history

Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the fun Bechdel Test video we link to frequently (and blogger at Feminist Frequency), emailed to let us know about Jonathan McIntosh’s most recent video. McIntosh, who posts at rebellious pixels, has a knack for remixing elements of pop culture to make larger social points. He made the Buffy vs. Edward remix we posted last year.

His newest video, Right Wing Radio Duck, mixes scenes from 50 different Donald Duck cartoons with audio of Glenn Beck:

Glenn Beck actually responded to it. Here’s the audio:

When I read part of the transcript first, I honestly thought Beck was joking and playing along. But after listening to it, I think he’s serious.

Of course, he’s also making some accurate points: Walt Disney was extremely anti-union and anti-Communist. He served as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 (transcript here). Others have accused Disney of being a Nazi sympathizer — swastikas and other symbols show up in some Disney cartoons — though The Straight Dope says Disney’s politics weren’t easy to pin down (for instance, the cartoon where Donald Duck is a Nazi eventually shows it to have been a nightmare; is that pro-Nazi or not?).

But back to Beck’s fascinating response, and how seriously he takes this “unbelievable attack.” He seems to imply the Fair Use doctrine allows propaganda, but also that Disney is somehow in on it (“apparently Disney doesn’t have a problem with Donald Duck cartoons now being remixed and politicized for the progressive left”). Of course, that’s the point of the Fair Use doctrine: whether or not Disney is ok with it isn’t relevant, because Fair Use protects the right to use otherwise copyrighted material. Specifically, according to the U.S. Copyright Office, “Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.” It’s hard for me to imagine that Beck doesn’t know that; I’m sure he’s used material on his program at some point — say, news footage or historical photographs — and was able to do so specifically because of the fair use doctrine.

His response also reminds me of an episode of Fresh Air I heard earlier this week. Historian Sean Wilentz discusses how often Beck draws on 1950s Cold War-era ideologies, and that he has made them resonant again. Five years, saying “communists” and “socialists” in an ominous tone and implying that communism is in danger of spreading across America would have made you ultra-fringe, and I don’t think it would have had much cultural resonance. Now throwing around accusations of socialism and conspiracy theories isn’t at all out of the ordinary.

Given that resurgence in ideas that arose from the right during the Cold War, combined with Disney’s anti-Communist and anti-labor stance from that period, I think actually makes McIntosh’s use of old Disney cartoons even more effective as social commentary.

And just for fun, ikat381 remixed part of Beck’s response with an old Mickey Mouse cartoon:

In this Zócalo video, sociologist Jennifer Lee discusses the social construction of race and the history of the U.S. census with NALEO’s Arturo Vargas and the L.A. Times‘ Steve Padilla:

For more on the social construction of race, see our post on race and ethnicity in censuses around the world.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

History isn’t fact, but a narrative.  Nations narrate their own histories, telling the stories about themselves that they prefer.  Holidays are one way in which these stories are told and re-told.

At www.america.gov, the U.S. government describes Columbus Day as a”commemoration” of Columbus’ “landing in the New World” (they astutely avoid the term “discovery”) and initiating a “lasting encounter” between the mis-named “Indians” and Europeans (no mention of genocide or the stealing of land).

Contesting this particular version of history, an organization calling itself Reconsider Columbus Day is asking Americans to adopt an alternative national narrative, one that both acknowledges and emphasizes the oppressive and unjust outcomes of the ongoing “lasting encounter” between American “Indians” and Europeans-now-Americans.

The narrative and counter-narrative is an interesting example of how nation-founding memories are not set, but always potentially changing as the national ethos and distribution of power shifts underneath them.

For more on national memories, see our post comparing the German approach to the Holocaust and the America approach to slavery.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Jeremiah sent in a fascinating post by Nicola at edible geography about how Prohibition, which outlawed liquor in the U.S. from 1920-1933, changed our culture in a number of ways that aren’t immediately apparent. Nicola draws heavily on historian David Okrent’s book Last Call.

An image from Detroit the day before Prohibition went into effect in 1920:

Although Prohibition made liquor illegal, there were a number of loopholes, including certain alcoholic “fruit juices” (which in effect meant wine and hard ciders were often allowed), medicinal uses of alcohol, and industrial alcohols. Nicola provides an image of a prescription booklet for medicinal alcohol:

These loopholes led to a dramatic rise in the popularity of wine in the U.S.: “American wine consumption increased from 70 million gallons in 1917 to 150 million gallons in 1925,” according to Nicola. That change affected the agriculture of California, in particular, where many acres of other crops were replaced with wine grapes. In another unexpected consequence, Okrent argues that the medicinal use loophole was a central factor in the success of drugstores such as Walgreen’s, since sales of alcohol for medical purposes were very profitable.

