Through the Legendary American class course have been repeatedly faced with the issue of whether or not legendary Americans should be endorsed and taught in schools.  Arguments for the perpetuation of legends have been set forth by everyone from Furstenberg to The Simpsons, but I believe that their effect is more harmful than beneficial to our society.  The legends, as we know them, distort the past and thereby prevent us from clearly viewing the future, as is evident in the sensationalized legend-making process that has partially obscured John F Kennedy.

The negative effects of legend-making are clear in the example of JFK.  For most American children, he is presented angelically, as a visionary ripped away from the nation.  As I child growing up in Texas I remember becoming physically angry over the injustice of assassinating someone so young and so wholesomely pure. Because Kennedy was a ‘legend,’ I assumed he deserved the adoration, and imagined him in my mind as a flawless martyr.  This type of mindset, which Loewen insists is a common side effect of the ‘legends’ system, instills a black-and-white world view—those who are good enough and those who simple aren’t—that is extremely dangerous in the morally complex world of reality.  Legend-making, like all elitist methods of viewing history, is also fallaciously exclusive, and presents students with an extremely narrow perspective of the past.  Lies My Teacher Told Me references studies that reveal that history is the least favorite subject of most minority students, and who can blame them?  When the supposed moral high point of a class is a wealthy white man with only a lukewarm tolerance of the Civil Rights movement, we know we have erred.  Instead, history should be more based on the lives of the average person.  We should take society as a whole, and view vast trends with a specific examples to illustrate various points along the spectrum of life experience.

More relevant to Kennedy than these issues, however, is the problem of why we insist on legend-making in spite of the consequences.  I argue that legend-making is maintained because it has become, rather than a format for teaching history, an outlet for sensationalism.  American culture is fascinated by the sensational, and constantly seeks entertainment from the seediest rock stars, most inaccessibly evangelical, and most absurd celebrities.  The tendency was evident even hundreds of years ago, but has been made worse by the increasing speed and demand of modern media.  It’s effect is clear in the children’s book I studied: only briefly does Sutcliffe acknowledge JFK’s weakness as a president, while the headline-grabbing tale of his saving a fellow soldier by swimming for miles with a lifejacket between his teeth gets multiple pages of coverage.  The tone of the book suggests that the rhetoric might have been even more skewed if not for the emerging PC culture that would have condemned it.  Sensationalism accounts for why Kennedy’s legend has survived—a tragically young death, a rise to the most powerful position in the nation, a picture-perfect family, numerous covert affairs, including a rumored one with Marilyn Monroe, one of the most sensational American figures of all time.  In light of the headlines, the facts of Kennedy’s presidency are lost.  We forget his failings as a negotiator in the Cuban Missile Crisis, his miscalculations in the Bay of Pigs, and his questionable morality within his personal relationships.  With the current model, students cannot hope to learn political information, and instead are subjected to a class about a cardboard saint who provides no guidance as to how to run a country beyond the preschool mantras we’ve heard since infancy.  When we base our history on the sensationalism of legends, textbooks become no better than sensationalist magazines, looking to over-emphasize episodes of interest to the point of misrepresentation.

The legend-making based on sensationalism has been such a difficult trend to dispel because sensation is so entertaining a values.  It is also easier to moralize and inflate towards either the good or the bad side of the spectrum.  Some separation needs to occur, however.  History must cease to be the place we turn to for morality tales and must start to become a place where facts can be debated and challenged, but on a factual basis.  Ture, having a legendary figure to spew out civic texts may “bring the community together,” as Lisa Simpson observed, but it should not.  History should not be the place where we hear about Kennedy’s ‘pure’ love for his family—it should be where we address his mistakes—and many existed—and take a dynamic role in preventing them for future generations.  Morality tales can be told from any fictionalized source or from simple utilitarian logic, but history should be un-airbrushed fact.  Legends may conceivably have had their place in the early years of the United States, binding together the rebels that formed it and their disparate descendants, but now that the country has a foundation, would it not be better to fully transfer the commonality that creates consent to the morals of the nation?  In such a conglomerate nation, I would be far happier inviting a russian immigrant to sample my culture with declarations of freedom of worship and speech than I would be holding up the face of a man he may never have hear of and who may have been responsible for the deaths of many in his country.  An truthfully, the American public is in no need of more nationalism.  I think most citizens are blinded by their national pride, which is greatly affected by legends.  Perhaps my time living internationally has given me an altered, slightly socialist view, but if this nationalism could be redirected towards a more global appreciation for humanity we might be able to do something productive with our time on earth.  Instead, we perpetuate an elitist, excluding system of history in an increasingly elitist, excluding country; the legends must go.

Works Cited

Furstenberg, François. In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New, 1995. Print.

Sutcliffe, Jane. John F, Kennedy. Print.

I just wanted to preface my final post by saying that the rubric supposedly attached in through the link on the class blog will not open correctly for me–all I can see is pages of numbers and letters.  So, if my addressing of the questions is a bit off from what you intended us to discuss, that’s why.

Last week Dr McDaniel suggested that we write a short response about the groups that present before we do, so I will briefly be doing that along in addition to my regular post this week.  I thought that both groups did well, which in a way makes it harder to learn anything about what we should or shouldn’t do.  Both kept fairly focused on the essential questions of the course, as I think is necessary, and both successfully incorporated the data specific to their historical figures with more general, philosophical, issues.  If I were to find a fault that we could learn from, I would say that the first group especially dealt with lengthy pauses in the discussion, and although is isn’t really something we can prepare for we should be wary of letting the conversation lapse, and we should be ready to jump in with another topic if it does.

Here are our questions for Wednesday:

1. Compare the Kennedy children’s book to Weems’ biography.  Does the modern text appear more balanced?  How so or not so?  If the current text is more balanced, does it suggest that we don’t need Legendary Americans or civiv texts anymore?
2. In a recent Times article, Kennedy was ranked 11th in the list of best presidents even though the article acknowledged that he dealt mainly in rhetoric and passed “very little in the way of funding or legislation.” With this in mind, assess the roles of sensation and achievement in the lives of Legendary Americans.  How does this relate to Kennedy’s scandalous personal life, assassination, etc?
3. What does the shifting data expressed in the polls reveal about how the public felt about different events in Kennedy’s presidency?  Do you think polls are useful/truthful as a source?

Hey everybody!  Here are the online readings for you to look at in preparation for our JFK discussion on Wednesday:

1. ANB entry: http://www.anb.org/articles/07/07-00152.html?a=1&f=John%20F%20Kennedy&g=m&n=John%20F%20Kennedy&ia=-at&ib=-bib&d=10&ss=1&q=2
2. Polls excerpt: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3521635, pages 269-275
3. Kennedy vs. Romney: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/why-mitt-romneys-mormon-question-doesnt-matter-as-much-in-2012/2011/10/10/gIQAvgIeaL_blog.html
4. Polls image: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/popularity.php?pres=35&sort=time&direct=ASC
5. Interpretation of Polls: http://jfklancernews.blogspot.com/2009/02/look-at-jfks-popularity-polls-by-debra.htmlReading questions to follow.

Just to clarify, I don’t think there is much more to say about the group projects.  At least on my part, I have turned in the resources and am currently working on wording the questions so that they will be most effective in sparking discussion in class.  I could give an update on the points I want to cover, but I feel like this would be an exact repetition of what I posted last week and Jessica posted today, so I will avoid that.  From my perspective, I am happy with how prepared we are (which I think was evident when we met up yesterday and had little to talk about), and I think if everything goes according to plan we will have a very thought provoking and successful discussion.

According to Lies My Teacher Told Me (which I think is a fantastic, fascinating book that I read excerpts of in high school philosophy), heroification is a pervading problem in American schools that leads to several negative consequences for students.  For example, the excerpt suggests that the blemish-free portrayal results in “pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest.” (p. 9)  This contributes to statistics I remember reading elsewhere in the book, which reveal that history is the least-enjoyed academic subject especially amongst students who are not white males, as the majority of historical heroes are.  The worshipful portrayal also leads to unrealistic standards for role models in the eyes of children.

