Commonplace artifacts of material culture since the late nineteenth century, postcards are cheap to produce, purchase, and mail, they don’t require much personalization, and sending them to family and friends can make others jealous of the interesting places you visit. Often they depict beautiful landscapes or historic sites, which is why, looking through a collection my mom kept growing up, I was surprised to find several postcards of highways.
Seriously, who sends postcards of highways?
Clockwise from top left: “Pennsylvania Turnpike and Approach of Bedford Interchange,” postmarked July 23, 1954; Pennsylvania Turnpike, “World’s Most Scenic Highway,” postmarked Oct. 6, 1965; Ohio Turnpike, postmarked Aug. 1965 (?); and Indiana toll road (US I-90) near Elkhart, Indiana, postmarked Oct. 29, 1959.
To viewers, postcards structure “how and what views were to be taken from a rapidly changing world,” and their publishers often marketed the future those changes represented.[1] In the US after World War II, that included expanding infrastructure and mass consumerism. While highway construction had begun in the 1920s, it took off in the 1950s, characterized by “limited-access roads”: standardized, four (or more) -lane highways with interchanges. The prototype, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, first opened in 1940 and was completed by 1954. Its popularity exceeded expectations, making it a model for the 41,000 miles of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways developed under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This massive federal investment in infrastructure represented the largest public works project ever undertaken and spurred economic growth.
Increased highway construction, suburban sprawl, urban redevelopment, and car ownership all intertwined in the prosperous postwar decades. Together they created the car-centric “landscape of mass consumption” most Americans experience today.[2] This has had a profound impact on where we live and work, and spend our free time. In the postwar decades more families purchased cars and traveled further in them, making recreational travel a central part of middle-class culture and an expression of affluence.[3]
Enter the roadtrip. What to Americans in 2020 seems retro was novel to Americans in 1965. Postcards of highways highlight that novelty, and they marketed it. The highways pictured are remarkably empty. These are open roads, an uncommon sight today, and, since traffic rapidly increased after their construction, an uncommon sight at the time too.
Left: “New Village Center, economy shopping hub of Ellinor, Florida,” postmarked June 18, 1954. Description on back reads, “Florida’s vacationers shop at home-town prices in the new Village Center – all the convenience and economy of centralized home-town shopping while you vacation!” Right: Quality Courts Motel, Perry Georgia, built 1963, postmarked Oct. 19, 1967. US I-75 and US 41 both pass through Perry.
As the highway system expanded, so did roadside attractions from shopping centers to motels (from “motor hotels”). They boasted ample parking to cater to their customers. Historical sites adapted too, expanding their parking lots and advertising their convenience, as in the postcard from Mount Rushmore below.
Postcards tend to set a positive tone. They leave out a lot: the political and social upheavals of the era; the communities and ecosystems that highway construction destroyed; and the many Americans denied access to prosperity. In some ways these things feature implicitly: the Georgia motel built in 1963 in “plantation revival” style suggests who would, and who would not, be welcome guests. A postmark from 1954 reads “hire the handicapped – it’s good business,” a record of a government campaign in the history of Americans with disabilities.
Gendered histories also surface here: many of the postcards in the collection I’ve drawn from came from female colleagues of my grandmother. They suggest ways women created bonds in male-dominated workplaces. However, the majority of the postcards sent to the whole family were addressed to my grandfather “& family” or “& co.”. A woman’s ambitions in this era – my grandmother left her home in Ohio to take a job three states away – were nonetheless subsumed by her marital and maternal role.
Owning a car and taking to the “open road” represents a peculiarly American sort of individualism. Yet ironically its expression depends upon the interstate highways created with federal funds. Americans celebrated that public infrastructure in images shared via another key public service, the USPS. Perhaps it’s time we remembered that.
Mt. Rushmore (front and back), foregrounding the parking lot! The description on the back says, “This famous shrine is visited by over one million people each year and this huge parking area provides ample space for the many thousands of motor cars arriving daily during season.”
[1] John A. Jackle & Keith A. Sculle, Picturing Illinois: Twentieth Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo (University of Illinois Press, 2012), 21, 186.
[2] Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Knopf, 2003), 13; Christopher Wells, Car Country: An Environmental History (University of Washington Press, 2013).
[3] Susan G. Davis, “Time Out: Leisure and Tourism,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew & Roy Rosenzweig (eds.), A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 68.
I know few Turkish words, but most of the words I do know relate to food. I can ask for tea (çay) or coffee (kahve), and name some of my favorite dishes (like baklava, obviously). In the realm of embarrassing stories from childhood, my family never tires of reminding me of when, visiting Turkey as a toddler, I repeatedly asked for “more zeytin, more zeytin” (olives – still a favorite).
My father is Turkish and my mother American. Most of my father’s family still lives in Turkey and I grew up here in the US. Whenever we visited Turkey, a form of triangular communication would occur: my mom and grandparents would speak German to each other; since my father doesn’t speak German he would talk to his parents in Turkish; and my parents spoke to my sister and me in English, of which my grandparents could not speak more than a few words. Later, I learned some German, but only enough for pretty basic conversation.
Without the language, my primary connection to a Turkish identity is through food. My Babaanne (father’s mother) and I can’t speak much to each other, but we can cook, and eat, together. With the help of my dad, acting as translator, she has taught me how to make some of my favorite dishes. The recipes themselves reflect her own life history: Her fruit preserves call for a few hours sitting in the sun, a simple step in Turkey, but almost impossible for me to accomplish during the years I lived in Ireland. The green beans recipe below calls for two “wooden spoonfuls” of olive oil, a convenient unit of measurement in a Turkish kitchen, if not an international standard. And Babaanne’s signature dessert, Obsttorte (fruit tart), is a recipe she picked up living in Germany in the late 1950s. Many of the recipes, of course, are hardly recipes at all. She knows from experience the quantities and consistency needed at every step in the process. I’m the one who has to write them down to learn and remember.
Left: Babaanne talking to a neighbor from her balcony – in the days before COVID-19 quarantines. Right: Breakfast on the balcony, with fresh fruits, cheeses, and bread from the local farmers market and homemade jams.
When returning from trips to Turkey, my suitcase always contains food: olives, olive oil, baklava, halva, homemade preserves, and maybe some cheese or sucuk (sausage) snuck in past customs. My family and I have always most lamented our inability to bring back crates of fresh figs, the equal of which cannot be found on this side of the Atlantic. The foods that do make it back are jealously guarded to make them last.
As an historian I study music, specifically Irish traditional music and the migrants who carried it with them from Ireland to communities across the diaspora. Like food, music is somewhat ephemeral. Sounds and tastes can’t be so easily packed into a suitcase. Their approximation can be documented through notation or recipes, but the true power lies with the consumer and the associations that those sounds or tastes carry. For migrants and their descendants – including me – that power persists even in new contexts.
Like many others, I have been cooking and baking more than usual during this pandemic. It provides both entertainment and comfort. Nothing I can cook will replicate the experience of a meal on the balcony of my Babaanne’s summer home overlooking the Aegean. But this weekend as I ate green beans and savored a fruit tart, I thought of her.
Green Beans with Olive Oil (zeytinyağlı taze fasulye)
Learning how to cook the green beans recipe below while in Turkey (September 2019).
Ingredients
500g / 1/2lb green beans 1 small onion 7-8 cloves of garlic 3 fresh tomatoes Olive oil
Preparation
Use a wide pot, 3-4” deep with a lid. Put round slices of one whole tomato, peeled, on the bottom of the pan.
Add half the green beans – ends trimmed and broken in half – in a layer.
Add 3-4 cloves of garlic (whole) and diced onions.
Peel and chop another tomato and add on top.
Add the rest of the beans.
Add another peeled, chopped tomato and 3-4 cloves of garlic.
Sprinkle with salt. Add olive oil (2 wooden spoonfuls).
Heat on the stovetop on low with the lid on. After it gets juicy, add some boiling water (if necessary). Cook for about 20 minutes, until the beans are soft.
I was asked recently to make an argument for the value of the humanities, a challenge given the amount of ink already spilt on the subject. Some authors frame it in positive terms, articulating the usefulness of the field. Others bemoan its perceived state of crisis. I would like to avoid whining about why no one appreciates us humanists anymore and focus on the positive. For me, the value of the humanities lies in the space they give us for reflection on the human condition.
