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The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

In this history of popular religion and spirituality, Matthew Hedstrom argues that books and book culture were integral for the rise of liberal religion in the twentieth century. After World War I, a modernizing book business and an emerging religious liberalism expanded the spiritual horizons of many middle-class Americans. The new spiritual forms of twentieth-century liberalism incorporated psychology, mysticism, and (to a lesser extent) positive thinking in their works. Hedstrom, like sociologist Christian Smith, believes that liberal religion achieved a stunning cultural victory after World War II.

Two key developments led to the rise of liberal religion: the embrace of the marketplace and the creation of middlebrow reading culture. In the 1920s, liberal Protestants turned to the marketplace, but on their own terms. They wanted people to read right. Middlebrow reading required that one read earnestly, intensely, and with purpose. Many liberal Protestants thought that this manner of reading would improve people. Middlebrow reading norms also required individual autonomy and expertise. Religious and cultural leaders carefully shepherded readers by offering comfortable — but limited — freedom to act as guided consumers. In other words, religious leaders still hoped to shape the purchases that laymen and laywomen made and the book industry complied.

The First World War destroyed the faith Americans had in simple notions of progress. In response to this crisis, liberal Protestant leaders, executives of the American publishing industry, and other cultural figures collaborated on a series of new initiatives to promote the buying and reading of religious books. These initiatives included the Religious Book Week, the Religious Book Club, and the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association. Major publishing houses, like Harper’s and Macmillan, established religious departments for the first time.

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925. Via Library of Congress.

In the interwar years, religious reading became a national concern as the United States faced the threat of fascism. Religious groups like the Council on Books in Wartime and the Religious Book Week campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) promoted reading. Hedstrom shows the widespread appeal of the Council’s slogan, “Books as Weapons in the War of Ideas.” The Second World War, for these groups, was not only an ideological battle, it was also a spiritual struggle for the soul.

US Government Poster from 1942. Via Library of Congress.

Harry Emerson Fosdick. Via Wikipedia.

After the war, Americans continued to turn to books for spiritual guidance. And the increasing belief that the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation formed the foundation of what Hedstrom calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.” Letters to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two of the most popular post-World War II authors of liberal religion, display Americans’ newfound eagerness to read religious and spiritual works from authors of other faiths. These letters also provide keen insight into who was reading spiritual books and why and how they were reading them. Many Americans were religious, even if they were not attending church on Sundays. Readers of middlebrow religious culture were trying to grapple with religious questions about the Second World War, morality, and spirituality. Fosdick and Liebman helped them find answers.

The Rise of Liberal Religion is revisionist history in the best possible sense. By emphasizing “lived religion,” or the spaces where religion is practiced and faith is formed, Hedstrom shows that the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches and churchgoers matters less than previous historians insisted. In addition, Hedstrom challenges the master narrative that conservative Christianity dominated the post-World War II religious landscape. Despite this, readers might find a few shortcomings. First, Hedstrom makes too many sweeping declarations about liberal religion after the 1950s. For example, he points to Americans’ incorporation of yoga as a form of spiritual cosmopolitanism, but it is not clear that liberal religion in the U.S. made a conscious effort to incorporate yoga into its practice. More important, Hedstrom provides little evidence about the lived religious experiences of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. He asserts that middlebrow reading provided women agency, but the evidence from women themselves is somewhat thin. By emphasizing the vitality of liberal religious experience, Hedstrom has set a new agenda for the cultural history of U.S. religion, but that cultural history will have to incorporate more of the population of the faithful for it to have a real impact.

Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013)

You may also like these reviews by Christopher Babits:

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

And Robert Abzug’s discussion of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Call Pest Control: The Bug Problem at the US Embassy in Moscow

By Brian Selman

Every popular American spy novel and film of the past half-century has had to contain a Russian character, usually in the form of a femme fatale or a burly, deep-voiced brute. Is there a strong historical basis for this? Did the US and Soviet Union conduct espionage as extensively as the movies would make us believe? The short answer is “yes.” While it is true that there were far fewer explosions and self-destructing messages than portrayed in this particular sub-genre, both superpowers employed vast intelligence and espionage networks in order to gather information about each other. The 1964 bugging of the US embassy in Moscow is a good example of this, as it served as one of the most pervasive and prolonged acts of espionage discovered during the Cold War.

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow. Courtesy of the LBJ Library

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow in 1964. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

On the morning of April 29, 1964, the American embassy in Moscow sent a telegram to the Department of State in Washington detailing the discovery and the beginning of the removal of microphones, eventually found to total more than forty, hidden within their walls. According to a situation brief from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the American embassy, the U.S. had long suspected that their facilities in Moscow were bugged. Regular sweeps and frequent probing of the embassy’s walls, however, had never shown any evidence of the presence of microphones. According to Rusk, they had done everything “short of physically destroying a room.” Rusk states in this telegram that the hidden microphones were only discovered as a result of a ”decision to do some extensive physical damage to an area in Embassy.” According to this telegram and as reported in “Red ‘Bugs’ Found in U.S. Embassy,” an article in Long Island’s Star-Journal, after demolishing an inner wall, embassy staff discovered the first covert listening device located inside a wooden tube 8-10 inches behind the wall’s surface. It was only after finding this first microphone and following its wires that they realized the pervasiveness of the bugging. The foundations of every single room, including the bathrooms, were bugged, with the exception of a specially designed “room-within-a-room.” As the Star Journal report states, due to the age and obvious rusting on some of the microphones, it was clear that the embassy had been bugged since the Soviet government had leased the facility to Americans over a decade prior to their discovery.