As may have been evident in class, I have been on the fence throughout the semester regarding the value or lack thereof of the idealized legendary American, but this excerpt solidified my opinion.  Loewen perfectly argued why heroification is a negative influence on learning, and I found that all of his points rang true with me.  I had no idea that Helen Keller was such an extreme socialist, as the 20 page biography I read of her “held her up” as the “blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps” (pg 10) and little else.  Similarly, I was shocked to learn about Woodrow Wilson’s extremely racist and un-democratic politics, as I had always been told that he was one of the ‘nice’ presidents–wanting to be lenient on Germany after WWI, trying to ensure the peace with the League of Nations, etc.  Not only did these revelations make Keller and Wilson more interesting to me, but they made me feel more engaged, as the omitted details referenced ongoing problems and conflicts in our country that needed and still need to be addressed, rather than portraying America as a stagnant result of years of gradual bureaucratic progression.  I also agree with Loewen that current textbooks’s glossed-over content results in “intellectual immaturity” among students. (p. 25)  I feel this myself, as I am usually disappointed and saddened when I hear of some negative aspect of an American Hero that I learned about as a child.  Why, though, when it is clearly unrealistic to expect perfection from anybody?  I feel that the unrealistic expectations taught by history have also bled into my personal life, as I tend to expect too much from authority figures such as my parents.  Loewen’s assertion that we have been given a “Disney version of history” seems very accurate. (p. 25)

As far as solutions are concerned, I think the answer is simple: textbooks and teachers should be more forthcoming about the faults of historical figures.  Just as I don’t believe religion is necessary to having morals, we do not need history to give us ideal figures.  We can use fairy tales and utilitarian, logical ethics for that.

This week we all met again to confer more about the status of our project.  I like where we are, and I think we won’t have much trouble filling the allotted time with discussion.  The hard part now is deciding how to divide up the pages to give the class the best basis for discussion.  So far, I wpould like to submit the following:

• American National Biography about Kennedy, roughly 4 pages
• single image graphing Kennedy’s popularity
• website analyzing the data represented in the image, about 3 pages
• my children’s book on Kennedy, equivalent of 7 regular pages
• single page of Times article ranking presidents

Through the Legendary Americans course, we have learned that many legendary figures such as Sacagawea and Bonnie and Clyde are as much shaped by their public persona as by their actions.  This is extremely relevant to Elvis, who gives fans the choice of extremes to hold up as their interpretation of him.  The readings give conflicting portrayals of which version is most often chosen–either the “wholesome, patriotic, and pious” idol or the deeply flawed, pain-wracked addict; early or late versions of Elvis.

According to Doss, the pious and idealized version of Elvis survives because fans wish to see in him “who they want to be, who they most admire, who they mourn for; Elvis is the image of an ideal American.”  He suggests that, due to the intensely personal, kinship-like bond that fans share with Elvis, they want to see him at his best.  Supporters “shape their fandom around his broader familial image,” and so wish to see him be as wholesome and brotherly as possible.  They fixate on the love that he, as a “gentleman,” showed to his parents, and on his charity that transgressed racial lines.  This persona of pure goodness is advantageous from the Elvis’s side, too (as implied by his rumored slur towards African Americans that cited one of their two main purposes as consumers of his records (Bertrand)), since an undivisively good figure would appeal to more people, resulting in more record sales.  By tying him to patriotism through his military career, Elvis’s proponents also tap into nationalism as a fuel for his marketable image.  It adds another layer of heroism to him, and his meritocratic rise through the ranks is yet another tie between himself and the working class fans who were hungry for a rags-to-riches idol. (Doss)

While the above arguments depict fans as following an idealized Elvis because he is who they wish to be, Rosenbaum shows many fans as worshipping late Elvis because he is the figure they acknowledge themselves to be.  He traces their adoration through a shared feeling of pain, as evidenced by the rousing support for “Hurt” during Death Week and the emotional healing sought there.  The pain Elvis felt is “the kind of pain that is the true source of the growing reach of the Elvis faith.  As appealing as the image of a perfect hero to look up to is, flaws can often be just as appealing, as they allow the common person to see themselves elsewhere, and thus be comforted by the shared experience.

