Let's Ride the West Once Again

Believe it or not, this is the 40th anniversary of Blazing Saddles! Mel Brooks considered it his best comedy and I was happy to see it has held up reasonably well over time, although many of the sight gags are obviously dated. I hadn't realized Brooks had tackled the race issue in such bald-faced terms. He notes in his article that Richard Pryor had been his first choice for Black Bart, but Warner Brothers wanted a more proven actor. Pryor recommended Cleavon Little.

If you don't remember the story, Black Bart found himself sheriff of an all-white Western town through which a ruthless developer (Harvey Korman) wanted to drive a railroad. He figured the idea of a black sheriff would send the town into such a disarray that it would be easy pickings by a gang led by Slim Pickens. But, Sheriff Bart proved more than a match for the developer in this madcap adventure tale.

There really wasn't anything like it before or since. Mel Brooks said a movie like this would be impossible to make today because of the unbridled racism and sexism on display, but Brooks felt that only by showing it so blatantly could you draw attention to it, and boy did he. The film stirred a lot of controversy, which no doubt helped it at the box office, becoming only the tenth film in history to surpass the $100 million mark.

I found myself placing political figures in the roles. Obama was the obvious choice as Black Bart and Joe Biden as the Waco Kid. Dick Cheney would have suited the developer Hedley Lamarr just fine. Maybe Sarah Palin as the sultry chanteuse Lili von Schtupp? You can have a lot of fun recasting this film, especially in the wake of the Cliven Bundy fiasco. Sadly, much of the racism that pervades this film still exists today.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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