L-R: US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1967 during the Glassboro Summit Conference. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

In a press conference on May 19,1964, James L. Greenfield of the Public Affairs Bureau and Marvin Gentile, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security at the time, announced that more than 130 microphones had been found in American embassies in Eastern Europe between 1949 and April 1964 when the Moscow bugs were detected. However, none of these other microphones were part of such an extensive system. After the removal of these microphones, embassy staff there evaluated the size of the security breach resulting from the unprecedented 12-year Soviet bug infestation. Many reports were sent to the White House by different members of staff at the embassy detailing the precautions they took in their correspondences and conversations. In fact, as a circular telegram sent out by Rusk to numerous embassies in Europe states, all members of staff at the Moscow embassy were instructed as a matter of procedure to always assume they were being watched and listened to by the KGB (Soviet secret police). At the press conference Gentile stated that, “We will never operate in any post behind the [Iron] Curtain except under the assumption that a place is bugged.” He then claimed, “That is the only way we can operate in Eastern European countries.” In a report to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Rusk claims that he often made statements “in the hope, if not expectation” that they would be overheard by the Soviets. All these reports stated that, to all embassy staff members’ knowledge, no ultra-sensitive information was leaked. However, according to the article in the Star Journal, a meeting of U.S. consular officials had been proposed to take place at the American embassy in Moscow. The “room-within-a-room” where most important meetings were held was not large enough to accommodate all of the meeting’s members. Therefore, if this proposal had gone through, they would have convened in a larger, and therefore bugged, room. Because the hidden microphones were discovered first, Rusk rejected the meeting’s proposal and it never took place. If it had, unbeknownst to the US, the Soviet Union would have gained profound insight in American consulate operations during the peak of Cold War tensions.

Replica of the Great Seal which contained a Soviet bugging device concealed inside a gift given by the Soviets to the US Ambassador to Moscow on August 4, 1945. The device is displayed at the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum. Via Wikipedia

Another problem at the time was how to officially declare the discovery of these bugs to the Soviet government. A memo for Bundy from Benjamin H. Read, Rusk’s Executive Secretary, states that it was likely that the Soviets already knew that the bugs at the American embassy had been discovered; it was assumed that they heard the moment of detection through the bugs themselves. However, the U.S. needed to inform the Soviet government that such blatant acts of espionage would not be taken lightly. Embassy staff drafted a formal protest intended for U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy D. Kohler, to present to Soviet Foreign Minister, Vasily Kuznetsov. The first draft is written in flowery complimentary language, giving Kohler the “honor” of informing Kuznetsov and the Soviet government about the discovery of the bugs. After edits, the official protest was written in much sterner and stronger language, detailing the U.S.’s serious displeasure of the USSR’s “flagrant contravention” of Article 22 of the Vienna Convention, which invested the host state with the responsibility of assuring diplomatic missions safety against intrusion. As Kohler reported to Rusk, Kuznetsov openly wondered why such a “strong” protest was issued. He recalled several prior occasions, when Soviets found similar bugs in their facilities in Washington, but Soviet government had issued no such protest. According to the memorandum to Bundy, Kohler replied to Kuznetsov that due to the extent of this particular bugging, a “strong” protest was indeed warranted. However, later, after the Soviet Union’s subsequent official rejection of the U.S. protest, Kohler privately confirmed Kuznetsov’s claim, listing multiple cases of American espionage that the Soviet Union cited in its rejection of the U.S. protest including the discovery of listening devices in a table leg in the USSR mission to UN and microphones discovered in vehicles belonging to both a military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington and of the Third Secretary of Soviet UN mission.

While the Moscow embassy bugging and the American bugs mentioned by Kuznetsov were by no means the only large-scale acts of espionage between the two superpowers during the Cold War, they demonstrate the lengths that both sides were willing to go to in order to gain an edge in their worldwide struggle for supremacy.

The image of the bug and all cited documents were taken from box #9 of the NSF Intelligence File at the LBJ library, file name: “USSR-Hidden Microphones in Moscow Embassy.”

My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig (2004)

By Jimena Perry

One of Colombia´s most important museums is the Gold Museum, located in Bogotá. It is part of the Bank of the Republic, a state-run central bank. The museum houses approximately 55,000 gold pieces, most of them belonging to Pre-Columbian cultures, and aims to preserve the country´s heritage. Perhaps the most intriguing object on display is the world famous Poporo Quimbaya, a device used by indigenous cultures to store the lime they mixed with coca leaves for chewing. This was the first object acquired by the museum’s directors and has been on display for more than 60 years.

Quimbaya gold poporo and pestle, at the Gold Museum, Bogotá. Via Wikipedia.

In 2003, anthropologist Michael Taussig, known for his unconventional ethnographic writing, published My Cocaine Musuem, a controversial analysis of the Gold Museum. The book was based on his conversations with the director and museum staff as well as analysis of the collection and its presentation. Taussig´s book uses the Gold Museum as a case study to reflect on what museums should do and raised significant criticisms regarding the practices he saw at the Gold Musuem. While the book upset the museum’s team, it is now considered an important reflection on how museums work.

One of Taussig’s major criticisms was the key omissions he noticed in the story told by the Gold Museum. Taussig drew on his own research into the black communities located in Timibiquí in the country’s southwest. These communities were formed by black former slaves who settled in Timbiquí and began extracting gold from mines and panning it from rivers there. Despite the strong connection these communities had to gold, the museum made no mention of them.