Being Human
This is part of a larger question: what does it mean to be human? Anytime I visit a new city I make a point of visiting bookstores, particularly used bookstores. On a trip to Kansas City about a month ago I picked up a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. It comprises a series of vignettes, short prose-poems, on subjects from across world history. One of my favorites is titled “Only Human”:
Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we learned we emerged from Africa’s jungle and that no stork ever carried us from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost identical to those of mice.
Now we can’t tell if we are God’s masterpiece or the devil’s bad joke. We puny humans:
exterminators of everything,
hunters of our own,
creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron bomb, which is the healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and leaves objects intact,
we, the only animals who invent machines,
the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent,
the only ones who devour their own home,
the only ones who poison the water they drink and the earth that feeds them,
the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or
selling their fellow humans,
the only ones who kill for fun,
the only ones who torture,
the only ones who rape.
And also
the only ones who laugh,
the only ones who daydream,
the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm,
the ones who find beauty in rubbish,
the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow,
the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music,
and who create words so that
neither reality nor memory will be mute.[1]
Humans are capable of expressing both extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary beauty. The humanities seek to make sense of that through culture. But it is not only an academic endeavor. It is about finding meaning in our existence.
That act is not limited to the present, nor to a single place. Galeano’s book turns western history on its head, juxtaposing world religions, philosophies, and scientific discoveries. Confronted with these “stories of almost everyone” – like hand stencils in cave paintings – we cannot escape a sense of shared humanity, no matter the distance across space or time.
Cueva de las Manos [Cave of Hands], Argentina (image by Mariano, Wikimedia Commons)
Context
The humanities teach us about being people. They provide context for our lives and societies. History forms a key part of this (though as a historian no doubt I’m biased in this regard). I would like to illustrate it with an example relevant to contemporary discourse: immigration.
Across American history, nativists have targeted different groups of immigrants with the same types of rhetoric. In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin complained about Germanic peoples and their failure to assimilate to Anglo-American life. From the 1840s fears were directed towards Irish Catholics, the poor huddled masses fleeing famine who, by virtue of their poverty and religion were seen as unintelligent and disloyal.
Thomas Nast, “The American River Ganges”, Harper’s Weekly, 1871. Note the alligator archbishops emerging from the water and the children in fear of being eaten by them. In the background stands a building resembling St. Peter’s Basilica, except it is labeled Tammany Hall and on it flies a flag with an Irish harp. In the back right is a noose, a reference to racial violence in the lynching of African-Americans. A school in the center is in a state of disrepair with an American flag hanging upside down.
Dr. Seuss, “Waiting for the Signal from Home…”, PM, Feb. 13, 1942. These racialized caricatures of Japanese Americans being given TNT are typical of their time, little though we want to think that the author of beloved children’s books could be responsible for holding these views (Dr. Seuss Went to War, UC San Diego Library).
The continuity across these examples is their basis in fear: fear of otherness (whether racial, ethnic, or ideological) and fear of people whose locus of loyalty might lie elsewhere.[2] The question of what it means to be American – and, therefore, who qualifies and who decides – is older than the nation itself. In all cases, Americans who are themselves descendants of immigrants are also those arguing against immigration, forgetting or denying the experiences of their own ancestors. This reflects the final lines of the Galeano passage above: we must know this history so that “neither reality nor memory will be mute”. My point here is not about knowing the facts of history, but in recognizing that everything has a history and history itself is contested, subject to both deliberate remembering and forgetting in the service of the present.
Joseph Keppler, “Looking Backward: They would close to the new-comer the bridge that carried them and their fathers over”, Puck, Jan. 11, 1893 (Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library).
Without denying the importance of ‘transferable skills’ and the reasons for an evidence-based approach to humanities advocacy, economic arguments alone will not save the day. They form part of a general trend towards neoliberalism in education, particularly higher education, which sees students as consumers. Any aspect of the experience that lacks an obvious connection to a job is called into question.
