As American as Apfelkuchen

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment
Immigrants aboard an Atlantic liner, 1906, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–11202

Somewhere along the roller coaster of Super Bowl LI as the New England Patriots dug themselves out of a 25-point hole to win Tom Brady his thumb ring, Budweiser ran a one-minute commercial that reawakened a dormant resentment.

The commercial, with its fairly high production values, depicts a coming-to-America narrative of a young German immigrant circa 1850. His ship encounters a storm, knocking him from his bunk, which leads to stitches for a scalp wound. After having his entry papers stamped, he’s shoved on the street by nativists and told to go back home. His paddle wheeler burns and he’s forced to abandon ship, finally arriving cold and wet on the muddy banks of St. Louis. In a saloon, a stranger named Anheuser kindly buys him a beer, and our hero introduces himself as Adolphus Busch. Cut to the company logo.

The resulting #BoycottBudweiser movement went flat less than 24 hours after the bottle was opened but in the meantime, infuriated viewers — doubtlessly more than a six-pack into the evening — fired off angry tweets about Muslims, illegal immigrants, and keeping America safe, all the while disregarding the images before their bloodshot eyes that Busch was (a) very probably not-at-all Muslim, (b) entered the US legally with his paperwork in order, and (c) had designs no more sinister than brewing a low-APV lager. But such is 2017, wherein Americans are assumed to have appeared on the continent spontaneously like mice from dirty laundry and an immigrant’s story, once a plaque of honor showcased on the wall of the American Dream, is now dismissed as agenda-driven propaganda.

More than 300 years after William Penn organized a group of German “atheists” to emigrate to his colony (German law only recognized Catholics and Lutherans, and Penn recruited Quakers, Mennonites, and others), it seems German immigration still raises hackles in America, even though 49 million identified as having German ancestry in the 2013 census — more than 15 percent of the nation and the largest ancestry group tabulated.

One would imagine a story like Busch’s would suggest that twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now a president surnamed Rodriguez or Gupta or Farooq will be no less strange than one named Eisenhower; and that whatever concerns one might have about the assimilation of Hispanics and Muslims into American culture would disappear like a sauerkraut-topped hot dog eaten under a Christmas tree. But the animosity that erupted, however briefly, on February 5 toward a German immigrant story is emblematic of an American nativism once believed as extinct as a Know-Nothing but actually resurgent in the 21st century.

We may assume prejudice is always founded upon visible and obvious distinctions. Yet the English — and, in turn, their heirs among colonial America and the United States — have never needed much excuse to look down their noses at other cultures. In a 1753 letter, Benjamin Franklin complained about German immigrants that, “Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation,” before tallying a menu of deficiencies.

At the battle of Shiloh, the Confederate Henry Stanley (yes, that Stanley, of Livingstone fame) was outraged that Germanic Federal soldiers had the audacity to capture him, saying, “They were apparently new troops, from such back-lands as were favoured by German immigrants; and, though of sturdy build, another such mass of savagery and stupidity could not have been found within the four corners of North America.”[1] That he felt free to write such in a memoir published in 1909 suggests sympathetic rancor still existed in the breasts of at least some of his readers a half-century later.

The Native American Party, which eventually morphed into the American Party or the “Know-Nothings” due to the semi-secretive nature of their proceedings, held their first convention in 1845. Their Declaration of Principles celebrating nativism is a scratchy wax cylinder looped endlessly during a Certain Somebody’s 2016 campaign:

  • “The almshouses of Europe are emptied upon our coast.”
  • “[T]he lives of our citizens have been attempted in the streets of our capital cities by madmen just liberated from European hospitals.”
  • “[T]he punishment of crimes has been commuted for banishment to the land of the free; and criminals in irons have crossed the ocean to be cast loose upon society on their arrival upon our shores.”

Immigration was fine and dandy in the days of Georgie W. and Tommy J., said the Know-Nothings, but now times and the types of immigrants are different. Foreigners didn’t assimilate, or if they did, they usurped and warped supposedly pristine republican processes by lobbying for their interests (e.g., New York’s Tammany Society). Democracy itself and “the civil institutions of the United States of America” stood “in imminent peril.”

