Damn Yankees Research Articles

George C. Rable. Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South.

George C. Rable. Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South.

Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable

Reviewed by: Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable Lonnie A. Burnett Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South. By George C. Rable. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. 201 pp. $38.00. ISBN 978-0-8071-6058-9. An early scene in the classic movie Gone with the Wind shows a group of hot-blooded southerners embroiled in a lively discussion concerning the prospects of the inevitable war against the North. Between sips of brandy and puffs on cigars, the men shout things like "Yankees can't fight and we can;" "They just turn and run every time;" and "One Southerner can lick twenty Yankees." Perhaps the most interesting boast was that "Gentlemen can always fight better than rabble." Asked for his opinion on their pronouncements, Rhett Butler sagely replies "It's hard to win a war with words." In Damn Yankees!, George C. Rable has given us a marvelous study of the words used by Confederates to define, marginalize, and later demonize the northern foe. Rable convincingly illuminates an overarching thesis that "by painting the adversary in the darkest possible hues, propagandists can help turn the conflict into a holy crusade" (p. 16). Far more than merely a compilation of outrageous examples of wartime vitriol, Rable presents a clear and important message—emotions inspired by words (and vice versa) both "lengthen wars and poison the peace" (p. 52). This work was the product of Professor Rable's well-deserved selection to deliver the 75th series of the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University. Rable, the award-winning author of such books as God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War and Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!, became the first graduate of LSU's own doctoral program [End Page 88] in History to preside over this distinguished event. Rable leads us on a journey through which southerners sought, through their written and uttered words, to characterize their Yankee rival as an unworthy enemy who was "outside the bonds of civilization and even humanity." In this type of propaganda, there must be a foil which is "defined, denounced, and defeated" (p. 2). To accomplish this task, Rable consults a wide sample of historical evidence including political speeches, private correspondence, newspapers, and periodicals. The contributors range from famous politicians and generals down to lowly foot soldiers and non-slaveholding men and women. The result of this meticulous research is a first rate study of "a standard or orthodox denunciation of the Yankee enemy, based on broad themes" (p.4). The first theme Rable identifies is the southern move to define the enemy as a contemptible, unworthy adversary. The overly arrogant rebels believed that there was no way the "vilest race on earth" would be able to compete successfully on the field of battle. Additionally, according to Rable, "describing the northerners as somehow racially distinctive made their supposedly fanatical and despotic character stand out" (p. 11). As this group of northern "hirelings" began to display military superiority, a shift in the nature of Confederate propaganda took place. As Rable notes, "The early dismissal of cowardly Yankees as unworthy foes gave way to linking their inherent cowardice to their cruelty" (p.66). Southern correspondence became filled with sensationalized accounts of murder, pillage, rape, and desecration of church and homes. The Confederates now painted the North as fighting a "war against humanity," with Confederate polemicists characterizing the Yankees as a destructive, barbarous, marauding band whose ultimate goal was the complete subjugation (if not extermination) of the South. Paradoxically, the inflamed rhetoric made the cessation of hostilities less likely, and the longer the war lasted, the more the viciousness of these themes intensified. Certainly all civil wars inspire a certain degree of emotion, but Rable fleshes out the unique degree of animosity shown by the southerners toward the [End Page 89] North. Perhaps this feeling was best summed up in the journal of one Eliza Andrews when she wrote, "I can't believe that when Christ said love your enemies, he meant Yankees" (p. 98). Although Rable does a masterful job of organizing the evidence to paint the desired...

Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable

Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable

Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South

George C. Rable traces the depth and breadth of southern hatred of northerners before, during, and after the Civil War. He argues that their rhetoric continued well after the cessation of armed conflict, shaping the way southerners perceived the postbellum world and contributing to the fraught legacy of Reconstruction. To explore the ways white southerners vilified northerners Rable relies heavily on newspapers and examines political speeches and sermons as well. He also mines the letters and journals of soldiers and civilians, and draws heavily on evidence left by Confederate women, although largely those confined to the planter class. Rable's focus is on the power of language, demonstrating that a verbal war can have visceral consequences. White southerners' contempt for Yankees existed long before the start of hostilities. Those of Puritan background were seen as self-righteous and intolerant, and nascent Confederates compared them to the worst of every other nationality. This demonization only grew during the war as Confederates argued that Yankee society was rotten to the core and that Northerners were cowards and, consequently, unworthy enemies.

