The two Declarations of American Independence

Representations

Volumn 55, Issue , 1996, Pages 13-30

  Rogin, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547233285     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.1996.55.1.99p0438k     Document Type: Review

References (102)

1. Portions of the present essay are adapted from my Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, 1996).
2. The Turner quotation is in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 4.
3. Abraham Lincoln, speech at Chicago, 10 June 1858, in Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches, Messages, and Letters, ed. T. Harry Williams (New York, 1957), 91-92.
4. Also a metaphorical cross-dressing, and in no way merely second in importance to minstrelsy, the frontier myth made out of Indian dispossession a politics and culture that both overlaps with and departs from the race relations visible under burnt cork. The frontier myth is chronicled elsewhere, most authoritatively now in Richard Slotkin's trilogy, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973),
5. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985),
6. and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992).
7. John Patrick Diggins, "The Pursuit of Whining," New York Times, 25 September 1995, A11.
8. Thomas Jefferson, "Autobiography," in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York, 1944), 25-26;
9. James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981), 311-19, 342-46;
10. Stephen Hopkins, "The Rights of Colonies Examined [1763]," in Tracts of the American Revolution, 1763-1776, ed. Merrill Jenson (Indianapolis, 1967), 41-62.
11. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 256, 262.
12. See also Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 429-81;
13. James Campbell and James Oakes, "The Invention of Race; Rereading White over Black" Reviews in American History 21 (1993): 172-83.
14. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
15. James Snead, White Screens/Black Images (New York, 1994), 60.
16. F. O. Matthiesen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941);
17. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), 42;
18. Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York, 1983), 15-23, 70-76;
19. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (New York, 1988), quoted 170, 174, 205;
20. Lawrence Buell, "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon," American Literary History 4 (Fall 1992): 411-42;
21. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960).
22. The indispensable studies of nineteenth-century minstrelsy are Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974);
23. William W. Austin, "Susanna," "Jeannie," and "The Old Folks at Home": The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours, 2d ed. (Urbana, 111., 1989);
24. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990), 119-80;
25. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991);
26. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993). A full discussion of minstrelsy would have to address what Lott and Roediger (from different perspectives) make central, the origins of blackface in the northern white working class.
27. Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York, 1975);
28. Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Fall of an American Jester (New York, 1986), 70;
29. W. T. Lhamon Jr., "Constance Rourke's Secret Reserve," introduction to Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; reprint, Gainesville, 1986), xxiii, xxiv;
30. Rourke, American Humor, 95-104;
31. Lott, Love and Theft, 56;
32. Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 118-23.
33. Lewis Ehrenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Night Life and the Tramformation of American Culture (Chicago, 1981);
34. Michael Rogin, "The Great Mother Domesticated: Sexual Difference and Sexual Indifference in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance," Critical Inquiry 15 (Spring 1989): 525-30;
35. David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York, 1994), 1-2, 45-61, 91-94, 115-16 (quoted 45).
36. Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (New York, 1991);
37. Ethan Mordden, "'Show Boat' Crosses Over," New Yorker, 3 July 1989, 94;
38. Austin, "Susanna," "Jeannie," and "The Old Folks at Home";
39. Gary Giddins, Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop (New York, 1981), 5-17.
40. I first made this claim in "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice," Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992): 417-20. The following pages expand on and modify that argument.
41. The definitive treatment of Porter is Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, 1991).
42. John Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith (Berkeley, 1983);
43. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 23-125;
44. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, 1965), 183.
45. Compare Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 212-30;
46. Tom Gunning, "Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith's Biograph Films," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6 (Winter 1981): 12-25;
47. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde," in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema (London, 1990), 56-62;
48. Noel Burch, "Narrative/Diegesis: Threshold, Limits," Screen (July-August 1982): 16-33;
49. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, 1992), 101-23;
50. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 90-125.