I do not think that any of these explanations for Elvis’s stardom is necessarily the most persuasive.  Instead, I think the reasons for devotion are entirely personalized based on what each person is searching for.  This is seen in the examples given by Rosenbaum.  Those who identify with late Elvis, such as the alcoholic woman at death week, follow Elvis because he shared their pain, and feel a human connection with their common past.  Alternatively, the reasons for supporting a more pious version of Elvis can be found in the personal experience of individuals.  For example, Chadwick is “a native Mississippi good-ol’-boy,” and thus probably from a background that condemns open sexuality.  As a result, he does not see the sexual overtones in hishero, and explains it away as a reference to pentecostal pastors and gospel style.  Similarly, the religious Revered Finster ties his ideal of Elvis to God, insisting that any sexual implications in Elvis’s movements was, in fact, God-mandated in order to increase American reproduction rates.  Both men’s views are shaped by their perspective as liberal scholars, who seek “a redemptive vision of their native region, eager to find a source of health in a culture widely stereotyped as ‘redneck’” (Rosenbaum).  The diversity of opinion indicates that, like most cultural icons, Elvis has become a personal interpretation more so than a real person.

This week most of our group met to discuss our progress in the project and where we thought we should head next.  This was important because we are soon going to have to finalize our choices for readings to give.  What I tried to emphasize is that we should make sure that whatever we give out is directly related to the core of the class—the questions like “why do we need legendary Americans” and “what makes a legendary American”—and try to consciously avoid the factual stuff, even when it is interesting or relevant to Kennedy’s general history.  I specifically wanted to mention this point because I read the children’s book that Peter found a few weeks ago as per his request.  Maybe I’m just missing it, but I couldn’t see that much that directly connected to the “legendary” aspects of Kennedy.  Which parts of the book were you planning to use?  I will bring the children’s book on Kennedy that I found to class this week, so y’all can read it and see it there is valuable stuff within it.  I personally think there is more we can say about that book than about this one.

Also regarding the project, it seems like some major talking points are starting to appear (aside from the few basic “legendary” questions that we have to answer).  The fascination with Kennedy’s death shows that he is a legend and demonstrates our fixation with the morbid and martyr (is this why Peter’s book would be good to cite?).  Jessica, I know you researched this most; what do you think the best excerpts were?  His Catholicism highlights important aspects about the US and religion, which would be good to touch on because it is still relevant today.  I also think it would be particularly helpful to focus on the polls data I found.  They directly reveal how Americans thought about a “legend” through time, and isn’t this exactly what we are studying?  We also haven’t really discussed the value and limitations of polls as a source in class, which we could do now.  Therefore, the only sources I think we should definitely use from my independent research are the three I cited at the end of one of my previous posts, which I will re-post here.  What do you guys think about them?   There are also several books that I used elsewhere, but I haven’t finalized which parts would be most useful yet.  I will work more on this in the coming week.

Sources:

Conway, Debra. “A Look At JFK’s Popularity Polls.” JFK News and Updates – JFK Lancer Blog. 3 Feb. 2009. Web. 05 Oct. 2011. <http://jfklancernews.blogspot.com/2009/02/look-at-jfks-popularity-polls-by-debra.html>.

Hines, Nico. “The Greatest US Presidents – The Times US Presidential Rankings – Times Online.” The Times | UK News, World News and Opinion. 31 Oct. 2008. Web. 05 Oct. 2011. <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5055404.ece>.

Houston Chronicle, “Chronicle Poll Sees Goldwater Over Kennedy” Nov. 22, 1963. “Gallup Poll had indicated that 63 per cent of Americans disapproved of the March [on Washington], and that 38 per cent thought he was pushing too fast on integration.” William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, December 31, 1994.