It is quite difficult to do this exercise while consciously excluding the influence of the Smoot and Scopes books. With the added perspective of these texts, I am beginning to form a single, more unified vision of what brings our reading together, but, for me personally, these most recent selections provide the central tenet, whereas the texts we were initially asked to consider (Kraut, Roediger, Ngai, and especially Bederman) serve more so to inform and support an idea rather than provide it.
In-class discussion seems to be chiefly concerned with determining who’s “American” and how groups both earn that title and discredit themselves from doing so. We’ve looked at race, ethnicity, language, culture, susceptibility to disease, and even food preferences as surface level boundary markers between “American” and “not”, or, in sociologist Erving Goffman’s terms, “us”, and the “other”. But, as we see in specific cases, such as the assimilation of immigrant groups like the Irish as discussed in Roediger and Ida B. Well’s academic inversion of the white man’s civility to the black man’s in her discussion of the Memphis lynchings & her presentation of self as a “woman of culture (63), these boundaries are constantly being toed, crossed, and shifted around, so what “American” is not clearly cannot be used to define the essence of the term. So, what is to be used instead? What underlying commonality can we find between groups that become incorporated into the definition that groups separated from it demonstrate that they distinctly lack? I feel as though it must be an arguable case of have and have-not, and one of the ideas brought solidly into view through our discussion of Smoot and the Mormon church definitely fits this category: the ability of self-rule in a rational context and the factors of compromise ability, the triumph of internalized rationality over outside authority, and “civility” that serve to legitimize it. When we are asked to do this exercise for the second time, I will further expound upon how I feel this thesis is most concretely demonstrated in Smoot and Scopes. The next part of this post essentially works a bit backwards, outlining a few of the ways in which I feel the underlying current I identified the sentence prior is evidenced and worked upon in the first four texts.
Bederman: The changing definition of masculinity in relation to its implicit, negotiated connections with civility, both of which are linked to the “us” group of America (the ruling, politically active white male population) are the subjects of concern in this text. When authority of this group is challenged in traditional terms, a la Jack Johnson’s boxing victory, the qualities of the challenger that make it a contender the competition to begin with (brute strength, ruggedness, virility) are inversed and subverted to become “bad” qualities, qualities that deem him unfit for political participation. How does this happen? By bringing “civility” into the mix- the “savageness” of manhood doesn’t jive at this specific point, it doesn’t fit the mold, so Jack is prevented from standing equally in society with the white man he can very well match. Civility is a tool here, one that’s very much manipulated, and we see this when G. Stanley Hall proposes his reasons for encouraging young white boys to engage in the violence that supposedly keeps Jack Johnson from participating in the society they will one day run.
Roediger: I think this article does a good job of discussing the base, surface ways of separating “us” from “other” and thereby providing a discourse based on appearances to determine who was fit for citizenship. The article explores the “what did it mean to live in-between?” question¬¬— what did it mean be racially “white” but not ethnically “American” (139)? It asserts early on that “whiteness” was legally equated with fitness for citizenship, and thereby connects to my thesis and the time period by explaining why European immigrants were deemed worthy of inclusion by American society at large much more quickly that Asians and Blacks. The varying degrees of immigrant resistance to and acceptance of this “fact”, as discussed in the “In-between & Indifferent” section, tells us why, even today, we still largely found our individual identities in where we came from (for example, I’m Italian and Polish). As groups got larger and refused to assimilate in total, America was forced to renegotiate & broaden the categories it used to determine who could participate in it.
Ngai: “Thus the invention of national origins and unassimilable races was as much a project of state building as it was one of ideology.” This paper demonstrates how America used and manipulated one of the categories it used to determine fitness for citizenship (rationality) as a system to politically reinforce the same idea. The sentence that begins this section, found in the conclusion of the paper, shows that, as time went on, this became a conscious, purposeful exercise for the “us” group in America during the time period in question. The fact that a “science” (demography) was created to rationally cipher out who could be included when people were already being discluded for their supposed unwillingness to govern themselves based on “scientific” thinking shows us how all encompassing the system was and simultaneously reinforces its existence. This facts and tables presented in this article are, in my opinion, the best primary source of the group at solidly demonstrate a rather removed, academic theory.
Kraut: Shows us how the physical body was used as “evidence” of irrationality and incivility, and therefore could demonstrate fitness for exclusion from self-rule. Consider Chapter 2 as a case study of sorts. Here, Kraut tells us that the ruddy complexion of the Irish was seen as a sign that “they were given to raw, unrestrained passions and self-indulgence” (and therefore lacked civility), their dark eyes were “lustful”, and even Thomas Nast continued to depict the “Irishman and the ape as closely related” well into the late nineteenth century, (42). The author also asserts that “mental illness…seemed to native-born Americans every bit as pervasive among the Irish” and that skewed statistics demonstrated this population as having one of the highest rates of insanity of the era, (39). Since mental illness was defined as “aberrant behavior” and supposedly grew out of the violation of, among other things, “mental laws”, the Irish that suffered from it clearly did not share in the “rationality” of American society, and thus shouldn’t participate in it under their immigrant status (38,39). But, gradual assimilation of the Irish and Kraut’s assertion that these processes are “ever changing but never ending,” (272) shows us that what defines the ability to self-rule is in constant renegotiation. This is demonstrated by the multiple ways it is legitimized across these texts, and the clear, concise discourse of this line really drove that point home for me.
Although fitness for self-rule was an idea we originally came up with in the context of the first four texts, I didn’t really see this as a factor until religion was thrown into the mix with the Smoot in-class discussion. Here, I was able to identify protestant anxiety over his election as deeply rooted in his foremost allegiance to the Mormon Church, something outside the “rational” self. Smoot, as well as Catholics with their Pope, weren’t seen as fit for self-government because they weren’t actually governing themselves. They were, in some senses, seen as blindly following an authority they did not know/experience intuitively (just like “old” Europe blindly accepted the authority of the King), so they were working outside the bounds of rationality. This would not be acceptable for participation in an enlightened society. This thought process is important to me because it was the first time I could see the “logic” behind the “us” Americans discluding the “not” out groups. Before then, the legitimacy of the “rationality” of the society we’ve been discussing didn’t hold much weight, so the “rational” theories for separation presented by the first four texts were similarly difficult to not consider as arbitrary assignments. Now that I possess something in our material that I can at least syllogically agree with, I can use it as a tool with which I can begin to excavate and examine the past material that I initially had difficulty finding value in.