, Massachusetts

MARY A. RENDA

4. William Howard Taft’s Drawers

ANDREW J. ROTTER

5. Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt

MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL

6. V-J Day, 1945, Times Square

BROOKE L. BLOWER

7. The Kinsey Reports

NAOKO SHIBUSAWA

8. The Quiet American

FREDRIK LOGEVALL

9. That Touch of Mink

NICK CULLATHER

10. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965

JESSE HOFFNUNG-GARSKOF

11. President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Address

MARK PHILIP BRADLEY

Conclusion

DANIEL T. RODGERS

Notes

Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 Miller-Davenport 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.

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

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.

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 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 pointed-arch 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 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

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.

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.

If transnational readings of American Gothic help to illuminate the long-distance 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 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

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 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 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.

CHAPTER 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 trans-national 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, 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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