Prohibition also affected international maritime laws. At that time nations controlled the areas up to three miles off their shores. Along much of the U.S. coast, “Rum Rows” emerged, strings of generally foreign-owned ships anchored just outside the 3-mile jurisdiction limit, all full of liquor. They would openly advertise prices. This is an image of the Kirk and Sweeney loaded with illegal alcohol in 1924 (via):

The U.S. Coast Guard has a collection of images of its efforts to stop the illegal importation of liquor. This image shows one of the small rum runner boats that would sail from the shore to Rum Row to load up on alcohol, as it approaches a British-owned boat called the Katherine in 1923:

Nicola describes the scene:

…a floating ship-city, thousands of miles in length, bobbing up and down in place along the coast of America, and serviced by a fleet of much smaller, nimble rum runners that slipped to and from the mainland under cover of night.

The U.S. government began to push for an extension of the area of the ocean over which governments have jurisdiction, from 3 miles to 12, which would make it much more difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous to run liquor in from the larger ships. The U.S. eventually succeeded in pushing its national borders outward, expanding national sovereignty over oceans, another unexpected consequence of our anti-alcohol policies. Rum Row dutifully relocated farther offshore.

Apparently Prohibition also fueled the popularity of mixed drinks (the mixers helped mask the smell and often unpleasant taste of bootleg liquor) and dinner parties (since you couldn’t buy liquor openly at restaurants but were relatively safe serving it in your home).  According to a set of Life photos about Prohibition, sales of Coca Cola tripled, since soda served as both a substitute and mixer for alcohol:

From the Life photoessay:

“People don’t realize,” Okrent told LIFE.com, “how much drinking there was in this country before Prohibition. We were awash in booze. In 1830, for example, the per capita consumption of alcohol was three times what it is today — 90 bottles of booze per year per person over the age of 15. By 1933, drinking was around 70 percent of pre-Prohibition levels, and with some fluctuations has stayed well below pre-Prohibition levels ever since.

Okrent says that contrary to what we often see in movies, where speakeasies are built to be easily dismantled or disguised as legal businesses in case the cops raided, by the late 1920s, many speakeasies were set up as permanent structures that were clearly serving liquor, and customers felt fairly secure going to them:

As soon as liquor became legal again, Americans enthusiastically returned to openly buying and selling it, though, as Okrent said, not at pre-Prohibition levels (photo from a different Life photoessay):

The Budweiser company decided to deliver beer to several high-profile locations by horse-drawn cart as a marketing stunt, giving us the iconic Budweiser Clydesdales. Here they are on their way to the Empire State Building:

And if you buy Okert’s argument, Prohibition even gave us NASCAR; he says it emerged in the South after Prohibition ended, when all the former runners of liquor needed new uses for their driving skills and fast cars now that they could no longer make a profit smuggling booze.

So there you have it: some of the unintended consequences of Prohibition, and example of the way public policy can have implications for areas of social life that seem far removed from the topic at hand.

On this day in 1911, suffragettes in California squeaked out a victory, making the state the sixth to give women the vote and doubling the number of female voters in the U.S.  See David Dismore’s great summary at Ms.

Campaign poster reproduction (c. 1896-1910, from David Dismore’s collection):

The New York Times reports:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

As you may have heard, this week the Republican Party released what they’ve termed a “Pledge to America,” a document that lists their agenda for the next legislative session. Erin Echols, a student at Kennesaw State U., took a look at it and was struck by the contents, particularly the images.

Of the 48 total pages of the document, 14 consist of images, either a single one or a collage of several. Of course, in a document of this sort, you’re going to have the required patriotic images — the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Capitol and other buildings in D.C. Nothing surprising there. But Erin points out that the cowboy seems to be a recurring theme.

It reminded me of a post by Macon D. over at Racialicious a while back about some ads by a Republican primary candidate for Agricultural  Commissioner in Alabama:

The hat, the horse, the rifle, the sweeping music that makes me think of old Western movies… it all evokes what Macon D. calls the “Independent (White) Cowboy Myth,” a version of rugged, stand-alone, honest manhood. Macon D. quotes Mel at BroadSnark:

In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Here’s the follow-up ad he made after losing:

And, for the record, I’m not arguing this presentation of Dale Peterson is necessarily fake; for all I know he dresses and acts like that all the time. People do; I’m related to some of them. I’m not saying Peterson is a fraud who really wears tuxes and has never been on a horse. That’s irrelevant. What I’m interested in is the power of a particular cowboy mythology, the one on display in Peterson’s ads.

