Lecture 3: Learning to See in Lindy’s America

English 140
Summer Session B, 2012
UC Santa Barbara

Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

The (actual) 1940 election

Electoral College map, 1940 presidential election
State-by-state map of Electoral College votes in 1940 US presidential election. (Source.)
  • F.D. Roosevelt:
    • 38 states
    • 449 electoral votes
    • 27.3 million popular votes
  • Wendell Willkie:
    • 10 states
    • 82 electoral votes
    • 22.3 million popular votes

Lindbergh’s early presidency

Can you believe these people? he [Herman Roth] said. This fascist dog is still their hero. What he didn’t say was that by making good on his campaign promise to keep America out of the worldwide war, the fascist dog had by now become the hero of virtually every paper in the country with the exception of PM. (126)
Walter Winchell persisted in attacking the president on his Sunday-night radio show […] but as nothing that they feared had come to pass since the inauguration, our neighbors slowly began putting more and more faith in Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s optimistic assurances than in Winchell’s dire prophecies. (156)

Phil’s perceptions

I’m unable to describe the rest of his [Little Robert’s] outfit because the fear of gaping merged with the terror of seeing to prevent me from ever looking long enough to register what he wore. (128)
Never before had money seemed like something alive. (163)
Don’t talk, I told myself, as though a protected boy of nine were mixed up with criminals and had something to hide. But I must have already begun to think of myself as a little criminal because I was a Jew. (167)

Ribbentrop on the treatment of German Jews

The Jews in Germany were without exception pickpockets, murderers and thieves. The property they possessed had been acquired illegally. The German government had therefore decided to assimilate them with the criminal elements of the population. The property which they had acquired illegally would be taken from them. They would be forced to live in districts frequented by the criminal classes. They would be under police observation like other criminals. They would be forced to report to the police as other criminals were obligated to do.

comment to French foreign minister Georges Bonnet

Omi & Winant’s Racial Formation

  • Race is a social construction, and is neither
    • An essence (determining who someone really is)
    • nor
    • An illusion (an entirely spurious product of the mind)
  • Omi and Winant’s definition:
  • Race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. (55)

Sorting racial characteristics

I spotted just the man to follow, a businessman with a briefcase who seemed to me – with my admittedly imperfect grasp of the telling characteristics that Earl was so masterfully attuned to – not to be Jewish. (131)
It was then that I realized – employing all the criteria imparted to me by Earl – that my mother looked Jewish. Her hair, her nose, her eyes – my mother looked unmistakably Jewish. But then so must I, who so strongly resembled her. I hadn’t known. (134)

Shifts in identity

[…] determined to make everything turn out right by being the best little boy imaginable, much, much better than Sandy and better even than myself. (132)
Imagining a future when I’d be in the cellar manning the furnace all alone was, at nine, as upsetting as thinking about the inevitability of dying, which had also begun tormenting me in bed every night. (139)
I [Phil] knew how convinced he [Sandy] was of what he was saying and how he gorged on the attention it brought him. (184)
He and I were about the same size, and on the afternoon when I dared to secrete myself in the bin and change out of my clothes and into Seldon’s, all I did was to stand there and whisper, Hello. My name is Seldon Wishnow, and feel like a freak, and not just because Seldon had become such a freak to me and I was being him but because it was clear from all my transgressive sneaking around Newark – and culminating in this costume party in the dark cellar – that I had become a far bigger freak myself. (222)
FDR: Americans will not, under any threat or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty framed for us by our forefathers in the Constitution of the United States. (178)
Lindbergh […] donned his Lone Eagle flying gear and early one morning took off from Washington in his two-engine Lockheed Interceptor to meet with the American people face to face and reassure them that every decision he made was designed solely to increase their security and guarantee their well-being. […] That was all he said or had to say. He never mentioned von Ribbentrop’s name or FDR’s or made reference to the German-American Bund or the Iceland Understanding. (178-9)
A multitude of helmets, uniforms, weapons, buildings, harbors, beaches, flora, fauna – human faces of every race – but otherwise the same inferno again and again, the unsurpassable evil from whose horrors the United States, of all the great nations, was alone in being spared. Picture after picture of misery without end: the mortars bursting, the infantrymen doubled over and running, marines with raised rifles wading ashore, airplanes dropping bombs, kneeling chaplains, the improvised crosses, the sinking ships, the drowning sailors, the sea in flames, the shattered bridges, the tank bombardment, the targeted hospitals sheared in two, pillars of fire coiling upward from bombed-out oil tanks, prisoners corralled in a sea of mud, stretchers bearing living torsos, bayoneted civilians, dead babies, beheaded bodies bubbling blood . . .
And then the White House. A twilit spring evening. Shadows falling across the sprawl of lawn. Blooming bushes. Flowering trees. Limousines driven by liveried chauffeurs and everyone exiting them in formal attire. From the marble hallway beyond the open portico doors, a string ensemble playing last year’s number one hit song, Intermezzo, popularized from a theme in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Gracious smiles. Quiet laughter. The lean, beloved, handsome president. Beside him the talented poetess, daring aviatrix, and decorous socialite who is the mother of their murdered child. The loquacious, silver-haired honored guest. The elegant Nazi spouse in her long satin gown. Welcoming words, witticisms, and the Old World gallant, steeped in the theatrics of the royal court and looking in his evening clothes like a million bucks, charmingly kissing the First Lady’s hand. (200)

Evelyn’s rising star

it wasn’t ideological conviction that animated her [Evelyn], […] but the exhilaration of having been rescued by Rabbi Bengelsdorf from her life as a substitute teacher living in an attic flat on Dewey Street and removed to a life at court as miraculously as Cinderella. (185)
They’re sapphires, darling – Montana sapphires set in gold. And do you see who is wearing them? Who? Who is that? It’s Aunt Evelyn! It’s Evelyn Finkel of Dewey Street! At the White House! Isn’t it unbelievable? (214)
[…] someone reveling in the pleasures of the standard, petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank. (217)

The Office of American Absorption

Herman: The only purpose of this so-called Just Folks is to make Jewish children into a fifth column and turn them against their parents. (192)
our private turmoil was exactly the sort of dissension that the Lindbergh anti-Semites had hoped to stir up between Jewish parents and their children with programs like Just Folks. (196)
the new Homestead program, which is designed to give emerging American families a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move their households, at government expense, in order to strike roots in an inspiring region of America previously inaccessible to them. Homestead 42 will provide a challenging environment steeped in our country’s oldest traditions where parents and children can enrich their Americanness over the generations. (204-5)
Shockingly enough, my father had been rendered impotent by his company’s having obediently joined hands with the state. There was nobody left to protect us except me. (209)
And just where do they get the gall to do this to people? my mother asked. I am dumbfounded, Herman. Our families are here. Our lifelong friends are here. The children’s friends are here, only a block from the best elementary school in Newark. We are a block from the best high school in New Jersey. Our boys have been raised among Jews. They go to school with other Jewish children. There is no friction with the other children. There is no name-calling. There are no fights. They have never had to feel left out and lonely the way I did as a child. I cannot believe the company is doing this to you. (206)

Media credits

  • The electoral map of U.S. election results by state (slide 2) is from Wikipedia user AndyHogan14. Original source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/49/ElectoralCollege1940.svg/2000px-ElectoralCollege1940.svg.png