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

Damn Yankees!: demonization and defiance in the Confederate South

Damn Yankees!: demonization and defiance in the Confederate South

Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable

Reviewed by: Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable Paul Quigley (bio) Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South. By George C. Rable. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. 201. Cloth, $38.00.) Writing in her diary in early 1865, a white Georgian named Eliza Frances Andrews unleashed a veritable tirade against the northern enemy. Yankees “thwart all my plans, murder my friends, and make my life miserable,” she wrote. “Yankee, Yankee, is the one detestable word always [End Page 614] ringing in Southern ears. If all the words of hatred in every language under heaven were lumped together into one huge epithet of detestation, they could not tell how I hate Yankees” (95). Among the accomplishments of Damn Yankees! is almost exactly that: to gather together as many words of hatred as possible in order to reveal how Andrews and her fellow white southerners hated Yankees. If nothing else, readers are guaranteed to learn some new and highly creative ways to insult people. Yet Damn Yankees! is so much more than a repository of execrations. It is a masterfully executed work by one of our field’s most accomplished historians, a slim volume with broad implications for how we understand Confederate thought. Rable persuasively shows that language and imagery mattered greatly to the prosecution of the Civil War. They matter in every war. Across the world and through the centuries, as weapons and strategies have evolved, using words to vilify the enemy has been a constant feature of warfare. “Language matters,” Rable explains, “because descriptions of the enemy carry serious and sometimes deadly consequences for all concerned” (3). The more harshly we portray our enemies, the more severely we want to hurt them—and the less we want to reconcile after the fighting is over. These issues are especially consequential in civil conflicts. When fighting against former compatriots, the line demarcating us from them, good from evil, becomes more critical than ever. Confederates expended much ink detailing North-South differences. Sometimes they read those differences back into the past, back into the days of original settlement, when Cavaliers supposedly clustered in the South and Puritans in the North, and sometimes even further back, into the European past. Once one accepted that Yankees were historically a different race, it became easier to define them as subhuman—the type of people who would not only subscribe to dangerous “isms” such as feminism or abolitionism or socialism, but also resort to inhumane means of waging war in the effort to propagate those isms. The result was the frequent dehumanization of northerners in Confederate culture. One need only leaf through the pages of Damn Yankees! to find numerous examples that hover around a fine line between the quaintly amusing and the deeply disturbing. There is the civilian who states, “I rejoice when I hear of their slaughter by the thousands.” And there is the Confederate officer who reports that it was “doing my soul good” to see northerners’ “severed limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains” (102–4). Language is what justified, even generated, such callousness, and the results were nothing short of horrific. The power of antinorthern invective long outlived the war itself, going on to fuel southern resistance to Reconstruction. After defeat, [End Page 615] one South Carolinian reported, the Yankees “left me one inestimable privilege—to hate ‘em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate ‘em” (133). White women appear frequently in Damn Yankees! as key authors and disseminators of anti-Yankee insults. They were also the ultimate victims of Yankee perfidy. When Union soldiers invaded not just southern states but southern homes and bedrooms, they threatened the gender relations that white southerners had placed close to the center of their regional identity. Even the hint of sexual peril—let alone explicit allegations of rape—steeled southern hatred like little else. Little else, that is, except the threat of emancipation. Some of the most enlightening sections of the book emphasize racial disorder as a particularly menacing aspect of the northern threat. Of course, differing attitudes toward racial slavery, in...

Review of 'Damn Yankees: Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South'

Review of 'Damn Yankees: Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South'

Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team by Rob Fleder (review)

Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team by Rob Fleder (review)

The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley (review)

