Second lecture for my students in English 140, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/su12/index.html

1. Lecture 3: Learning to See in Lindy’s America
English 140
Summer Session B, 2012
8 August 2012
“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

2. The (actual) 1940 election
● FDR beat Wendell Willkie by 449 electoral votes to 82. FDR won 38
of the 48 states and had 27.3 million popular votes to Willkie’s 22.3
million.

3. 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)

4. 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)

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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)

8. 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)

9. “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)

10. In the media
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)

11. “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 . . .

12. “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)

13. 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)

14. 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)

15. “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)

16. “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)

17. 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