My work on Daisy Lampkin has preempted a previous project, a cultural history of American empire. But I stir the pot on that project occasionally. Here is a fun little rumination on US culture, empire, and the myth of the frontier that derives from it. 

Hollywood Westerns, one of the great wellsprings of American culture, are a particularly rich source of imperial—in this case, frontier—mythology. Take, for example, the 1939 Warner Bros. film, The Oklahoma Kid. That film starred Warner Bros.’ most bankable star, James Cagney, in the titular role as “Jim Kincaid.” Kincaid’s rival, the sinister “Whip McCord,” featured an up-and-coming Humphrey Bogart, still a few years shy of shaking the black-hat roles in which the studio had typecast him. Miscasting two quintessentially New York actors in a potboiling genre piece makes the picture a literal incarnation of Hollywood’s studio system.
 
The plot is set against the backdrop of the Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s, the land grab in which those who rushed the claims timeline to grab a piece of land before it was allowed came to be called “Sooners.” The land grab will soon bring Kincaid and McCord into conflict. Cagney's Kincaid—The Oklahoma Kid—as events make clear is an outlaw. Within the frontier logic of the film, however, he is a much different kind of outlaw than McCord.

I wouldn’t typically highlight the books of one publisher with whom I work, but over time it’s become clear to me that the books published by Savas Beatie really stand out. Publishing is a very expensive, low profit, and highly pressurized industry these days. I am privileged to work with any number of very high-quality publishers, including leading university presses such as the University of Virginia Press and Princeton University Press. No one puts out a better book at the price point than Savas Beatie does. (There are economic and intellectual reasons why academic presses price their books the way they do, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Daisy Lampkin’s legacy runs deep throughout Pittsburgh’s civil rights history. One long-term Pittsburgh-ally of Daisy Lampkin was the legendary Homer S. Brown (right). Brown was the founder and first president of the Pittsburgh-branch of the NAACP, an organization with which Lampkin was deeply connected. Brown served with Lampkin on any number of boards and committees and shared daises with her for decades, galvanizing black Pittsburgh’s political power and building community institutions.

In the mid-1930s Brown was elected to the PA state legislature to represent the Hill district, carving out a reputation as a champion of fair housing and employment legislation. Since at least the 1920s, Lampkin and her political associates determined to exercise their newly won electoral muscle by demanding greater black patronage in exchange for their political support, a demand that went largely unheeded until Brown became Pittsburgh’s first black judge in 1950.

Brown’s son, Byrd, followed in his father’s footsteps leading Pittsburgh’s NAACP chapter himself, organizing and mobilizing for peace and civil rights, and running for mayor of Pittsburgh in 1989.  

​More photos after the jump:

The previous post addressed the great American political realignment of the twentieth century, offering Daisy Lampkin’s partisan work as an important inflection point. When Lampkin, Robert Vann, and others advocated that African American voters repudiate the Republican party and support the Democrats in the 1930s, after a decade’s worth of intense activism and advocacy, it was a watershed moment in American political history. It was the Republican party, after all—the “party of Lincoln—that as Lampkin herself once pointed out had stood foursquare behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Constitutional revisions in the wake of the Civil War that defined citizenship for African Americans. Up until this point the Democrats, especially in their southern stronghold, had always been the party of Jim Crow and segregation.

But after the 1930s, prompted in part by the mass influx of African American voters represented by Lampkin and Vann’s defection, the Democratic party increasingly (though always imperfectly) began to embrace a civil rights agenda. In response, over the course of the 1950s and 60s, conservatives began to leave the Democratic party and take their segregationist views into the Republican party. The once solid Democratic south remained solidly in support of segregation, but by now it was the Republican party, and not the Democratic party, that championed these views. The two-party system had realigned itself, primarily around the topic of race.
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Today let’s look at the other end of that pivot. If many voters were streaming into the Democratic party and realigning its views on race, many voters (and their politicians) were also streaming out of the Democratic party into the Republican party, also realigning its views on race. The career of long-time South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, still a revered figure in the state, is a case in point.