Reviewed by: The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962 by Ron Briley James J. Donahue Ron Briley. The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study, 1948–1962. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2011. 214 pp. Paper, $40.00. Ron Briley, editor of two previous collections of essays for McFarland on baseball and American culture, has just published the first book-length critical study devoted solely to the baseball film in postwar America. And while there is much in this volume of interest to popular readers and fans interested in the role of baseball in popular American culture, unfortunately as an academic study this work is of limited value. In the study’s preface, Briley notes that “the baseball film genre of the post-war era was more than just a nostalgic enterprise in which young people [ . . . ] could seek to escape reality” (3). Accordingly, Briley reads the films from the period as evincing the various tensions that had beset postwar American society, in particular tensions related to gender, race, and class. Further, this preface sets up a useful thematic organization for the following films, though this organization is not employed by the study itself. Such an organization, in this reviewer’s opinion, would have strengthened the reading of the films and provided better, more fluid connections between the individual chapters. This is especially the case with the biopics, as Briley is often referencing earlier discussion in his later chapters. Instead, the chapters are arranged mostly chronologically, with the notable exception of chapter 8, “Baseball and Supernatural Intervention: It Happens Every Spring (1949), Angels in the Outfield (1951), and Rhubarb (1951),” a chapter organized thematically by discussing three of the four “supernatural” films included in the study. Other than the resulting length of the chapter, this reviewer sees no reason why the discussion of Damn Yankees (1958) could not have been included in this chapter. In a similar vein, all of the biopics could have been included in one larger section, given Briley’s particular strength in the individual chapters for establishing the importance of the biopic as a subgenre within the baseball film. All that said, there is much value in the discussion of the various movies. The individual chapters (with one exception, noted above) focus on one film and read that film both within the context of American social anxieties of the time as well as against the historical figures and events depicted in the films. This, of course, would be of particular interest to fans of the players whose biopics are included in this study: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Dizzy Dean, and Jimmy Piersall. It is this reviewer’s opinion that the chapters focusing on biopics are the strongest chapters because they demonstrate the best balance between discussion of the film, situation within social/cultural contexts, and comparison to the historical record. Fans of the individual players whose lives have been depicted (or [End Page 158] romanticized, as Briley smartly demonstrates) in these films will find much valuable discussion in these pages. In short, Briley is at his best as a historian of baseball and American culture. The remaining chapters, unfortunately, do not cohere into a clear thematic pattern, which may be one reason for Briley’s choice to discuss the films (mostly) chronologically. That said, Briley convincingly demonstrates the cultural importance of several films which are often considered little more than mere entertainment by film scholars and popular audiences alike. Films such as Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1949) and Damn Yankees explore gender tensions in postwar American culture; films such as The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and Jim Thorpe: All American (1951) force audiences to confront racial tensions in professional baseball as a focal point for American society at large. Similarly, The Stratton Story (1949), The Winning Team (1952), and Safe at Home! (1962) all engage the battle between individual achievement and the merits of teamwork, which Briley smartly connects to the larger cultural response to “the organization man.” There are a couple of instances in this study where Briley’s engagement with the larger discussion of the history and culture, unfortunately, detracts from the discussion of the...

The Harm of "Swedening": Anxieties of Nativism in Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine"