Immigrants at Ellis Island, circa 1907–1917, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–26543

To be fair, contemporary worries about non-assimilation and even German separatism were not fabricated whole cloth. In the 1830s groups like the Giessen Society and New York’s Germania Society dreamed of establishing miniature Deutschlands in Texas and the wide-open west. Some of these were to be founded on the same republican principles that had booted many exiles from the Old Country in the first place; some were socialist utopianism; and still others were intended to duplicate feudal caste systems. None of the schemes amounted to much, foundering as they did upon the apathy of a population more interested in homesteading than nation-building.

In the late 1800s, German-Americans circled the wagons around their language with newspapers and preservation groups, a phenomenon to be expected among older generations anxious by fading traditions (like jellyfish, Old World languages don’t last long on American shores — today only about 40 percent of third-generation Hispanics speak Spanish and even fewer can read it).

Even so, the physical manifestation of German settlers’ support networks into towns and communities ratcheted up xenophobia among native born. In an 1849 speech, a Kentucky congressman complained about German enclaves “living in isolation; speaking a strange language, having alien manners, habits, opinions, and religious faiths, and a total ignorance of our political institutions; all handed down with German phlegm and inflexibility.” He suggested instead they emigrate to South America where they could “aid in bringing up the slothful and degenerate Spanish race; here their deplorable office is to pull us down.”[2]

As the temperance movement gained speed during the 19th century, it became increasingly unclear whether ethnic Americans were targeted for their drinking habits or whether prohibition was a way to target ethnics. German beer gardens and saloons were the suns of orbiting ethic working-class identity — part bar, part function hall, part clubhouse, and all community center. The same could be said for Irish, Italian, Jewish, and every other stripe of immigrant establishment. Through prohibition, reformers sought to dissolve ethnic identity by throwing bleach on what they saw as dirty and foreign.

German-Americans were fond of the “Continental Sunday,” that is, church services in the morning followed by an afternoon of foamy steins at a biergarten submerged in gemütlichkeit and oompah music. In 1855, the Know-Nothing mayor of Chicago, disgusted by all the brewskis and tubas around him, closed the city’s beer halls on Sundays, resulting in the Lager Beer Riot. By the First World War, the Anti-Saloon League used anti-German hysteria to curtail beer manufacture by lobbying for the Food and Fuel Control Act, which prohibited the use of grain for distillation and gave the President control of beer and wine production. It was essentially a test run for Prohibition.

The revelation that some American brewers had been funding the National German-American Alliance, a civic group, which in turn had bought a pro-Kaiser newspaper, knotted the association between Germanic culture and sedition in John Q. Public’s mind. “Everything in this country that is pro-German is anti-American,” read one League pamphlet.[3] Businesses with “German” in their name rechristened themselves, Germanophonic newspapers declined, and those who spoke both Deutsch and Englisch became strictly monolingual in public. The WASPs were allowed to keep their country clubs and Methodist meeting halls while ethnics were supposed to retreat inside their homes, stare at the walls, and be silent.

There was another reason why many Americans disliked German immigrants, one that is subtly referenced in the Budweiser commercial when young Adolphus Busch is standing at the rail of the paddle boat, dreaming his sudsy daydreams, and smiles at a black passenger. German immigrants, for whatever reason — religion, politics — were hardcore abolitionists. Those German Quakers of William Penn’s? In 1688 they issued the first recorded protest against slavery in North America, and eventually guilt-tripped their English coreligionists — who were ambivalent about the slave trade — into embracing abolitionism wholesale. Anti-slavery views became synonymous with German identity; one traveler to antebellum Texas reported never meeting a single slave-owning German. During the Civil War, German-Americans disproportionally volunteered for Northern service — although for some it was simply because they needed a job after rolling off the boat.

