H. Bruce Franklin

‘Vietnam’ in the New American Century

In 2005, we commemorated what was called ‘the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.’ Yes, it was thirty years since the last US military forces were evicted from Vietnam. But anybody who thinks that the Vietnam War ended for America more than three decades ago did not live through the presidential election campaign of 2004, when John Kerry’s campaign ship, all festooned with Vietnam War-hero flags and banners, was torpedoed by the ‘Swift Boat Veterans,’ who succeeded in convincing millions that Kerry was a coward who had aided the Vietnamese enemy and committed the ultimate sin, betrayal of our POWs. The black-and-white POW/MIA flags still flutter all across America, as decreed by law in each and every one of the fifty states. With its image of the heroic American warrior, imprisoned and tortured by Vietnam, it remains the only flag, other than the Star-Spangled Banner, ever to fly, as it does annually, over the White House. On permanent display in the Rotunda of our nation’s Capitol, draped in a huge banner over the New York Stock Exchange, and adorning the bumpers of hundreds of thousands of cars, SUVs (sports utility vehicle), pick-ups, and big diesel rigs, the POW/MIA flag projects one of America’s favorite images of itself as victim of Vietnam.

Songs of an Imprisoned People

This song had probably timed the labor of countless Black slaves on the plantations of America before the Civil War, but when it was first recorded it was a prison work song in the 1930s and it was widely diffused among Black convicts in the 1960s.1 The survival of old slave songs as late twentieth-century convict work songs is immensely revealing, for Black prisoners embody in both their lives and culture the continuity of Black experience in America. The songs and ballads of the chain gang are central to Afro-American history and Afro-American poetic culture, and, therefore, to American history and culture, because Black convicts are part of an imprisoned people within America.

Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment.

The criminal justice system in America is as powerful a shaper of history and society as its better-known counterparts--the military, politics, government, and technology. In a country that lacks a mandatory death sentence for specific crimes, the American strategy for execution proves to be based more upon distinctions between offenders than upon distinctions between offenses. Five important novels--McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood and The Executioners Song--bring readers a vivid awareness of Americas punitive codes. Each details the story of a life that leads to the gallows. Sentenced to Death places these works against the historical background of crime and capital punishment in America, a nation where public discourse on crime is dominated by images of the electric chair and the gas chamber, by maximum security prisons, by hardened convicts out on parole. Such images, in turn mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power. This probing look at capital punishment in execution novels and in real-life media accents the poles of punitive power. Such a comparison of literary works with confrontational journalism and court records also brings revealing insight into the long-term debate on capital punishment in American culture.