51. William L. Slout, "Uncle Tom's Cabin in American Film History," Journal of Popular Film 2 (Spring 1973): 137-52;
52. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (New York, 1973), 3;
53. Thomas R. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York, 1977), 12-14;
54. Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth (Knoxville, Tenn., 1981), 12-14, 37-39;
55. Staiger, Interpreting Films, 101-23.
56. Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment, 1915-1928 (Berkeley, 1990), 184.
57. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (New York, 1949), 197;
58. J. Hoberman, "Our Troubling Birth Rite," Village Voice, 3 November 1993, 2-4 (quoted 3);
59. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 90-142, 183.
60. The discussion of Birth of a Nation here is derived from my "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation," in "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, 1987).
61. Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment, 214.
62. Robert Sklar, "Oh! Althusser!: Historiography and the Rise of Cinema Studies," in Robert Sklar and Edwin Musser, eds., Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History (Philadelphia, 1990), 19-32;
63. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988).
64. See Tom Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York, 1988).
65. William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York, 1978), 373-74;
66. "'Gone with the Wind' Champ Again," Variety, 4 May 1983, 5;
67. Carleton Jackson, Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel (New York, 1990), 35, 46-51 (quoting Selznick);
68. Patrice Storace, "Look Away, Dixie Land," New York Review of Books, 19 December 1991, 24-27;
69. John D. Stevens, "The Black Reaction to Gone with the Wind," Journal of Popular Film 2 (Fall 1973): 367;
70. Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representation of Race and Region (New York, 1994), 171-81.
71. Toni Morrison, "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac," in Toni Morrison, ed., Raceing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York, 1992), xv.
72. See my "'Democracy and Burnt Cork': The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights," Representations 46 (Spring 1994): 1-34.
73. Compare David Lloyd, "Race Under Representation," Oxford Literary Review 13 (Summer 1991): 81;
74. Catherine Gallagher, "The Politics of Culture and the Debate over Representation," Representations 5 (Winter 1984): 115-47;
75. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 706-7;
76. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 49;
77. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 14-18.
78. Adam Clymer, "The Presidents' Analysts," New York Times Book Review, 10 December 1995, 12.
79. Like the author of the book he is reviewing (Ben Wattenberg, Values Matter Most [New York, 1995]), Clymer uses the "social" label to avoid facing up to race.
80. Alexander Cockburn, "Beat the Devil," Nation, 27 November 1995, 656;
81. Alfred Holt Stone, "Is Race Friction Between Blacks and Whites in the United States Growing and Inevitable?" American Journal of Sociology (1908): 692,
82. quoted in Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston, 1995), 160.
83. Mike Davis, "Hell Factories in the Fields," Nation, 20 February 1995, 229-33;
84. Richard Walker, "California Rages Against the Dying of the Light," New Left Review 209 (1995): 60-61;
85. Fox Butterfield, "Political Gains by Prison Guards," New York Times, 7 November 1995, A1, A15;
86. Andrew Sullivan, "Affirmative Action Is Dead, Even If Clinton Doesn't Know It," International Herald Tribune, 25 July 1995, 6.
87. The Supreme Court decision (1993) is Shaw v. Reno. For Bob Dole's version of "civil rights," co-authored with the freshman black congressman from Oklahoma elected in 1994, see Bob Dole and J. C. Watts Jr., "A New Civil Rights Agenda," Wall Street Journal, 27 July 1995, 6.
88. "The Fight over Orphanages," Newsweek, 16 January 1995, 22.
89. Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), reprints Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," by the then assistant secretary of labor in the Lyndon Johnson administration, now the senior senator from New York.
90. See also Todd S. Purdom, "The Newest Moynihan," New York Times Magazine, 7 August 1994,36;
91. Robert Pear, "Moynihan Promises Something Different on Welfare," New York Times, 14 May 1995, A13;
92. Robin Toner, "Senate Approves Welfare Plan That Would End Aid Guarantee," New York Times, 20 September 1995, A1, A17.
93. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994);
94. J. Philip Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994);
95. Malcolm W. Browne, "What Is Intelligence and Who Has It?" New York Times Book Review, 16 October 1994, 3, 41, 45-46.
96. On the role of black culture donors in the major 1994 movies, see Cecil Brown, "Doing That Ol'Oscar Soft Shoe," San Francisco Examiner, Image Magazine, 26 March 1995, 25-27, 38-41.
97. Aware of the irony, I am borrowing from his discussion. On interracial friendship as Hollywood's solution to the race problem, see Benjamin DeMott, "Put on a Happy Face: Masking the Differences Between Black and White," Harper's, September 1995, 31-38.
98. Bernard Weinraub, "Senator Moves to Control Party's Moral Agenda," New York Times, 1 June 1995, A1, B10;
99. Bob Dole, "To Shame an Industry," New York Times, "Letters," 8 June 1995, A15.
100. Hoberman, "Our Troubling Birth Rite," 2-4.
101. "The Top Money Makers, for Now," New York Times, 14 May 1995, H22.
102. Todd S. Purdom, "Senator Deals Blow to Affirmative Action," New York Times, 10 March 1995, A10.