The Atlantic Garden, a beer garden in NYC’s East Village, 1871, New York Public Library

A question sometimes asked in the scholarship of American-German history revolves around the so-called “spiritual drain” the many waves of immigration may have had on Germany. “The Nazi assumption of power might not have been possible if so many of the ‘good’ Germans had not fled in revolt against Prussian authoritarianism, against the militarism and nationalism which began rising in Germany during the middle of the nineteenth century,” wrote historian Richard O’Connor.[4] We can leave that answer to Man in the High Castle fanfic. Yet according to The Economist, German-American households have incomes above the national median, are more likely to be college graduates, and less likely to be jobless. This certainly has less to do with wizard magic in the blood than it does with a strong ethic and tradition passed through the generations, parent to child, beginning with those first immigrants. If one possesses the mindset to do a foreign country some harm — as many modern nativists seem to have — might not a strategy of “spiritual drain” be attractive? Suppose for a minute that if we took all the Syrian doctors and Iraqi professors and anyone else who has the gumption and wherewithal to show up here, PhD or otherwise, wouldn’t that be to our advantage and to the old country’s detriment?

The fickleness of the mob can turn on 10 pfennigs, and as #BoycottBudweiser proved, the old prejudice against Germans is still a warm ember that can be used to light fires against other groups today. Nativists will cherry-pick facts and deploy statistics but ultimately theirs is an emotional, even hysterical, ideology: if a beer commercial about white immigration unhinges you, then no amount of reason will soothe your terror of the brown hordes.

The German philosopher Carl Schmitt (and BTW *cough cough* a Nazi) believed that the political identity of a group coalesces around what its members believe is normal and right; and what is normal and right to them is itself defined in opposition to the customs and morals of another group. By defining their identity as a denial of their own immigrant roots — or at least by crowning their genealogies with white Stetsons — modern nativists defend themselves from every criticism: to point out deficiencies in their beliefs or toward history for counter-arguments is, on a certain level, to attack their very identity, which is almost always fated to fail. Ask any stand-up comedian and she’ll tell you that you it’s tough to mock a deeply held idea without also mocking the people who hold it.

My dad, who as a lifelong Democrat and civil servant probably has the most reason to feel anger at current events, remains blithe and unfazed these days. This too shall pass is a common saying of his, a result of seventy-odd years of human observation. This too shall pass — or, as I like to paraphrase, I will shit on your grave. Today’s outrage over bathrooms is often too inconsequential or boring to merit a sentence in tomorrow’s high-school history text. We German-Americans may have faded into the wallpaper but we’re still here nevertheless, still winning simply by hanging around centuries after the haters passed out blotto on the couch. There’s no reason why anyone else can’t do likewise.

[1] Henry M. Stanley, The Autobiography of Henry Morton Stanley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), 200–201.

[2] Richard O’Connor, The German-Americans: An Informal History (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 75.

[3] Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 32.

[4] O’Connor, 9.

Cross-posted on Medium.

Mourning Dove

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

I have a weird Western called “Mourning Dove” in the anthology Principia Ponderosa, now available.

She rose and walked to the press. “My husband started this newspaper to compete with the other established dailies in town. Every one of them printed a single edition per day. He realized he could gain an advantage by running two editions every day, and jump the competition by putting a morning edition on the streets for folks to read while they ate their bacon. But publishing two newspapers every single day is hard work, and doesn’t leave time for much else. So he invented this press to write the morning edition for him.” She patted the metal. “Thing is, he went ahead and somehow made a machine that wrote news before it happened, saving him the trouble of having to write about it afterwards.”

Certain recent aspects of my personal life have entailed me staring through a telescope into my future and I haven’t always liked what I’ve seen. I asked myself, Would anybody really want to know what lay ahead if they could?

Principia Ponderosa is available for Kindle and in paperback. The art above isn’t the cover; editor Juliana Rew used it for flavor when she sent around her submissions call and I love its digital whimsy, located somewhere between deco and 16-bit.

Open Loops

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment
Office Politics by Shag. Copyright is his, illustration reproduced for discussion purposes only, please don’t sue.

Over at Electric Lit, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats has an interview about his second novel, Universal Harvester, and his reliance on beta readers to provide “gentle reminders that I have to close loops” in his fiction:

There’s a scene where they’re editing video tapes, and originally there were cryptic labels on these canning jars that suggested something besides jam would be going into them — who knows what. Blood, or plasma, or whatever, right? It was creepy as hell, but you can’t plant that seed and never say anything about it again. You can’t. If I introduce something to the scene, I have to — at the very least — acknowledge that something has been left unknown there. I can’t just say something and never refer to it again … but the appeal of that is very strong and hard to resist.