However, if we understand education in the broadest sense as concerning more than a defined set of knowledge or marketable skills, then the humanities are valuable because they give us perspective. They contribute to an informed, democratic society. In the words of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, “they liberate us from the myopia our media culture and politics impose on us”.[3] This can occur only when we have “the intellectual space to grapple with questions of enduring importance”:[4] questions of why the world is the way it is. As such, the value of the humanities extends beyond school. Education at every level should create learners who can participate in society in an informed way, whether through reading poetry or debating current events.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c.1818 (Wikimedia Commons)
Around 1818 Caspar David Friedrich painted one of the quintessential images of European romanticism: The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Using it as a metaphor, science (or the enlightenment rationality of the eighteenth century) might lead the wanderer to ask what lies under the fog, why the landscape takes a particular shape, what flora and fauna inhabit it, and what sort of particles hold it all together. Science, at its best, complements the humanities.[5] But if the wanderer is a humanist, then he might ask: what is his place in this landscape and why does it matter? Through the humanities we ask why, despite the short time we spend on this earth – less than the blink of an eye for the universe – we still need it to mean something.
The humanities remind us of our common bonds and give us the space to question their complexity. An education in the humanities is not a sugar-coating of idealism, but the realization that context matters, history stays with us, and there are no easy solutions. Despite 200,000 years of modern human life, we are still trying to figure it all out. No currency can measure the enduring value of that endeavor.
[1] Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of almost Everyone, translated by Mark Fried (Portobello Books, London, 2009), pp.227-8.
On February 19, 1942 – two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor – President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It authorized the establishment of military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded” in the interest of national security and defense.[1] In broad terms, it gave the military power to decide who constituted a threat. It did not, as many discussions of it imply, specifically mention Japanese Americans. That fact does not make it any less pernicious.
General DeWitt of the Western Defense Command was convinced that the entire Japanese-American population posed a threat to the nation. Between March and August of 1942 he authorized a series of “exclusion orders” that applied to “all persons of Japanese ancestry”.[2] Authorities removed approximately 110,000 men, women, children, of whom about two-thirds were American citizens, from their homes on the west coast. Without any attempt at due process, they were ordered to store or dispose of their property, herded into groups at assembly centers, given numbered tags, and sent on buses or trains patrolled by armed guards to unknown destinations. The ten internment camps, known euphemistically as “war relocation centers,” were all in desolate, distant locations. Those closest to the coast were more heavily militarized, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. As one man recalled:
We were told that we are being evacuated so that the government can protect us. The first thing that I had observed was that they had armaments, not facing out, but facing in.[3]
Clem Albers, military police at Manzanar, April 1942 (National Park Service)
No evidence supported the perceived threat. Rather, its origins lay in racism and fear. Adding the two and throwing government propaganda into the mix meant the policy enjoyed widespread support. Both the press and Congress almost unanimously endorsed it. Groups supposedly committed to ending discrimination either supported the policy or looked on in silence as the “gravest violation in civil liberties since the end of slavery” took place.[4]
Many understand the historical lesson of Japanese-American internment, like that of the Holocaust, to be “never again”. But there is another important lesson. It could happen again. Fear is part of human nature and those in power have repeatedly harnessed it against the ‘others’ in society. The record of internment should stand today not as a monument to a past from which we may safely distance ourselves, but as a reminder of what is possible and what we should do all in our power to resist.
Manzanar National Historic Site, January 2016 (photo by Sara Goek)
Cemetery monument at Manzanar, created by stonemason Ryozo Kado and erected in August 1943 (photo by Sara Goek, Jan. 2016)
Danny Meehan outside his restored family home in Donegal, June 2012. Photograph by Sara Goek.
Fiddler Danny Meehan was born in 1940 and grew up in Drimalost, in the Blue Stack Mountains of south Donegal, in a family and local area with a rich musical heritage. At age sixteen he migrated first to Selby in Yorkshire. He worked in many places across Britain, finally settling in London in 1963 where he established a career as a self-employed stonemason. He also met and played with many great musicians in pubs, folk clubs, and concert halls in London. He appears on the album Paddy in the Smoke, with the group Le Chéile, and has two solo albums. He returned to live in Donegal in 2007. In 2012 TG4 honored him with the Gradam Saoil (Lifetime Achievement Award).
However, that biography doesn’t do him justice. He is a larger than life character – humorous, generous, self-effacing, and, as he says himself, still a bit wild. Those traits come through in his music as well – his clever variations on traditional tunes, his unwillingness to put his own name to original compositions, and, having lived through what he calls a “dark age” for music, an appreciation for the young musicians of today. His is a music shaped by his roots in Donegal, his 50 years in England, and the many musicians he heard and played with along the way.
Huge thanks, of course, to Danny for sharing his stories and music. Thanks to Aidan O’Donnell for initially helping me get in touch with him. Danny’s nephew John Daly kindly provided additional information on the Meehan family history and the family photographs. Thanks to Clare O’Halloran and The Irish Review for supporting the publication.
In war, “you don’t become a killer. No normal man who has smelled and associated with death ever wants to see any more of it,” wrote cartoonist Bill Mauldin (1921-2003) in his book Up Front: “The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.”[1] His cartoons contained few feats of heroism. Instead, his central characters Willie and Joe griped about the weather, the rations, and their superiors.
Stars and Stripes, March 2, 1944. Source: Military History Now.
Mauldin observed,
I don’t make the infantryman look noble, because he couldn’t look noble even if he tried. Still there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid men with dirt in their ears. They are rough and their language gets coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties. Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other. They are normal people who have been put where they are, and whose actions and feelings have been molded by their circumstances.[2]
Like war correspondent Ernie Pyle, Mauldin gave GIs on the front in World War II both their dignity and a recognizable image of themselves. His cartoons balanced realism and respect for the combat soldier with humor and a healthy dose of cynicism. Pyle himself played an important role in bringing Mauldin’s work to a wider audience. In January 1944 he wrote, “Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training-camp life, which you at home are best acquainted with. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast army who are actually up there in that other world doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.”[3] As a result of this coverage, his series Up Front was syndicated in papers across the nation.[4]
I first encountered Mauldin’s work in that form. When my mom moved to a new house a couple years ago, among the boxes we discovered one that her parents had kept for her when they moved decades earlier. It contained an old cigar box labeled “Bill Mauldin Cartoons (Collected by W.G.M.)” with over 200 newspaper clippings that my great-grandfather had cut from The Cleveland Press during the war and its aftermath. I don’t know why he kept them. His son, my great-uncle, had fought in the Italian campaign (as did Mauldin), so perhaps that connection had something to do with it. Or perhaps, like so many other Americans, he saw in them something of the realities of a war taking place thousands of miles away.
These drawings are not part of military history as we often conceive it – of generals, battles, strategies, weaponry, or even ideology. Rather, Mauldin’s work is part of the social history of wars – of what it felt like to be there – perhaps something those who have not experienced can never truly understand. Despite all his attempts to explain the lived reality of war through both words and drawings, Mauldin reflected, “I guess you have to go through it to understand its horror. You can’t understand it by reading magazines or newspapers or by looking at pictures or by going to newsreels. You have to smell it and feel it all around you until you can’t imagine what it used to be like when you walked on a sidewalk or tossed clubs up into horse chestnut trees or fished for perch or when you did anything at all without a pack, a rifle, and a bunch of grenades.”[5]
United Feature Syndicate, Aug. 8, 1945. Source: Library of Congress.
The perceived distance from ordinary life and the lack of understanding among ordinary people for the horrors of war may have contributed to Mauldin’s disillusionment upon returning home. Like many other veterans, he and his characters, Willie and Joe, struggled to fit back into civilian life. In their final appearance, they are “under a culvert” living “on the bum,” “totally out of luck, out of money”.[6] Despite his own troubles, Mauldin himself never stopped standing up for the Willies and Joes of the world and the respect and fair treatment they deserved.
Title quote from: Bill Mauldin, Up Front (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1945), p.202.
Kevin Henry at a festival in 1999 (photo courtesy of the Henry family).
Before I met Kevin Henry in April 2013 what I knew about him primarily rested on his reputation as a musician and raconteur. He comes from the same area on the Sligo-Mayo border as Roger Sherlock and Brendan Tonra, both of whom I’d interviewed and Brendan I had the pleasure of playing tunes with during my time in Boston. I knew also that Kevin had been a mainstay of the Chicago Irish music scene for decades. What I was unprepared for was the fascinating story of his circuitous journey from Ireland to Chicago and the aplomb with which he related it.