Taussig also criticised the museum for focusing too heavily on objects without providing the rich texture that brings understanding to different cultures. For example he highlights the relationship that some indigenous peoples have with objects such as poporos (not all of them are made of gold) and the lime they carry in them. He argues that these objects are revealing of a different life and culture that needs to be contextualized in order to be understood and respected. If, for example, there is a display of the object itself, without some kind of history behind it, the cultural meanings of the pieces might disappear entirely. Along these lines, continues Taussig, museums have become boring places that fixate on objects, they are “dead and even hostile places for bored bourgeoisie.” For instance, since poporos store lime for chewing with coca leaves, they have a green layer of dry spit in their upper part. Why wouldn’t a museum exhibit these poporos? Why is only an asceptic, clean, gold poporo appropriate to represent the cultural practice of coca chewing and why are the black people who extract gold totally absent from museums?

This old Muisca tradition became the origin of the El Dorado legend. This Balsa Muisca (Muisca raft) figure is on display in the Gold Museum, Bogotá, Colombia. Via Wikipedia.

In order to bridge these gaps, Taussig imagines a cocaine museum, not to exalt coke as a national Colombian identity marker, but as the object at the center of an issue that can be traced historically and that cannot be comprehended if it is only seen as an object. Taussig emphasizes the relationship among gold, coke, and cocaine. Along these lines, the author envisages a museum that does not separate nature from culture, where objects are not decontextualized and where the pieces tell stories that appeal to the people who use, elaborate, and see them. The scholar´s idea is that his cocaine museum portrays a story of things told by objects. For the anthropologist, My Cocaine Museum is a place where history and ethnography converge, contextualizing gold and its relationship with coke. It is even possible to say that he makes the following equation: gold is to slaves as coca to Indians and cocaine to the present.

Not all Taussig’s arguments are persuasive. Why should a historical museum, such as the Gold Museum, which aims to focus on the past, have the duty to also display the present? Should all msueums do the same thing? What are their purposes? How are they useful to society? Taussig´s book raises these question and will make readers think more closely about the nature, function, and role of museums.

My Cocaine Museum, by Michael Taussig (The University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

By Cali Slair

While totalitarianism did not first emerge in the twentieth century, the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler (1933-1945) and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (1924-1953) were distinct. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, seeks to explain why European populations were amenable to totalitarianism in the twentieth century and to identify what factors distinguish modern totalitarian regimes. Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family in Hanover, Germany in 1906 and in 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she left Germany. The Origins of Totalitarianism is Arendt’s attempt to better understand the tragic events of her time.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt explores the histories of anti-semitism and imperialism and their influence on the development of modern totalitarian regimes. Arendt argues that anti-semitism, race-thinking, and the age of new imperialism from 1884-1914 laid the foundation for totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Arendt traces how racism and anti-semitism were used as instruments of imperialism and nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe. Arendt shows that imperialism and its notion of unlimited expansion promoted annexation regardless of how incompatible a country may have been. Nationalism developed along with imperialism, and foreign peoples who did not fit in with the nation were oppressed. Modern totalitarian regimes, aware of the efficacy of these instruments, used them in pursuit of their singular goals.

Arendt argues that the origins of totalitarianism in the twentieth century have been too simplistically attributed to nationalism, and totalitarianism has been too easily defined as a government characterized by authoritative single-party rule. Arendt also argues that scholars and leaders have mistakenly equated nationalism and imperialism. Arendt rejects the notion that a dictatorship is necessarily totalitarian. Dictatorships can be totalitarian, but they are not inherently totalitarian. Totalitarian governments are characterized by their replacement of all prior traditions and political institutions with new ones that serve the specific and singular goal of the totalitarian state. Totalitarian governments strive for global rule and are distinguished by their successful organization of the masses. In fact, Arendt argues that totalitarianism is significantly less likely to originate in locations with small populations.

Arendt also argues that modern totalitarian regimes are defined by their use of terror. Totalitarian terror is used indiscriminately; it is directed at enemies of the regime and obedient followers without distinction. Arendt argues that, for modern totalitarian regimes, terror is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Arendt states that modern totalitarian regimes used alleged laws of history and nature that noted for example, the inevitability of war between chosen and lesser races, to justify terror. Arendt also argues that the bourgeoisie’s rise in power eroded the political realm as a space for freedom and deliberative consensus and contributed to the amenability of populations to totalitarianism.

According to Arendt, the appeal of totalitarian ideologies is their ability to present a clear idea that promises protection from insecurity and danger. After World War I and the Great Depression, societies were more receptive to these ideas. These ideas are fictional and the success of totalitarianism hinges on the regime’s ability to effectively obscure the distinctions between reality and fiction. One way this is accomplished is through propaganda.

Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is an influential work that takes on the difficult task of trying to understand the devastating rise of Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism.

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Abikal Borah on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe

Joshua Kopin discusses Walter Benjamin on Violence

Ben Weiss explain’s Slavoj Žižek’s theory of Violence

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

Katherine Maddox on Ranajit Guha’s ideas about hegemony

Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader, by Harry Kelsey (2003)

By Mark Sheaves

Following his successful biography of the famous English corsair, Francis Drake, Harry Kelsey turns to Drake’s lesser-known but equally adventurous cousin, John Hawkins (1532-1595). Born into a family of rugged traders and pirates in southwest England, Hawkins grew into a successful merchant and maritime navigator by his early twenties. This upbringing in a notoriously violent environment, Kelsey argues, created a fierce and pragmatic streak in the young trader. An ambitious individual, he turned his attention to Spain’s prosperous colonies establishing trading networks with merchants in the Canary Islands. Exposure to the emergent slave trade peaked Hawkins’ interest in this odious practice. In three separate voyages, he raided for slaves off West Africa and sold his cargo in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela. Despite Spanish legal restrictions against dealing with foreigners, Hawkins intimidated colonial officials into trade by harassing port cities until they agreed to terms. Financially successful, he developed good relations with Queen Elizabeth I. In 1578 he took up the position as Treasurer of the Royal Navy, playing a vital role in naval reform and coordinating the English victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588. From merchant to pirate to state officer, John Hawkins’ life comes alive for interested readers in Harry Kelsey’s lively prose.

Hawkins’ pirate exploits offered juicy source material for the English nationalist and imperialist propaganda that developed in the sixteenth century, but Kelsey offers a more nuanced interpretation of this “opportunistic individual.” Understood in relation to the shifting religious loyalties across Europe in this period, he argues that Hawkins developed a chameleon-like identity. He lived during the reign of four English monarchs who changed from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic and back again. Like many successful English men he pragmatically adopted the religion of each of these rulers. This ability also served him well when operating in the Spanish Atlantic. In 1568 he appealed to King Phillip II of Castile as a Catholic for the return of his possessions seized by Spanish officials during a failed deal in the Caribbean. To his credit Kelsey does not try to establish whether Hawkins truly identified as Catholic or Protestant. Instead he depicts an opportunistic individual driven by power, prestige, and wealth rather than religious or national loyalties.

Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada; the Apothecaries painting, sometimes attributed to Nicholas Hilliard. A stylised depiction of key elements of the Armada story: the alarm beacons, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, and the sea battle at Gravelines. Initially (and spuriously) dated to 1577, probably early 17th century. Via Wikipedia.

Drawing on archives in Austria, Germany, UK, Spain, Mexico, and the US, Kelsey follows Hawkins through various locales scattered across the Atlantic world. This close attention to the individual means narrative rather than analysis drives the book. The author makes no attempts to situate Hawkins’ slave trading in the wider context of the slave trade and the Africans appear as faceless commodities. As a work of biography, however, the book represents a fascinating window onto the character and activities of Sir John Hawkins, English pioneer of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

English ships and the Spanish Armada, August 1588. Unknown painter. Via Wikipedia.

Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (Yale University Press, 2003)

Corpses, Canoes and Catastrophes: An 18th-Century Priest’s Resume

By Susan Zakaib

Sometime in 1737, a Catholic priest climbed into a canoe to save his parishioners’ souls.

The cleric in question, Bernardino Pablo López de Escovedo, was a humble vicario—a parish priest’s assistant—working in a parish called Xaltocan, north of Mexico City. Xaltocan’s head priest had fallen ill and abandoned his post, leaving López de Escovedo to handle the parish on his own.

The timing could not have been worse. A horrific epidemic—which would kill about 200,000 people by 1739—was devastating central Mexico, and by 1737 it had reached Xaltocan. As the area’s sole remaining cleric, López de Escovedo’s priority was to conduct confession for all his sick parishioners before they died. The task was not an easy one: so many died so rapidly that López de Escovedo had trouble keeping up. He became so busy giving last rites that, “three days of the week, he could not eat more than a mug of chocolate, from the… time when he went out—two in the morning—until he got back at eleven or twelve the next night…”

During his long working hours, López de Escovedo was surrounded by death. According to his account, his indigenous parishioners were afraid to touch the corpses of their brethren, and often refused to bring him the bodies of the dead. To ease their fears, “although dressed in a cloak and surplice, he lifted the dead with his own hands, placing them in the casket,” so that they could be buried. At other times, López de Escovedo brought the ill together so he could deliver last rites for all of them at the same time. To ensure that parishioners did not overhear one another during this private ritual, the priest “was obliged to use his sash to cover his face and that of the sick person, suffering the intolerable smell and sweat that they left imprinted upon his face…”

The Virgin of Guadalupe watches over the dead during the epidemic, which contemporaries referred to as “Matlazahuatl.” Fontispiece from Cayetano Cabrera y Quintero’s Escudo de Armas de México, 1746.

The epidemic soon reached a small island, which lay in the midst of the now-defunct Lake Xaltocan. In a little chalupa (a type of canoe), López de Escovedo and a sacristan (church caretaker) traversed the lake’s choppy waters to conduct confession for the island’s sick and dying. The stormy lake proved too much for the small boat: during the hour-and-a-half-long journey, “the waves came up with such ferocity that the boat was about to sink…” The sacristan “went along draining the canoe with his hat unceasingly,” and managed to keep them more or less afloat. Meanwhile, López de Escovedo found himself submerged in water, holding up the consecrated host in hopes of keeping it dry. Finally, they arrived at island and, “by the divine and immense piety of the Lord, even with all these dangers and discomforts… not one sick person died without having first received the Sacraments of Penance and Last Rites.” Many perished on that small island, but thanks to López de Escovedo’s dedication, every soul was prepared to enter the next life.

This story is remarkable in its detail and dramatic flair. Yet its source is not a novel or a historical opus; rather, it is part of López de Escovedo’s resume.

Given that the purpose of López de Escovedo’s resume was to impress his superiors, we can’t know for sure whether his tale is true. In colonial Mexico, priests who sought a benefice (paid jurisdiction over a parish) submitted méritos—lengthy resumes of anywhere from 3-10 pages–to a committee of ecclesiastical examiners. Priests used their méritos to state their qualifications and explain to these committees why they should receive a parish post. López de Escovedo may well have embellished his tale to portray himself as a hero; perhaps his parishioners saw his deeds in Xaltocan differently.

Regardless of their authenticity, stories like this one were common in the resumes of colonial-era priests. Most clerics used their méritos to state who their parents were, describe their educational background and academic accomplishments, list their previous parish experience, and note their accomplishments during past assignments. Like López de Escovedo, many also included stories about their experiences on the job. While most of these narratives were less hyperbolic than López de Escovedo’s, they tended to share similar characteristics: they highlighted the suffering these men had endured as parish priests, and their perseverance in the face of adversity.

While to modern readers the inclusion of such melodramatic episodes might seem counterintuitive, this was a sensible tactic in the context of the 18th-century Mexican Church. Most priests in central Mexico during this period owned a copy of the Itinerario para parochos de indios, a manual for priests’ duties written by Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, bishop of Quito, and first published in 1668. Montenegro quoted the decrees of the Council of Trent—another book that priests frequently carried with them—which stated that the duties of a parish priest were “such a laborious burden that the shoulders of angels were afraid to carry it.” He argued that shouldering this burden was a Christ-like act, since serving as a parish priest was “so difficult and overwhelming that Jesus Christ himself felt its incomparable weight” when he served as the pastor and guardian of disciples who he knew would betray him. Having learned from Montenegro that their hard work and sacrifices made them Christlike, many priests must have felt that the difficulty of administering parishes was what made the job worthwhile.

The Council of Trent meeting in Santa Maria Maggiore church, Trento (Trent). (Artist unknown; painted late 17th century). Via Wikipedia.

However, not all clerics included stories of pain and perseverance in their méritos. By far, clergymen who were relatively poor and undereducated were most likely to take this approach. Priests who were wealthy and very well-educated had plenty to boast about without resorting to dramatic tales: they could list their extensive academic achievements, mention the important people they knew, and describe the expensive gifts they had lavished upon their parish churches. Dr. Joseph Francisco Vásquez de Cabrera, who applied for a benefice in 1709, was one such cleric. Dr. Vásquez wrote in his méritos that he had not bothered to list his accomplishments in university, since he had always been at the top of his classes. Nevertheless, he spent pages painstakingly noting every examination, thesis defense, and public debate that he had completed during the course of his studies. He also stated that, during his time working as a parish priest, he had built a new chapel, adorned the altar, and added a “very expensive” sculpted silver and gold cross, among other generous donations.

Lacking such boast-worthy accomplishments, clergymen with fewer funds and degrees often highlighted their perseverance instead. In doing so, they proved that they had earned a promotion, that they were willing to undergo what they saw as Christlike suffering, and that they had what it took to fulfill their duties under harrowing circumstances. Hence López de Escovedo’s epic narrative. Although he had done well in school, his dismal finances prohibited him from continuing his academic career beyond his bachelor’s degree. With his vivid story, he sought to show that what he lacked in educational accolades, he made up for with nearly boundless dedication to the Church and to the spiritual wellbeing of his parishioners.

López de Escovedo’s strategy appears to have worked: after submitting his méritos in 1749, he received the benefice of Oapan, in modern-day Guerrero. Yet his success paled in comparison to that of Dr. Vásquez, who attained the benefice of Taxco in 1710. Also in Guerrero, Taxco was a much more desirable benefice than Oapan, with a significantly better salary. Although López de Escovedo’s gripping resume was enough to land him a job, his perseverance was no match for education and wealth.

This article was originally published on the author’s website on September 15, 2015

Material is from my forthcoming dissertation, “Built Upon the Tower of Babel: Language Policy and the Clergy in Bourbon Mexico,” The University of Texas at Austin, 2016. Méritos of Bernardino Pablo López de Escovedo and Joseph Francisco Vásquez de Cabrera are located in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City (Bienes Nacionales 199, exp. 12 and Bienes Nacionales 338, exp. 2 respectively).

Screening Vietnam: First Blood and Jaws

Good afternoon, everyone! Thanks so much for joining us. Today, I will be offering a short meditation on cultural memory and the Vietnam War using two case studies that first appeared as blockbuster novels published during the war, and then adapted into popular films, which premiered after the war had ended. While the novels vividly articulated a fractious and divided national zeitgeist during the war, the films transformed the cultural memory of the war through plot twists of revisionism and historical erasure. The first case study, First Blood, is readily familiar as a Vietnam story; the second, Jaws, is less so.

In August 1968, a twenty-five year old graduate student named David Morrell had a creative epiphany while watching the CBS Evening News. The first story was at the scene of a chaotic firefight in the heavily foliated outskirts of Saigon. American soldiers fired from M-16s in response to an enemy assault. The second story—as Morrell recalled it—was about urban unrest in America. Images of smoke, burning buildings, broken glass, and National Guardsmen marching with M-16s filled his small TV screen. (Given the vagaries of memory, Morrell might have actually been watching a report about the antiwar protests at the Democratic National Convention on August 26-29, rather than the urban rebellions, which occurred in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968.): “It occurred to me that, if I’d turned off the sound…I might have thought that both film clips were two aspects of one horror…. The juxtaposition made me decide to write a novel in which the Vietnam War literally came home to America.”[i]

Cover art of First Blood novel. Source: Wikipedia.

Morrell’s protagonists were both veterans and both told their own story from different generational perspectives. The first was a longhaired Vietnam veteran named Rambo, a Green Beret who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor, but suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), adrift, alone, and unemployed in a softening American economy. The second was a Korean War veteran and winner of the Distinguished Service Cross named Wilfred Teasle, a police chief in Madison, Kentucky. Rambo walks into Madison looking for something to eat, where Teasle immediately picks him up and drops him off outside the city limits. Tired of being treated as a social outcast, Rambo decides to stand his ground and return to the town—twice. Finally he is arrested, brutalized in the town jail, escapes, amasses a small arsenal, and returns to war as he lays siege in the woods and kills countless people. His commanding Special Forces officer in Vietnam, Sam Trautman, is called to mediate the standoff, which ends badly: Rambo shoots and kills Teasle and Trautman kills Rambo. Published in 1972, First Blood was translated into twenty-one languages and Morrell immediately sold the film rights to Columbia Pictures.