I have to wonder if Darnielle is a Robert Aickman fan. Aickman wrote what he called “strange stories,” stories that aren’t horror and don’t always involve the supernatural but were intended to leave the reader unsettled, often via a lack of explanation or full context. This has given Aickman a reputation for being baffling, though this is an exaggeration; more accurately, the vitreousness of his work spans the gamut from dirty windshield to outright opacity.

Take, for example, his best known story (and for good reason), “Ringing the Changes.” It involves a pair of newlyweds — Gerald being much older than his attractive wife Phrynne — arriving in the small seaside town of Holihaven for their honeymoon. They arrive in late afternoon only to learn there is one night during the year when tourists most certainly should not visit Holihaven. By the story’s end it’s fairly clear what has transpired — there’s little confusion — though the motivations of some of the characters are oblique. Over and over, the townspeople chastise the owner of the hotel, Mrs. Pascoe, for accepting the couple’s reservation on that most notorious of nights. Why did she endanger her two guests? But they, and we, never hear a clear response.

It was so dark where Mrs Pascoe was working that her labours could have been achieving little; but she said nothing to her visitors, nor they to her. At the door Phrynne unexpectedly stripped off the overcoat and threw it on a chair. Her nightdress was so torn that she stood almost naked. Dark though it was, Gerald saw Mrs Pascoe regarding Phrynne’s pretty body with a stare of animosity.

A favorite visual artist of mine is Shag, aka Josh Agle. He’s well-known in tiki and mid-century modern circles; his paintings are populated by lithe women and dapper men drinking cocktails while spy jazz presumably plays softly in the background. But often his canvases also feature other, more inexplicable details, like anthropomorphic animals or sinister characters and scenarios. In an interview (which I can’t find now), Shag stated he likes creating ambiguous scenes in which full context is unknowable, thereby forcing the viewer to create her own unique narrative of what’s taking place inside the frame.

“Office Politics,” shown above, is a perfect example. The woman in the foreground carries a broken bottle, presumably to use as a weapon. But on whom — the man? The woman? Both? Meanwhile the other woman entertains the man with a puppet. But wait — the puppet is a pink elephant, a common symbol for drunken delirium (and a recurring motif in some of Shag’s paintings, most notably “Pink Elephants,” “Seek Help,” which he said was about him quitting alcohol). So does the puppeteer represent alcoholism and the broken-bottle woman sobriety, each vying for the man’s soul? There’s no wrong answer, and that’s the beauty of Shag’s work — he engages the viewer into a subjective experience. Two people can see the same painting and walk away with very different stories about it.

In college I took a drawing class in which I became fascinated with the concept of pareidolia — the phenomenon of the brain forming faces or other recognizable shapes and patterns out of random meaninglessness, like clouds. My final project consisted of a long scroll of paper on which I had quickly jotted hundreds of squiggly lines. Once the scroll was hung on the classroom wall, yes, I could see a few faces within the lines — though whether anyone else could, I don’t know.

When I discovered Aickman a few years ago, he helped ease my anxiety over open loops in my fiction, of tying every string’s end into an explicit, visible knot. It was OK, said Aickman, to leave things unexplained and let the reader connect the dots, even if the shapes created by those dots weren’t the ones I had intended. That designed pareidolia is something I have since resuscitated in my fiction: let the reader have his own interpretation. Maybe Aickman could work the same medicine on Darnielle for book number three.

In a Modern World

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Back in the fall as I was returning to writing after being laid off from my main hustle, I had an alarming string of bad luck pitching articles. Not only did my pitches fail to sell, but their recipients couldn’t even be bothered to respond to them; and not only did they not respond, but these recipients were either editors or markets to which I had made previous sales, or at least were very friendly to me on Twitter. Follow-ups were likewise met with stony silence. Welcome, Jackson, to the newest flavor of New Media.

I told myself that everything I was doing was wrong and immediately set out to do everything — anything — completely differently. What did that mean? Well, I consciously moved away from my usual subjects, like history or politics, and targeted markets that I had only recently discovered, markets that tended to be less visible. Almost immediately I made a couple of sales, the latest being an article for Nifty Homestead about a favorite hobby of mine.