Kevin was born in 1929, the eighth of eleven children. Following in the footsteps of his older siblings, he left Ireland for England in 1947. He traveled up and down the country working as a seasonal agricultural laborer, coal miner, and construction worker. In 1953 he decided to seek his fortune across the Atlantic and booked passage to Canada, though his ultimate goal was America. He worked his way from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Toronto and finally across the border to New York, where other siblings lived. There, he worked digging tunnels and waiting tables before deciding to head for Florida’s sunnier climes. Unimpressed with the low wages paid laying pipes in the Everglades or working on the construction of a hotel, he moved north again, this time to Chicago. Apart from a four-month stint mining copper in Butte, Montana, he has remained in Chicago ever since. He spent 37 years as an iron worker, a career that included work on the iconic Hancock Tower. Throughout his life traditional music has remained a touchstone for his identity. Now 87, Kevin continues to work to sustain the culture of his native land and the legacy of music collector Francis O’Neill in his adopted home.
In conjunction with that article, I have put my oral history interview with Kevin Henry, photographs, and recordings of his music on my PhD project website Voices of Irish Music & Migration. More material will be coming soon – stay tuned!
A huge thank you to Kevin and his wife Pauline for sharing their time and their stories with me!
Last semester I co-taught a class on American history since the Civil War. Throughout we emphasized a central theme: the changing meanings of freedom. In a prelude to the lectures on the Great Depression, we asked the class (mostly first-year Irish students, with a smattering of visiting international students) to take a few minutes to write individual responses to two prompts:
Define freedom.
Can meaningful freedom exist in a situation of extreme inequality?
Their varied answers gave me a lot to think about, particularly in comparing current political perspectives and goals in the US versus Europe.
The definitions of freedom fell along a spectrum from what I think of as individual to social freedom. In that roughly order and in condensed form, they included:
The right to live on your own terms
Ability to do completely as you like with no repercussions / limitations
Ability to do as you like within the limits of the law / reason (as long as that law is democratically established)
Ability to choose how to live, act, and speak without oppression, discrimination, or fear
Ability to achieve a fulfilled life, in which all basic needs are met and personal progress can be attained
Ability to do as you like and go where you please as long as you obey rules and laws that protect other people’s freedom
Democratic government and enfranchisement
Rights: vote, speak, practice any religion, safety, health, property, basic human rights
Equality: Ability to pursue opportunities (education, careers, wealth, property, government, etc.) regardless of race, gender, sexuality, faith, or culture
Somewhere between the individual and the social there is a shift from singular to plural; as the definitions move along the spectrum other people gradually begin to enter into the equation.
The shift became even more apparent in the responses to the second prompt. Not all the students gave an exact yes or no, but I categorized their answers for the chart below:
Even many of those choose yes or no also qualified their answers. On the no side, they argued that inequalities inhibit freedom, because not all members of the society have the same freedoms in practice. Many of those who said yes added that freedom might still have limitations when there are extreme inequalities. In between, they said it depends on the nature or extent of the inequalities or that some types freedoms may exist (e.g. freedom of speech), but not necessarily meaningful freedom overall.
This was not a comprehensive survey, but from discussions with students and friends (surveyed even more informally) I got a sense that if combined with demographic data on nationality, political views, or socio-economic background the results would be even more interesting. It strikes me that the ‘individual’ conception of freedom, and the idea that it therefore can exist even alongside inequalities, is more characteristically American. The European welfare state idea – and the government influence it involves, which many Americans are quite hostile to – is based more on the freedom-as-equal-opportunities definition. Each has emerged from a unique set of historical and social circumstances.
As ways of thinking, these ideas suffuse our national collective mentalities. They pervade our political discourse. In the United States I think it would take more than legislation to successfully adopt social programs such as public healthcare or free education: it would take a shift in mindset and a commitment to a broader definition of what it means to be free.
Thanks to Sarah Thelen for being an awesome co-teacher and for comments on a draft of this post!
I confess, I am allergic to biographies of the famous and exceptional. My dad gave me some prime specimens when I was younger – the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Bird among others – and recently he even tried to interest me in new books about Abraham Lincoln. But I simply cannot finish one. Why? Some subjects perhaps seem anointed from the start, the products of circumstances far removed from the realities of my life and the lives of others around me. Others may have had the benefit of living in interesting times, but I never did finish Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography either, as much as I like his historical work.
Yet I find myself drawn to read and write the lives of the ‘ordinary’ people, those whose experiences many judge unremarkable. Historian Richard White’s mother told him ‘half jokingly, but only half, that her life was more interesting than my latest book. Why didn’t I write a book about her? I told her, not joking at all, that I would.’[1] The result is my favorite history book, Remembering Ahanagran. Its subject, Sara Walsh, would have remained anonymous outside her immediate circle of friends and family had her son not become a distinguished historian and taken up her challenge. I take the book off the shelf repeatedly and never get bored. In the space between history and memory White reveals much about life, the ways we tell our stories, and how, through them, we come to understand ourselves.