First Blood film poster. — First Blood movie poster. Source: Wikipedia

But the film languished for ten years.[ii] Morrell’s sympathetic portrayal of Rambo and Teasle as complex and flawed human beings did not readily translate into visual form. Finally, after its new directors made substantial changes to the plot, the film was released in 1982. Rambo was given a first name—Johnny, as in “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” His movement through the small town—set here in the Pacific Northwest—is now purposeful: in the opening scene, Rambo is trying to find a fellow soldier, Delmar Berry, whose family sorrowfully informs him that Delmar is dead. Teasle is now a flat, purely reactionary character. While still volatile, Rambo rarely kills. Rambo merely wounds Teasle. Most significantly, Rambo lives, which allowed for the possibility of serialization.[iii] In the film’s final moments, Rambo surrenders to Trautman, but indicts the society that failed him, “And I had to do what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win.”[iv]

The theme of the abandoned soldier is blasted writ large in the film’s first sequel, Rambo (First Blood Part II): Rambo is released from prison to return to Vietnam on a special mission to search for American POWs. Released in 1985, the film was an international box office hit—the first of three sequels, which Morrell likened to “westerns or Tarzan films.” First Blood Part II’s celebration of Rambo’s massively muscled heroics and its erasure of ambivalence about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam gave popular form to President Reagan’s full-throated declarations of whipping the “Vietnam Syndrome.”

Cover of the first edition of the novel Jaws. Via Wikipedia

At the time of First Blood’s publication in 1972, a writer named Peter Benchley was drafting an “Untitled Novel” about the social and economic chaos unleashed by a murderous great white shark that eats five people at a beach community on Long Island. A member of the celebrated Benchley literary family, Peter grew up watching marine life at his family’s summer home in Nantucket. His childhood fascination with sharks endured at Harvard and his subsequent career as a journalist and a speechwriter in the Johnson Administration. Benchley’s privileged background gave him an intimate sense of the WASPY summer people who populate his fictional seaside community of Amity in the novel that he finally named Jaws.[v] References to Vietnam punctuate the novel. In an early draft, Benchley describes the young adult summer people, the lifeblood of this struggling seaside community, as virtually immune to the shocks of war and socioeconomic upheaval because of their wealth and their ready access to college draft deferments, or through desirable draft assignments as naval officers or reservists:

“If their IQs could be tested en masse, they would show native ability well within the top ten percent of all mankind…. Intellectually, they know a great deal. Practically, they choose to know almost nothing. For they have been subtly conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world is really quite irrelevant to them. And they are right…. They are invulnerable to the emotions of war.”[vi]

By contrast, a local police officer, Len Hendricks, who discovers the grisly remains of the shark’s first victim, is a Vietnam veteran. He is grateful to have a secure job. Trained as a radio technician, he struggled to find work in a glutted market after he returned home from Vietnam.[vii] In wartime Amity, the arrival of the shark is a catalyst for the town’s unraveling: the shark indiscriminately kills locals and summer people alike. Police Chief Martin Brody tries to close the beaches, but is repeatedly thwarted by Mayor Vaughn and his Mafia cronies. The novel is filled with political corruption, class conflict, racial strife, anti-Semitism, drug abuse, and marital infidelity. After Brody hires the crotchety sexagenarian seaman Quint to kill the shark, a tense confrontation erupts between Matt Hooper, the LaCoste-clad Ph.D. ichthyologist, and Quint over their firearms skills. The confrontation quickly turns to Vietnam: “Hooper didn’t know what Quint was doing either, but he didn’t like it. He felt he was being set up to be knocked down. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve shot guns before.’ ‘Where? In the service?’ ‘No. I…’ ‘Were you in the service?’ ‘No.’ ‘I didn’t think so.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Christ, I’d even bet you’re still a virgin.’”[viii]

Hooper and Quint are killed in pursuit of the shark. Only Brody survives. Published in the spring of 1974, the novel was an international bestseller. In the United States alone, the paperback sold over nine million copies.[ix] Benchley was amused to hear that Fidel Castro praised it as a wonderful metaphor for “the corruption of capitalism.” Jaws was also a bestseller in South Africa until it was banned under tightened censorship laws in 1975 for its salacious racial and sexual content.[x]

Even while Benchley was still finishing his “Untitled Novel,” he was working on an adapted screenplay for a movie version with Universal Studios. The movie became a dramatically different cultural product than the novel. Stripped of all references to Vietnam and contemporary socioeconomic conflict, the movie is a lean thriller centered on the rampaging shark and its climactic demise. Quint is now eaten by the shark—its final victim. But Hooper and Brody both live.

Despite the film’s erasure of Vietnam, the war provides an essential context for understanding the film’s reception in the summer of 1975. On April 29-30, North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon and dismantled the remains of South Vietnam, while the American evacuation mission, “Operation Frequent Wind,” frantically rescued Americans and South Vietnamese from the fallen city by helicopter. Just two weeks later, American troops were deployed again during the Mayaguez Incident in Cambodia. The last deaths of America’s longest war occurred in these final military operations.

Amid a jittery national mood, Jaws was released on June 20, 1975. The film was a smash hit, quickly creating a new cinematic category: the summer blockbuster. Directed by a virtually unknown twenty-eight-year-old named Steven Spielberg, Jaws grossed $60 million in its first month and became the most profitable film in American history (only to be displaced by “Star Wars,” two years later). Americans eagerly consumed Jaws paraphernalia: t-shirts, foam shark fins, and shark bones. Jaws terrified its audiences so completely that some coastal tourist towns experienced a recession. Frenzied swimmers occasionally became mobs as they fled the water, or even attacked harmless marine life thought to be sharks. On July 28, 1975, Newsweek dubbed this national hysteria, “Jawsmania.”