The Harm of "Swedening":Anxieties of Nativism in Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine" David Yost (bio) "Yes, sir, Homer T. Hatch is my name," the bounty hunter of Katherine Anne Porter's 1937 "Noon Wine" declares, "and America is my nation" (86). While this introduction is clearly part of Hatch's stock patter—he also asks to buy a horse, then reveals that it's "an old joke" of his designed to put people at ease (85)—his emphatic foregrounding of his nationality reveals a key anxiety of the novella's characters: who, exactly, can be considered an American? Though Mr. Thompson and his family at first see their Swedish-descended hired man purely and explicitly as a "forriner" (65), just as they view other American minorities (63), Olaf Helton's helpfulness and work ethic gradually persuade them to see him as a "man" first and a "Swede" second. The villainous Hatch, in contrast, exploits nativist anxieties to attack the "Americanness" not only of Helton but also of the third-or fourth-generation Irish American Mr. Thompson. By demonstrating both the hypocrisies of nativist reasoning as well as the violence that it inexorably creates, "Noon Wine" forms a powerful critique of this conflation of national and racial identities. Though "Noon Wine" has received a number of psychoanalytical and feminist readings, its themes of nationalism and nativism remain largely unaddressed. Janis P. Stout, for example, contrasts Hatch's garrulousness with Helton's taciturnity and observes how Mr. Thompson finds himself [End Page 75] caught between these two extremes (212), while Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. focuses his reading on Hatch's and Thompson's failures of storytelling (144-145). Although these readings usefully contrast the verbal styles of main characters, neither reading addresses the pervasive racial subtext of their conversations. Even M. Wynn Thomas, who builds his insightful analysis of the novella around the repeated use of the word "stranger," sees the discussion of foreignness as a theological metaphor for alienation and estrangement, "the fateful privacy of meaning" in God's world (159), rather than as a commentary on the politics of race and immigration. Darlene Harbour Unrue reads the moment similarly, seeing the labels of "stranger" and "foreigner" as symbolizing the isolation inherent in "basic human nature," rather than in a specific political context (Understanding 81). This critical lacuna is all the more surprising considering the amount of attention that critics have bestowed on anti-nationalist themes in Porter's only novel, Ship of Fools.1 Set on an ocean liner en route to Germany in 1931, Ship of Fools chronicles the varying prejudices of a massive cast of characters, ranging from the economic, racial, and sexual snobbery of Thiele, the ship's captain, to the explicit call of Herr Siegfried Rieber, a magazine publisher, for Jewish extermination: "I would put them all in a big oven and turn on the gas" (207). Though German anti-Semitism understandably receives the most narrative focus in this setting, Porter makes it clear that the American passengers harbor many prejudices of their own, particularly the young Texan, William Denny. First introduced as "exhausted" by his efforts to maintain "the proper white man's attitude" while "among strange languages and strange lands" (24), Denny makes clear his distaste for "niggers, crazy Swedes, Jews, greasers, bone-headed micks, polacks, wops, Guineas, and damn Yankees" (333-334). Even the German-run ship is not segregated enough for Denny, who longs to return to his hometown, "where a man knew who was who and what was what" (333). Throughout Denny's scenes, the novel thus demonstrates not only his racism, but the anxieties that underpin his white identity: Denny's own "whiteness" can only be preserved by keeping others—including "crazy Swedes," who occupy an unenviable place in Denny's hierarchy of prejudice between "niggers" and "Jews"—in subordinate roles. For Denny, the racial mixing involved in foreign travel leaves these delineations deeply threatened, though the ironic name of his fictional hometown—"Brownville" (333)—hints that even there, white identity may not be as absolute as he would wish. The turn-of-the-century South Texas of Porter's "Noon Wine" is the setting for William Denny...

Baseball on the Boards

Damn Yankees, the smash-hit 1955 musical, is easily is the best-known, most frequently revived baseball theater piece. Other high-profile plays include Elmer the Great (1928), a Ring Lardner comedy that was produced by George M. Cohan and featured Walter Huston as the title character, a comically thickheaded hurler; Bleacher Bums (1977), conceived by Joe Mantegna, which charts the frustrations of Chicago Cubs fans; Fences (1987), August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winner about a bitter ex-Negro Leaguer (a role created by James Earl Jones) and his relationship with his football-playing son; and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out (2002), a drama about a gay ballplayer.Remarkably, no memorable baseball stage piece dates from the 19th or early 20th centuries. No major producer of the era-no David Belasco, Charles Dillingham, or Charles Frohman-saw fit to mount a baseball play. No Broadway headliner signed on to thrash the villain and smash home runs right before the final curtain.This is not to say that the theater and baseball were then the equivalent of water and oil. On the contrary. During this pre-radio, pre-television era, Americans regularly attended live stage performances. Minstrel shows and vaudeville thrived. Starting in the late 19th century, baseball stars began spending their offseasons appearing in theatrical presentations in which they recited monologues, acted in skits, or tapped their toes in musical numbers. For their efforts, they often earned more money in several weeks than they did for their season-long ballyard heroics. Most significantly, playwrights of all stripes were penning baseball-related dramas, comedies, musicals, skits, and operettas.A representative list of such titles is found in the Library of Congress Copyright Office's Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870 to 1916. It includes at least 36 indisputably baseball-themed titles (see the table at the end of the article), testament to baseball as a fertile ground for invention.Yet collectively, these titles have for decades been languishing in obscurity. One would have to pore through countless big-city and small-town newspapers to determine whether any of them were ever produced-anywhere. But they did exist, at least on paper, and their authors expectantly submitted them to the Library of Congress for copyright.Additional titles in Dramatic Compositions appear to be baseball-related, yet likely are not. Among the characters in The Bat and the Ball; or, Negative Evidence (1889), a farce by F.E. Chase, are a photographer, a photographer's assistant, and a journalist. None are ballplayers; the ball of the title is in fact a Policemen's Ball. The title character in Gabe's Home Run (1911) is no slugger. This comedy by William and Josephine Giles charts the antics of a harassed husband whose wife chides him for never coming home in time to complete his household chores.Some of the authors of bona fide baseball pieces were established theater professionals. Miron Leffingwell (A Home Run, 1909), for example, was an actor-playwright. Gustav Blum (A Double Play, 1912), was a producer-director-actor who was affiliated with 16 plays that came to Broadway between 1923 and 1946. Bolossy Kiralfy (The Sporting Ballet, or, Turf, Oarsmen, Base Ball, Hunters, etc., 1887), was a dancer-acrobat-pantomimist who staged musical spectacles and worked for the Barnum & Bailey circus. Frank Dumont (A Base Ball Crank, 1890), wrote and acted in scores of minstrel sketches and managed the Eleventh Street Opera House in Philadelphia, described in the New York Times as one of the most famous homes of minstrelsy in America. Richard Walton Tully (Base Ball Game, 1910), was a playwright-director-producer whose best-known stage works, including The Rose of the Rancho (1906) and The Flame (1916), were nonbaseball- related. All made it to Broadway. Base Ball Game did not.Others were thriving writers. Philip Verrill Mighels (On the Diamond, 1906), worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and published non-baseball-related novels, short stories, and poetry. …

Damn Yankees and the 1950s man: you gotta have (loyalty, an escape clause, and) heart

Despite its reception as a light-hearted romp, Damn Yankees (by Adler, Ross, and Abbott, 1955) embodies several cultural ideas that were in conflict or in flux in the mid-1950s. This story of a middle-aged man who makes a deal with the devil to become a champion baseball star can teach us much about the way the era viewed young healthy men versus older unfit men, in a time when concerns about fitness and international threats conflicted with growing prosperity and lives of ease. The musical delves into the time period's distinct notions of masculinity, fighting for country, fidelity to one's wife, and the psyche of a post-war suburban populace. Joe Boyd becomes representative of a growing type of 1950s man, teaching a somewhat ambiguous, not entirely inspirational lesson about the dangers of risking a comfortable lifestyle for the sake of adventure.

D.C.'s Latest Baseball Team to Unveil New Home

D.C.'s Latest Baseball Team to Unveil New Home

“Of War Machines and Ghetto Scenes”: English-Canadian Nationalism and The Guess Who's “American Woman”

Woman, stay away from me. (1) Grungy and over-driven, The Guess Who's 1970 title track acted as a Canadian call-to-arms, unofficial national anthem, and became the most popular song in Canadian rock 'n' roll history. Canadian popular culture authors Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond call probably the most blatant dis of our southern neighbor in recording history, while Chart magazine columnist Aaron Brophy notes that it has become an anthem of sorts, with us Canadians thumbing our noses at those damn Yankees across the border. (2) Two recent rankings have affirmed its place in Canadiana: Chart magazine's July-August 2000 Top 50 Canadian Songs of All Time, and a reader-selected list tallied by Sun Media (publisher of the Toronto Sun and other Canadian newspapers), both placed it as No.1. (3) Shaped by their experiences touring the United States and the nationalist period in which the song was produced, The Guess Who constructed American straw man (or, in this case, a straw woman) of oppressive, militaristic, ghettoized, superficial society, ready for a lyrical gutting. In return, the song was nationally embraced as a vocal manifestation of communal anti-Americanism. is important cultural artifact, highlighting the ferocity of a tremendously nationalistic period. It also illustrates the reciprocal relationship between social climate and the production and reception of cultural goods. As a historian, I will not delve too far into ethnomusicologist's realm of musical aesthetics and audio signifiers--instead, this article will contextualize the lyrics as a textual document created and interpreted within a specific and contentious period of English-Canadian cultural and national consciousness. Rockin' on Guard for Thee: The Guess Who's Vocalist Burton Cummings, guitarist Randy Bachman, bassist Jim Kale, and drummer Gary Peterson out of Winnipeg and rocked both the Canadian and American music scenes. They achieved tremendous success with 1968's Wheatfield Soul single These Eyes and in 1969 with Canned Wheat's Laughing and Undone, but it was the title track to their 1970 American Woman release which ensured their position as one of Canada's greatest rock 'n' roll groups. The song was improvised during a show and almost forgotten, though. Returning to Canada from a tour of the United States, The Guess Who played a gig in a very Canadian location: a hockey arena. (4) Bachman replaced a guitar string during a set break, and in the process of re-tuning he worked out Woman's fuzz-laced riff. Kale and Peterson returned to the stage and jammed while Cummings mingled outside in the arena's parking lot. Told of the band's return to the stage, Cummings rushed back and joined the jam with his harmonica and flute. Exhausting his instrumental selection, he stepped to the microphone and improvised the lyrics to what would become the band's most popular song. According to Cummings, the lyrics came through looking over a Canadian audience after touring through the Southern U.S.A. and just thinking how that Canadian girls looked so much fresher and more alive. (5) The song, however, was almost relegated to a one-time jam. There was a kid in the audience with a cassette recorder, Cummings explained. He backstage afterward and played the song to us, and we thought 'maybe there's something there.' If that kid hadn't brought the tape backstage, the song would have just been another jam that would have been forgotten. (6) Developed and refined for album release, the lyrics reflected several years of touring and traveling in the United States. In 1965 the band--at that time known as Chad Allan and the Expressions--released Shakin' All Over under the guise of the Guess Who?, a marketing trick in which the radio audience was to guess the band's identity. (7) Shakin' All Over's success landed them a tour through the U. …

Playing in the Bush League: The Rookie and the Baseball Presidency

Most viewers of The Rookie will think of it in the terms in which it was reviewed: as a feel-good, Disney, G-rated family movie recounting the true story of pitcher Jim Morris making the Major Leagues at age thirty-five after a ten-year absence from baseball caused by a bad arm. When Morris challenged his lackluster Texas high school players to follow their dreams and do their best, he inspired them to win 16 games after three seasons in which they had won only 1 game each year. In return they demanded that he pursue his dream of pitching in the big leagues because they saw that he could still throw heat at the ripe old age of thirty- five. He somewhat reluctantly accepted this challenge and succeeded, becoming a middle-aged rookie relief pitcher for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1999. (1) That the biographical story in a nutshell, but The Rookie also an effective, significant film on the generic and mythopolitical levels. Roger Ebert did not like the movie because it is ... relentlessly cobbled together out of older movies, making it unoriginal and plodding. (2) On the contrary, The Rookie's evocation of other sports films constitutes a strength, not a derivative weakness. The director John Lee Hancock's skillful echoes of past sports films and the inherent allusive aspects of Morris's biography as an archetypal comeback story broaden the themes and enhance its audience appeal. Field of Dreams (1989) a major influence on the scenes dealing with the hardscrabble diamond at the high school in Big Lake, Texas, where Morris taught science and coached the baseball team. Baseball takes a decided backseat to football at the school, and this disparity graphically illustrated by the ash-heap baseball field, where grass will not grow until a folk remedy leads to a blossoming of the field and the growth and fulfillment of the team and Morris's dreams. (3) Further, Jimmy's imperfect relationship with his aloof military dad, whom as an adult he still calls Sir, recalls the troubled father-son relationship in the Costner film. The reconciliation between Morris and his father after Jimmy's first appearance in the big leagues parallels the conciliatory catch between Ray and his father on the Iowa field of dreams. Morris hands the ball he used to strike out Royce Clayton to his father, who goes off tossing the ball into the air and catching it the way young Jimmy did. Sports Illustrated pointed out that this scene inaccurate since in reality Morris gave the ball to his son Hunter. But it not so much an inaccuracy as an adaptation of Morris's biography to echo the Field of Dreams context. (4) TRANSFORMATION Morris's transformation from a high school science teacher to a Major League pitcher recalls the classic baseball comedy It Happens Every Spring (1947), which stars Ray Milland as the bespectacled college science teacher and baseball fan who accidentally discovers a substance that repels wood and uses it to transform himself into King Kelly, pitcher extraordinaire who leads the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series title. Milland's magical transformation paralleled in The Rookie by Jim's miraculous recovery from his arm problems to emerge as a pitcher who can bring it at 98 mph. Another parallel magical transformation movie Rookie of the Year (1993), in which, as the result of an accident to his arm, the adolescent phenom able to pitch in the big leagues. The Rookie also evokes a number of baseball films in which the character either fails to make the big leagues or succeeds in doing so late in life, or makes a comeback after a major injury. Pastime (1991) the sad tale of an aging Minor League pitcher who self-destructs in his hopeless quest for even a cup of coffee in the majors. Damn Yankees (1958) concerns an old man who sells his soul for the restoration of his youth and a successful season in the majors. In The Natural (1984), Roy Hobbs, after being shot by a mystery woman, returns to the Major Leagues a grizzled veteran and wins the big game with a dazzling home run. …

Faustian Reparation in Ikiru and Eternity and a Day

LORNA FITZSIMMONS Faustian Reparation in Ikiru and Eternity and a Day "How does a man die? Strange no one's thought aboutit." George Seferis, "The Last Day" The Faust legend has fascinated filmmakers since the earliest years of experimentation with the new medium of motion pictures. In 1896, the magic aficionado Georges Méliès brought Faustian figures to the screen in such films as Le Manoir du Diable, and, indeed, the cinema is directly descended from traditions of magical performance hypertrophied by nineteenth -century developments in electricity, lighting, and mechanics.' Traces of the primal-scene phantasy inflecting Faustian love of conjuration are thus palimpsestuous within the primal-scene2 pleasures of the cinematic regime. Engaging this alchemy, my focus is not upon the issue of textual fidelity, which, as Brian McFarlane observes, has often "bedevilled" adaptation studies ,3 but rather the complex tissue of transtextual4 relationships that obtain between Faustian film and literature, in this instance with respect to two films that are exceptional examples of the post-World War II turn toward Faustian analogies.5 Ranging from the baseball musical Damn Yankees (George Abbott and Stanley Donen, 1958) to the stock-exchange comedy Limit Up (Richard Martini, 1989), such films deploy distilled Faustian figurations semantically and pragmatically transformed within nanatives set in present times. My particular concern at present is with the transposition of Faustian melancholia and reparative phantasy in the Japanese film Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952) and the Greek Palme d'Or winner Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, 1998).6 In Gautier's ecphrasis on Dürer's engraving Melencolia I, the speaker is at a loss to think of anything greater, "more filled with revery and profound pain," than the austere angel with folded wing, so sunk in reflection that he hardly seems to breath.7 To Gautier, Melancholy, who has taken all roads of learning and climbed every ladder, carrying the heavy keys by which to unlock Nature's mysteries, is a Faustian figure. Sunounding him are the "emblematic circle," the "mystical table / Faust's study, full of Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 348 Lorna Fitzsimmons nameless things." The angel's black eyebrow, writhing bitterly "like a wounded snake," is linked to the "beams of a great, utterly black sun," against which the hypnotically pitiful child, sitting on the millstone below, has lowered his lashes, "Leaving the viewer in doubt if he's awake / Or if, lulled in a dream, himself asleep." Gautier's reading of the child as doubling the viewer thus sets into abyme the infernal splitting of the "open wound" which the woeful grieve. As Julia Kristeva argues, the narcissistic visage of depression masks the "shadow cast on the fragile self, hardly dissociated from the other, precisely by the loss of that essential other. The shadow of despair."8 Bathing in choler noir, of ophidian temptation drawn, the melancholic ambivalently mourns the maternal object or preobject Thing, taunted by persecutory phantasies that Burton tropes, above all, as the "mighty hand of God" to which the inflicted "must submit" and thus make reparation.9 The concept of reparation is important within Melanie Klein's theory of the "depressive position." In her 1937 essay "Love, Guilt and Reparation ," she draws the conclusion that "making reparation" is a "fundamental element in love and in all human relationships. . . ."'" Love and the reparative drive develop in relation to destructive phantasies crucial for the growth of the child's imagination. The good breast is loved, but in its absence the frustrated child, vengefully phantasizing about hurting it, fears his/her own aggression has destroyed it, causing guilt and persecutory anxiety. Even prior to the onset of weaning, the infant mourns the loss of the good object, succumbing to ab ovo melancholia—the depressive position, reactivated during later states of grief—against which omnipotence , idealization, and denial are manic defenses enabling the restoration of good objects and protection against bad objects split off in the throes of ambivalence. Compensating for injurious phantasies, reparative tendencies are "the driving forces in all constructive activities and interests, and for social development" (294); they stimulate creativity, exploration, and the desire to be a good parent. Their intensity is correlated with the degree of anxiety...

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings: Keynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999

The Journey to Find the 1869 Cincinnati Red StockingsKeynote Speech to the Sixth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 13, 1999 Daryl Brock (bio) In the summer of 1985 I set out on a two-month, 12,000-mile odyssey around the U.S. following the tour routes of the 1969 Cincinnati Red Stockings. My intention was to visit the twenty-six cities and towns where they played. I managed to get to all but Fort Wayne, which still remains on my to-do list. Why was I doing this in the first place? Well, it began with my reading Douglas Wallop's Baseball: An Informal History. Wallop, you may remember, wrote The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which became the Broadway hit "Damn Yankees." I was intrigued by Wallop's charming descriptions of the first ballplayers to come out in the open and say they were playing a boy's game for money. Their salaries were guaranteed by contracts, and the amounts were even published in newspapers. (By the way, the day after tomorrow, Monday, is the 130th anniversary of the start of those contracts: March 15th, 1869; they ran eight months, expiring on November 15th.) Wallop recounted how opponents called player-manager Harry Wright a "bearded boy in bloomers" and "captain of the bloody calves" because of the team's new knickerbocker-style uniform. Wallop also told of them riding across plains and prairies to play in San Francisco—which meant they had ridden the new transcontinental railroad in the very first months of its existence. Who were those guys? I wondered. What was it like to be a twenty-two-year-old playing baseball only four years after the end of the Civil War and seven years before the Custer massacre, when the West was still wild? What was society like? What was baseball like? This was hardly a new pattern. As a boy I would read, say, Robin Hood and then probe its "reality" by delving into a general history or perhaps a biography of Richard the Lion-Hearted. In college I was a double major—literature and history—and taught those subjects later along with psychology—the very elements of novel making. By spring of 1985 I had done enough research on post-Civil War matters to become fascinated by them and also to realize that little in the way of commercial entertainment had employed that era as a setting. Most of it had been focused [End Page 23] in the South, such as KKK-related stories during Reconstruction. Nothing had been set in the North except the old TV program "Wild Wild West," which I think took place during Grant's second administration. The year 1869 seemed a fabulous backdrop for some kind of story. Consequently, on Sunday, May 5th, 1985, I prepared to set out from Seattle, where my wife, Lura, was then employed as an actress. We loaded gear into my truck—Lura had purchased a camper shell as a setting-out gift. Is she a great wife, or what?—and in jumped our beagle-mix, Missy. The scouting report on Missy read: "Best position shortstop. Great natural instincts, speed, and range; can get her teeth around almost anything ever turned out at the Louisville bat factory." She would be my traveling companion in the weeks to come. We left Seattle at 6 A.M. and set out across the Cascades, passing through Ritzville and St. Regis and Saltese; through Spokane and Couer d'Alene and Missoula. By nightfall we'd gone 704 miles and found a KOA campground to our liking outside of Bozeman Hot Springs, Montana. Next morning I breakfasted at theCowboy Café in downtown Bozeman, where I caught snippets of dialogue (more accurately, intersecting monologues) that went: "Hey, Craig . . . [long silence] . . . Ah sold thet roll a bob wahr. . . ." and the uninflected response: " . . . Huh . . ."On the TV in the corner was coverage of historians combing the Little Bighorn site with metal detectors, attempting to track the 1876 battlefield movements by means of ballistic tests on shell casings. The commentary in the Cowboy Café went: "Why the hell they wanna spend money finding out what happened to Custer? He...

“Talk Not of a Wife”: The Devil and Daniel Webster, Cabin in the Sky, and Damn Yankees–American Contributions to the Faust Legend

Shortly after signing his pact with the devil, Dr. Faustus requests that Mephistopheles provide him a wife. In Marlowe's version, he demands (perhaps recalling his St. Paul), “let me have a wife, the fairest maid in Germany, for I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife.” Mephistopheles first demurs, but finally gives in to Faustus's demand, providing him with a demon dressed as a woman. The experience proves unsatisfactory for Faustus, who declares, “A plague on her for a hot whore.” Mephistopheles replies that “marriage is but a ceremonial toy,” offering an assortment of courtesans instead (5. 138-50). The reference to “ceremonial toy” glosses a longer exchange in the 1587 Spiess Faustbuch and its 1592 translation into English,.