As Macon D. points out, Ronald Reagan actively appropriated the cowboy persona, often wearing cowboy hats and jeans, sometimes alongside a horse (he had also played cowboys in a couple of movies). He openly identified with the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” an effort by groups in the western U.S. in the ’70s and ’80s to stop designation of federal lands as protected wilderness areas, push for more mining and livestock grazing rights on public land, and oppose some other environmental and land use regulations, depicted as impositions from distant elites.

Macon D. quotes Sarah Watts on the appeal of the White cowboy myth when Theodore Roosevelt first used it:

…he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

The cowboy myth, then, arose partly to allay deep anxieties about changes in American society. But the myth is just that — a myth, a romanticized notion largely unmoored from the realities of cowboys’ lives. Mel says,

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

This isn’t true just in the past. I know people who work as hired hands on ranches now. They love many aspects of the life. But most of them aren’t particularly well-paid; they don’t have retirement benefits or health insurance; they aren’t on a path to being able to buy their own ranch and be a self-reliant family farmer. Some become managers, with more responsibility and money, as in any occupation. But sometimes what initially seemed like a great deal — getting free housing as part of the job — turns out to have downsides, such as being expected to be available round-the-clock since you’re right there on the property, or fearing that if you piss off your employer and get fired, you’re out of a place to live immediately as well.

The examples I’ve given here have all been Republicans. Democrats use the cowboy mythology as well — Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is well known for often appearing in a cowboy hat and nearly always wearing a bolo tie rather than a necktie. However, Republicans seem to appropriate the cowboy persona more often, or at least more successfully.

Anyway…back to Erin’s analysis of the “Pledge to America.” The other interesting feature of the images is their overwhelming Whiteness. Some examples of group photos:

Overall, the photos show a sea of Whiteness. As Erin says, whether it’s an unintentional oversight or a calculated choice, the resulting message is that America’s citizens, the hard-working, patriotic folks who matter and to whom the party is making pledges, are White. Given the current racialized tone of much of our political debate (especially regarding Hispanic immigrants and Muslims, a racialized group often conflated with “Arabs”), it’s a portrait of America that is likely to speak to, and soothe, the fears of some groups more than others.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

The New York Times reports that there has been an increase in the percent of Black Americans reporting that they are “pretty” or “very” happy (though Blacks lag behind Whites in happiness).  Indeed, while their happiness quotient appears to have dipped a bit this decade, Blacks have reported significantly higher rates of happiness in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, compared to the ’70s.

Still, the article entirely skips over the fascinating gender difference.  While American Black men’s happiness appears to have peaked in the ’80s and ’90s, they show real losses in reported happiness in the ’00s.  In contrast, Black women’s happiness has been steadily rising; they  neither express the same rapid increases or decreases that characterize the trend among men.

When we look at race and gender together, Black men are often among the most disadvantaged groups in society.  They are among the most hard hit by the recession in terms of joblessness.  They are less likely than Black women to enroll in and complete college.  That said, I am hardly an expert in happiness studies… any ideas as to why the gender disparity in self-reported happiness would be so much stronger among Blacks than Whites?

Via Racialicious, and sender-inners Patricia P. and Dmitriy T.M.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This week the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the American poverty rate has reached 14.3%, the highest it has been in 15 years:

Children are over-represented among the poor; among those  less than 18-years-old, the poverty rate is 20.7%:

The Census report suggests that the poverty rate would be even higher if it weren’t for an increase in non-nuclear family households.  Over the last two years, an additional 11.6 percent of households now include non-family or family members from three generations or more.  Consider this data from Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality blog (and notice that the near poor are more likely to be living with a grandparent than the poor, who may not have this option):

So, the economic recession is correlated with an increase in poverty, but what does “poverty” really mean?   The New York Times reports that in 2009 it meant a pretax income of $10,830 for a single person with no dependents and less than twice that, $22,050, for a family of four.

Trying to imagine keeping a roof over my head, sufficient food in my belly, and clothes on my back on that amount of money is difficult.  But even if this was possible, human beings  need more than food, shelter, and clothes.  Try to imagine, with this amount of money, maintaining friendships and romantic partnerships, nurturing your children’s emotional health and educational potential, having pride and comfort in your home and personal appearance, finding the resources to invest in your own human capital, or giving yourself a modicum of leisure.  Poor people are human too and these numbers only begin to scratch the surface of the kind of deprivation many Americans suffer every day.

Images borrowed from Graphic Sociology.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.