The shocks of war conditioned audiences for Jaws. Yet despite the film’s erasure of Vietnam, the movie explicitly remembered World War II in ways that the novel did not. In perhaps the film’s most haunting scene, just hours before his demise, Quint quietly recounts his experiences as a crewmember of the U.S.S. Indianapolis: “Soo, 1100 went in the water. 316 come out. The sharks took the rest. July 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the Bomb.”[xi]

The spring and summer of 1975 marked the thirtieth anniversary of America’s victory in World War II. Quint’s soliloquy reminded audiences of the “Good War,” a bygone era of national unity against a common fascist enemy. The movie’s unprecedented success also catapulted the stratospheric rise of Steven Spielberg, who would become, perhaps, the most influential architect of the nation’s cultural memory of World War II in subsequent decades. As the movie Jaws suggests, memorialization of the Good War could ease and recast the public’s memory of Vietnam.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following was originally presented to the roundtable: “The Vietnam War: Lessons and Legacies across a Half Century” Institute of Historical Studies, UT Austin, Thursday, November 12, 2015. Copyright © by Janet M. Davis

[i] David Morrell, forward, “Rambo and Me,” First Blood (1972, repr., New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000), viii.

[ii] Morrell, xi.

[iii] Morrell, xii.

[iv] First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff (Orion Pictures, 1982), mojvideo.com.

[v] Box 1, I. Manuscripts, A. Books, 2. Novels, a. JAWS (Doubleday, New York, 1974), Folder 19, (ii) Drafts, (i) 4 pages of holograph title suggestions for JAWS, Peter Benchley Collection, #956 (cited hereafter as PBC), Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University (cited hereafter as HGARC).

[vi] Box 1, I. Manuscripts, A. Books 2. Novels, a. JAWS (Doubleday, New York, 1974), Folder 6, (ii) Drafts, (a) Rough partial draft, untitled, TS with holograph corrections, pp. 1-174, June 1972, p. 58, PBC, HGARC.

[vii] Box 1, I. Manuscripts, A. Books 2. Novels, a. JAWS (Doubleday, New York, 1974), Folder 6, (ii) Drafts, (a) Rough partial draft, untitled, TS with holograph corrections, pp. 1-174, June 1972, p. 14, PBC, HGARC.

[viii] Peter Benchley, Jaws (1974, repr., New York: Random House, 2005), 251.

[ix] Benchley, introduction, Jaws, 5.

[x] Benchley, introduction, 4; Erik van Ees, “South Africa: More Censors than Writers,” Montreal Gazette, October 17, 1975, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19751017&id=YpMuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WKEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5335,537667&hl=en.

[xi] Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal City Studios, 1975), DVD (Universal Pictures, 2012).

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing of Europe

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference is about recognizing the limitations of Western social science in explaining the historical experiences of political modernity in South Asia. Chakrabarty offers a critique of the Enlightenment concepts of a universal human experience and of secular modernity. However, his project is not about rejecting European thought as a whole but rather, an effort to renew European thought “from and for the margins” (16), where the diverse histories of human beings and belonging can have a place for themselves. In other words, the idea of Provincializing Europe represents Chakrabarty’s attempt to pluralize the history of global political modernity.

Provincializing Europe is set at the intersection between subaltern studies and postcolonial theory. In alignment with postcolonial theory, Chakrabarty offers a critique of historicism both as a philosophical thought and a conceptual category. He sees postcolonial thought as a practice of critically “engaging the universals—such as the abstract figure of the human or that of Reason—that were forged in eighteenth century Europe and that underlie the human sciences” (5). In other words, Chakrabarty locates a problem in Enlightenment philosophy for assuming the human as an abstract figure. Postcolonial thought, as Chakrabarty suggests, is invested in understanding the different conditions of being, which, in a way, allows one to recognize the diversity of human experiences.

It is this recognition of diversity that compels Chakrabarty to describe the visions and experiences of political modernity in India as different from Europe. This recognition of historical difference allows him to further question historicism as an idea that suggests that to “understand anything, it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development” (6). Chakrabarty, therefore, chooses to displace the temporal structure that historicism as a mode of thinking represents. He argues that historicism represents a stage theory of development wherein modernity, capitalism, and civilization appear in a “first in Europe and then elsewhere” temporal frame. As Chakrabarty problematizes this linear temporal frame, he proposes an alternative reading of the processes of global political modernity by engaging with its antinomies.

Furthermore, Provincializing Europe rejects the idea of a universal history of the globalization of capital by examining the multiple constitutive elements of that history. This move enables Chakrabarty to interrogate Karl Marx’s conceptual category, “abstract labor.” Similar to his critique of historicism, Chakrabarty rejects the temporal totality of history. As opposed to Marx’s universal history of capital, Chakrabarty conceptualizes two histories of capital: “histories posited by capital” as History 1 and the histories that exist outside of “capital’s life process” as History 2.

Chakrabarty considers History 1 as purely analytical, whereas History 2 beckons him “to more effective narratives of human belonging” (71). In other words, Chakrabarty calls for an exploration of the “politics of human diversity” and argues that various History 2s continuously modify History 1. The remarkable achievement of Chakrabarty’s conceptualization of History 2 lies in his ability to create room for incorporating the history of human subjective experiences into the history of capital and vice-versa. To put it differently, Chakrabarty shows a way toward a sensitive reading of the subject while we grapple with the diverse histories of capital’s life processes.

Provincializing Europe also reflects on the problem of conceiving history as a secular subject. Chakrabarty considers secular histories inadequate when it comes to explaining the postcolonial conditions of being. In the particular case of India, there lies a difficulty in conceptualizing political modernity as “the seemingly nonmodern, rural, non secular relationships and life practices” constantly influence the modern institutions of government (11). Since the task of conceptualizing the present in the postcolonial context is laden with such anachronisms, Chakrabarty seeks to develop a conceptual framework that takes into account other forms of the past and other histories that capital encountered as its antecedents. Chakrabarty’s desire for the inclusion of the other forms of the past makes his critique of secular histories powerful. In other words, the idea of Provincializing Europe matters for its reincarnation of the other forms of the past, pasts that constitute the postcolonial conditions of being and belonging.

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Joshua Kopin discusses Walter Benjamin on Violence

Ben Weiss explain’s Slavoj Žižek’s theory of Violence

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

Katherine Maddox on Ranajit Guha’s ideas about hegemony

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

By Nancy Bui

Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture before US’s involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology. The War cost over 58,000 American lives and claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers, over a million of North Vietnamese troops and an estimated 7 million civilians from both North and South Vietnam.

The war was over, but the misunderstandings continued. What can we learn from this war? Perhaps, we may want to look at the war from the Vietnamese perspective. After all, we carry the largest cost of the war and suffered unspeakable atrocities long before and long after America’s involvement. The outcome of the War has affected us tremendously and the ongoing process of healing will take us generations.

On May 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S Marines landed in Da Nang, a beach town North of South Vietnam. It marked the year America officially got involved in The Vietnam War by sending ground troops. However, for the Vietnamese, the war had started many years before. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, an expat who was away from Vietnam for over 30 years, introduced communism into Vietnam. The Vietnamese have had a history of fighting for our sovereignty long before communism arrived. Our people fought the French for our independence from 1885, and we quickly had to fight another war against communists at the same time. In 1954, the Geneva Accords was signed to divide Vietnam into two parts at the 17th parallel. The North belonged to the communist party, and the South belonged to the free Vietnamese.

On May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s 69th birthday, with help from Russia and China, North Vietnam officially kicked off the invasion of South Vietnam. The South fought back in a Guerrilla War which lasted from 1959-1963. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and sent troops to Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Diem on the other hand, only wanted economic aid, weapons, and training, because he believed that any foreign troops on Vietnamese soil would sooner or later offend the Vietnamese people, as fighting for their sovereignty from foreign invaders was their way of life. The conflict ended in his assassination on Nov. 2, 1963.

After sending troops to Vietnam, the conflict extended into a Total War. The battlefields became bloodier and bloodier. Over half a million U.S troops were in South Vietnam by 1968. Vietnam lost the media war, as public opinion and support for the War rapidly declined, triggering a decade of antiwar demonstrations. America started pulling troops out of Vietnam. By the end of 1972, all combat troops were completely withdrawn. In early 1973, Congress passed the resolution to prohibit any funding of The Indochina War. The US was quick to get involved in the war, but was even quicker to retreat from it.

The South Vietnamese Army fought for over two years without any outside assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China more than doubled their aids to North Vietnam. The South fought to their last bullet and finally surrendered on April 30, 1975. The following two slides offer further information what happened after the war.

Walter Benjamin on Divine Violence

Divine violence, an idea set out in Walter Benjamin’s early essay “Critique of Violence,” is violence undertaken by a sovereign individual, a strike at power, an attempt at the dissolution of the law in favor of justice, a decision that reaffirms the sovereignty of the self against the coercive violence of the law. In order to understand the category of “divine violence,” it is critical to understand the other kinds of violence that Benjamin discusses in the essay.

First, Benjamin suggests that the state’s interest in the monopoly on violence is the preservation of the law, distinct from the goal of preserving a particular legal system. As he says “violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens [the law] not by the ends it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.” This violence is “law-making.” It makes its own law, its own order, and therefore is restricted by the state, except in the particular circumstances of war and striking workers.

Violence that is utilized by the state, in contrast, is “law-preserving.” Law-preserving violence is the appearance of the law-making violence that initiated a legal system in that system’s present, harnessed to ensure its continued existence. Benjamin says that both kinds of violence – law-making and law-preserving — are manifest in police power, which is “law-making because its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws, but the assertion of legal claims for any decree, and law-preserving because it is at the disposal of those ends.” Both these forms of legal violence are problematic but necessary. There is no resolution of human conflict without them.

There is, however, a kind of violence that appears to exist outside of the legal sphere. Benjamin calls this “mythic violence,” and it is the assertion of the existence of the gods (writ broadly, understood as something like “the powerful”), and of the power of their law. The challenge that is responded to with mythic violence is not the challenge to the state as such, but instead a challenge put to fate, understood here as something like “that which must happen.” Mythic violence, then, is the response to law-making violence, also understood as power-making violence and boundary-making violence. Power inevitably responds to such challenges with a demonstration of itself.

Divine violence stands in contrast to mythico-legal violence, which justifies its means in the end of its own perpetuation. Divine violence is “law-destroying.” It is justice intervening against legal and mythic violence in favor of the sacredness of the human, which is limited by the latter to its material condition, its “mere life.” In defending the sacredness of the human, divine violence also protects end-in-itselfness, the fact of vibrant humanity, the ability to make choices for ourselves, to make the law for ourselves, and ultimately our ability to reveal the world through language, sociality, and observation. In this way, divine violence is not literally of God—although it certainly resembles God’s violence. Instead, it protects what is sacred about humanity against the coercive force of unjust law. Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek sees Benjamin’s divine violence as accruing, perhaps in the superstructure, to be released in response to the pent up sufferings of millions. This violence is therefore that which is in excess of bare, lawful life, lashing out at that which restrains it. Even so, divine violence “serves no means”; if it were to express itself in revolution, to result in some kind of political, social, or cultural change, it would be law-making violence instead.