As I worked on my Ph.D. I started a collection of memoirs by Irish migrants – Angeline Kearns Blain, Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, Anna May Mangan, Seán Ó Ciaráin, any many more – picking up stories from the boxes and shelves of secondhand booksellers. If history remembers their names it is because they took up the pen. Many who did not still have stories to tell. As an oral historian, that realization motivates my work. Some of those I’ve interviewed are household names (at least in traditional music households); others are not, but that does not make their words or memories any less meaningful. Their stories have taught me about the human experience: what it means to be a migrant, why people hold onto their cultures, and what it felt like to live in the foreign country that was the past. In biographies of the famous, perhaps some of those fundamentals get lost amidst the action.
_________________
[1] Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past (Hill and Wang, New York, 1998), p.4.
I don’t often take the train from Cork to Dublin, but recently I did and for the first time I paid close attention to the memorial plaques along one wall of Heuston Station. In their own way, they encapsulate the debates over Irish identity and historical memory.
Formerly Kingsbridge Station, its name changed as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. The first plaque commemorates the man after whom the station is now named, Sean Heuston, Irish revolutionary and former railway clerk. It gives a brief summary, in Irish, of his life and role in the rising.
The second plaque reproduces the text of the 1916 proclamation on three, relatively bland, metal tiles. Though I was unable to find information about its origins, it’s likely that it also put up in conjunction with an Easter Rising commemoration.
The third looks the oldest and is, I think, the most interesting. It commemorates the staff of the Great Southern & Western Railway who ‘laid down their lives for their country in the Great War’. The ambiguity is striking. What country was their country: Ireland or Britain? While the inscription does enshrine the idea of patriotic sacrifice, it leaves open the question of the nation to which that patriotism was directed.
As many as 200,000 Irishmen served in the First World War and of those about 35,000 died. However, the context of the Home Rule crisis and subsequent Easter Rising meant that their enlistment was hotly debated at the time: Unionists joined up to demonstrate their loyalty; Redmondites enlisted to show their commitment to Home Rule; and many others simply welcomed the separation money, regular pay cheques, or sense of adventure.
Staunch nationalists opposed Ireland’s participation in ‘Britain’s war’ and saw being an Irishman and fighting for Britain as an irreconcilable contradiction. This view had a long and pervasive influence on historical memory. Keith Jeffery writes that ‘the prevailing orthodoxy in nationalist Ireland is that no true Irishman could possibly have joined the British army for patriotic and legitimate Irish reasons, or even (horrible thought) for a species of British loyalty.’[1]
Even those who enlisted realized at the time that their legacy would be contested. Tom Kettle justified his participation, arguing, ‘I have written no word and spoken none that was not the word of an Irish Nationalist’.[2] Poet Francis Ledwidge, reflecting on his life and decision to join the 10th Irish Division, asked, ‘how will I be accounted for?’[3]Patrick MacGill rejected attempts to view the war through the lens of patriotism, instead saying ‘the justice of the cause which endeavours to achieve its object by the murdering and maiming of mankind is apt to be doubted by a man who has come through a bayonet charge.’[4] He puts words in the mouths of those who lie dead, asking ‘what purpose has it served?’[5]
Placing these three plaques along the same wall gives a certain parity to their subjects. We are forced to consider the Easter Rising in its European context – the First World War – and to recognize that both events raised questions of national identity. Who are we to impose a brand of patriotism on those who did not or could not speak for themselves?
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[1] Keith Jeffery, ‘The First World War and the Rising: Mode, Moment, and Memory’, in Gabriel Doherty & Dermot Keogh (eds.), 1916: The Long Revolution (Cork. 2007), p.90.
[2] Tom Kettle, Ways of War (Constable & Co., London, 1917), p.72.
[3] Francis Ledwidge, ‘Soliloquy’, from The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge (Herbert Jenkins, Ltd., London, 1919), pp.259-60.
[4] Patrick MacGill, The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War (Herbert Jenkins Ltd., London, 1917), p.vii.