For me the takeaway of 2016 is that everybody needs to pull their shit together. I had predicted that Clinton would narrowly win Florida, allowing her to limp to a weak victory over Trump. I was very much in error. But here’s the thing: it’s not my job to watch elections. I’m someone who takes a casual interest in the news, and when he does, focuses more on local than national politics. Meanwhile the vast majority of news outlets whose content revolves around things like elections completely imploded in the months leading to November 8.

In the back of my head I always thought that if I landed a writing gig, either freelance or salaried, for a mainstream-ish publication I would be in clover. Now I look at many of them and recoil. While Trump was winning Middle America the ostensibly serious and strait-laced Atlantic published this. More recently the co-founder of The Federalist thought this was good content. Vox and Salon are parodies of themselves. None of it is news, fake or otherwise. It’s Twinkie filling.

I’ve recently discovered Medium. It’s an odd, nonintuitive place, basically a blog aggregator except a few of those aggregated are paying markets. Some of it is dreck; there’s a lot of “I fed the pigeons at the park today and have #feels about it.” But I’ve also found some gems too, like Pacific Standard, which has terrific feature writing, and the history site Timeline. It’s where I’ve been going for thoughtful analytic journalism, and with the exception of the Washington Post, nothing I’ve encountered on there could be construed as mainstream. Of course, it figures the day I write this, Medium closed two offices and laid off a third of its staff.

Do everything different. With Trump soon to be in power and media muckety-mucks falling on their asses, I feel a strange optimism entering 2017. Quoth Conan the Salaryman the morning after the election,

Black to the Future

~ Jackson ~ Leave a comment

Over at Electric Literature, you can read about my childhood fascination with Marvel Comics’ Black Panther, and more specifically with his native land of Wakanda:

Black Panther is a hero in the Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark mold, a super-wealthy bachelor who uses science and athleticism to pound on bad guys. There are no secret identities — everyone knows who BP is: he’s T’Challa, the king of the African nation Wakanda, which is a mix of grass huts, deep jungle, and 1970s futurism.

The essay is a departure from my usual stuff, very loose and free floating, a sepia stream of consciousness about comics and growing up in a household where futurism was literally just laying around on tables or bolted to the roof. Whereas Panther’s color resonated with many black readers, it was the setting that captured my imagination, and still does: I nearly jumped out of my seat at the brief glimpses of Wakanda at the tail end of this year’s Captain America: Civil War.

As of this writing my essay has received 20 retweets and a dozen likes on Twitter, more than my book ever did, suggesting maybe I should write about pop culture more often. Unfortunately I’m poorly qualified for the job: I generally hate TV (some exceptions may apply), I can count the frequency I go the movies in a year on one hand, and the number of video games I’ve played to completion since 2011 tallies at exactly three. I love music but not being a musician myself I feel I lack the vocabulary to adequately speak about it. Which leaves book blogging, something I’m hoping to do more of in the new year.

Rereading my old BP comics within the full and complete context of “Panther’s Rage” has been gratifying, with Wakanda coming across as smaller than I remember (the sci-fi technology is largely confined to T’Challa’s palace) and yet bigger (more dinosaurs! snowy mountain wastelands chock full of yetis!). It’s interesting being at an age now where I can experience a phenomenon both as contemporary futurism and as retrofuturism. Something like Vernean steampunk will forever be out of reach as a potentiality and exists only for us as a quaint, even naive, vision of how things were supposed to be; but by simply living past tomorrow we can experience both the very real possibility and the hindsight of existing in what invariably turns out to be a different future.

I was recently talking to my dad about the solar panels on his house, which are solely for heating water. When I asked him whether photovoltaic panels were available in the 70s, he told me no, not commercially — the technology was in its infancy. And yet as we spoke while driving through the streets of his town, we spotted several houses with PV arrays on their roofs. Wherever you go there you are, but almost never where you thought you’d be.

I’ll be there on opening day in 2018 when the MCU Black Panther movie drops, and I’m sure I’ll have many opinions about it. Maybe I’ll even write some of them down. Meow.