Among my goals for this blog is not merely to introduce the world to the tragically underappreciated Daisy Lampkin, but also to demystify for lay readers and novice historians what historical research looks like and how judgments and reasonable historical interpretations are made. In this post I give some indication how new research discoveries can combine with that we already know (i.e., the “historiography”), to produce new interpretations. What follows is somewhat speculative, but that is the nature of historical hypotheses. Further research will either confirm my propositions or falsify them.

​I am privileged to work on dozens of fascinating manuscripts every year (check out my editing portfolio here!), but last year something particularly noteworthy and unusual came across my desk. A retired CIA agent and overseas operative named Victor Motier asked for help with a memoir. Victor is not a writer by trade, though that is one of the few professions that he has not undertaken in his more than twenty-year career inside the agency. He has served all over the world, including on the front lines of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). What he produced is absorbing, exciting, and harrowing in ways I did not expect.

Most writers are aware to avoid cliches, which in nonfiction writing often appear in the form of metaphor: blind eyes, cold shoulders, hearts of stone, and the like. We know not to make all of life into a journey, and not all love must occur on a battlefield. We refuse to read between lines, we play our cards wrong, and we do judge books by their covers. We know that cliched metaphors in your writing will turn off your readers faster than water off a duck's—You get the idea.
 
But cliche still creeps in. Many writers still can’t resist to punctuate their writing with casual colloquialisms in the form of stock phrases. A stock phrase is employed to punctuate a passage or to add emphasis. And so every thing that is “first” is also “foremost.” Everything that is “last” is also assured to not be “the least.” And all “opportunities” are “golden.”

​Very much belatedly, in 2021, the federal government finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, a day in which all Americans should take pride. On June 19, 1865, at Galveston, Texas, some of the last enslaved persons still held in bondage were informed of their freedom.* Juneteenth thus symbolizes the final eradication of chattel slavery in this country, an outcome for which not only hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers and their commander in chief died, but a day for which many thousands of Americans, including many themselves enslaved and those in the abolitionist movement, had worked and struggled, at considerable personal cost.

​Daisy Lampkin was born in 1883 or 1884, nearly twenty years after the 13th Amendment (mostly) outlawed slavery in the US. But her life intersected with the history of the anti-slavery movement in a number of ways, making her an heir to Juneteenth and an important point of connection between nineteenth century abolitionism and twentieth century suffrage and civil rights activism.

The dismantling by the Trump administration of venerable foreign policy agencies such as the USAID, and the hobbling of venerable multilateral institution such as NATO, the World Health Organization, the UN, and many others, seems unquestionably to have brought to a sudden, and shocking, end the exercise of American power on the global stage. I write at some length about many of these institutions, and the vigorous support of them by Americans and global partners, in my book. I give primary attention to what American multilateralism meant for post-WWII Dutch reconstruction and renewal. But the work of these institutions and practices carried similar consequences for nations and communities around the world, for decades after the end of World War II. 

A few weeks ago I made a post on the various literatures, sub-fields, and specialties that informed my book, American Power in the Netherlands. I suspect many non-historians don’t fully understand the extent of other scholarship upon which historians rely to tell their stories, the cumulative and accretional building that goes into any work of legitimate history.

The context—what practitioners call “historiography”—for my Lampkin biography is no less extensive. Our lives touch so many other lives in so many ways, and this richness produces endless lines of investigation by scholars endeavoring to capture these connections. This is why we have regional and local histories, political histories, cultural histories, social and sociological histories, gender histories, diplomatic and military histories, intellectual and ideological histories, material and technological histories, and so much more.

It is incredibly stimulating to engage with all these stories in the context of the Lampkin project. I had done the obligatory reading on the civil rights movement, suffrage, Jim Crow, and other topics back in graduate school. But there is a wealth of new material out there that informs the project. Much of it is academic history, but it’s also been inspiring to discover the breadth and quality of popular, non-academic history relevant to Daisy’s story.

​Here is just a sampling of what I am currently reading, have recently read, or am shortly planning to read to give substance to the Lampkin narrative: