NONFICTION:EXECUTIVE RACE RELATIONS
The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane
On Jan. 20, 2009, more than 1 million people crowded into Washington to witness and celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama. The television audience in the tens of millions created a collective experience that stretched across the country and around the world. Barely 40 years after legally mandated segregation was abolished, a black man became president of the United States.
Clarence Lusane’s boldly titled “The Black History of the White House” explores the long, complex relationship between African-Americans and the White House as a way to understand this momentous turning point. Drawing on the stories of a remarkable variety of individuals, the book opens with slave Oney Maria Judge’s dramatic escape from the temporary presidential residence in Philadelphia, and George Washington’s aggressive effort to capture her. While it is well-known that eight presidents owned slaves while serving in office, this reality has powerful resonance here. Lusane describes the sights and sounds of the slave market that stretched along the Mall, in clear view of the Capitol and the White House, as late as the early 19th century.
During the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, African-Americans gained political access to the White House for the first time. The relationship between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass offers insight into the evolution of Lincoln’s leadership on the nation’s most vexing issue.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, a host of African-American strategists leveraged the growing power of Northern black voters and the liberalizing force of New Deal initiatives to gain fuller access to the White House, press for black inclusion in the government, open up the Democratic Party and lay the groundwork for the civil-rights legislation of the mid-’60s.
The book serves up a compelling account of the retreat from civil rights — starting with the “Southern strategy” of Richard Nixon and peaking with what Lusane calls Ronald Reagan’s “anti-black agenda.” There were, as the author notes, sharp differences in the racial attitudes and approaches of Republican and Democratic presidents in the closing decades of the 20th century.
NONFICTION:EROTIC HISTORY
Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz
“Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism” focuses on a small cross-section of Victorian culture: a group known as the Aesthetes whose members included the Pre-Raphaelite painters (of whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti is perhaps the best known) and a group that called itself the Cannibal Club, founded by the explorer Richard Burton as an offshoot of the Anthropological Society.
Deborah Lutz’s study follows two main ideas: first, that most of the 19th century’s overtly sexual material, whether in visual or prose form, came from these groups; second, that the willingness of these men to push the limits of social propriety and study, almost empirically, what was considered then sexually deviant, is at the heart of their creativity.
Lutz explains her attraction to these often overlapping groups and what they came to stand for: “I found in them something so rare today among artists and writers: a will to collaborate. Conviviality sparked inspiration for their work; shared rooms in houses and studios kept a seriousness of creative intent circulating.”
For Lutz, then, exploring their radical approaches to sexuality and eroticism is meant as a way of recovering an approach to creative work all but lost to us in the 21st century.
“Pleasure Bound” is clearly and smartly written and provides interesting and, yes, titillating accounts of Victorian pornography, from the anonymous “My Secret Life” diary to letters to the poet Algernon C. Swinburne’s proclivity for flagellation.
However, a great deal of the book is devoted to close readings of poetry and paintings with which the majority of readers may not be immediately familiar, suggesting that this book may be unfortunately of interest only to other scholars and enthusiasts of the Victorian period.
