H. Bruce Franklin
Encyclopedia
Howard Bruce Franklin is an American
cultural historian who has authored or edited nineteen books on a range of subjects. As of 2011, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University
in Newark, New Jersey
. He first attained prominence as a Melville
scholar and has served as president of the Melville Society. His award-winning books and teaching on science fiction
played a major role in establishing academic study of the genre. His books on American prison literature
have been said to open an entirely new field of study. His most recent work has focused on relations between the marine environment and American cultural history. In 2008, the American Studies Association awarded him the Pearson-Bode Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.
After serving three years as a navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command
, Franklin got his doctorate at Stanford University
in 1961 and then became an associate professor of English there. He spent the 1966-1967 school year at Stanford's campus in Paris, France, where he and his wife Jane read Marxist theory, met Vietnamese communist students and helped to organize the Free University of Paris. On his return to the US he became a prominent activist in the movement against the Vietnam War
. In the late 1960s, he was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Union, a Maoist organization, but in 1971 he split, along with about half the membership of the RU, to join the revolutionary Venceremos Organization
. Venceremos and Franklin were specifically targeted by the FBI COINTELPRO
effort. Franklin's political views and actions during that period were public, and continued despite being targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO, which used disinformation, agents provocateurs
, and violent acts to discredit leftist
organizations. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show many attempts by the FBI to "neutralize" Franklin.
Stanford fired Franklin in 1972, even though he had academic tenure
, for leading a group of students to occupy the computer center and urging students and faculty to strike in protest against the invasion of Laos
and Stanford's involvement in the war. Firing a tenured professor was quite a feat: the University's rules provided for due process. A tenure-review committee was chosen, from professors outside Franklin's department, composed of associate or full professors who had hopes of advancement: two of them expected to become President of Stanford some day, and one of them actually did—Donald Kennedy
. A medium-sized Physics lecture hall was converted into a courtroom with the usual furniture and paraphernalia. A Los Angeles attorney, Paul Valentine, was retained to plead the University's case. Franklin defended himself, with advice from a law student and a well-known constitutional lawyer. Evidence was heard for each side, witnesses were cross-examined, and summations given, and the panel left the room to consider its verdict, which was guilty of violating the university's Disruption Policy, punishable by revocation of tenure and termination with prejudice.
Franklin was blacklisted and without regular employment for three years (although he had brief visiting faculty positions at Wesleyan University
and Yale
). In 1975 he was hired as a (tenured) full professor at Rutgers
, where he has since been named the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies, and has received numerous awards for teaching and scholarship.
Franklin’s main subject is American history and culture; his work aims at interdisciplinarity and broad public accessibility. He started out as a scholar of Herman Melville
; his first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology, which has been in print since its publication in 1963, examines Melville's use of mythologies most 20th-Century scholars are not familiar with: one expects references to Judaeo-Christian or Greco-Roman lore, but Melville's intellectual milieu was well-informed on many other cultures, from Meso-American to Sanskrit. In addition, Franklin produced a scholarly edition of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, which traces many obscure classical and "alien" references embedded in Melville's prose. This has recently been reprinted, but its numerous and tendentious footnotes may annoy readers who prefer to experience Melville in his own words.
His second book, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (1966), which has gone through several editions and been widely adopted as a classroom text, inaugurated the serious study of science fiction and identified such classic American authors as Irving
, Poe
, Hawthorne
, and Melville as pioneers of this genre, hitherto largely neglected by literary critics. His Robert A. Heinlein
: America as Science Fiction won awards in 1981 and 1983; in 1990 he was named the Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 1991 he was Guest Curator for the “Star Trek
and the Sixties” exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum
of the Smithsonian Institution
; this show subsequently traveled to the Hayden Planetarium
.
Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist established Franklin as a leading authority on American prison literature. Released in 1989 into an expanded third edition, this book has been widely used by historians, penologists, literary critics, and sociologists. Franklin’s 1998 anthology Prison Writing in 20th-Century America is a basic classroom text.
In his 1988 War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Franklin turned his interest in science fiction to an examination of the American fascination with superweapons. His book presents a view that, ironically, from Robert Fulton
’s submarine Nautilus
in the eighteenth century to the death-dealing weaponry of the late twentieth century, superweapons ostensibly designed to end war have proved capable of exterminating the human species. The expanded 2008 edition explores how this cultural history led to the seemingly permanent state of warfare of the twenty-first century. War Stars is informed by Franklin’s own earlier experience as a former navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.
Franklin has been publishing on the history of the Vietnam War
and its role in American literature and culture since 1966. His M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, and his co-edited Vietnam and America: A Documented History have been widely used in courses on the Vietnam War. His 2000 book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies synthesizes this previous work and extends it into an overview of 21st-century American culture. One of Franklin's major themes in writing about Vietnam is that the supposed existence of surviving U.S. prisoners of war
in Vietnam after the war is a myth created after 1980 with the aid or tacit approval of the Reagan
White House, and that the psychological foundation of the myth arguably lies in the justifications the Nixon
White House offered for the Vietnam War in the years before 1973: namely, that it was a war to bring the POWs home.
Franklin’s most recent book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (2007), is an interdisciplinary study of the role of menhaden
in American environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural history from the seventeenth into the twenty-first centuries.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cultural historian who has authored or edited nineteen books on a range of subjects. As of 2011, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in Newark, New Jersey
Newark, New Jersey
Newark is the largest city in the American state of New Jersey, and the seat of Essex County. As of the 2010 United States Census, Newark had a population of 277,140, maintaining its status as the largest municipality in New Jersey. It is the 68th largest city in the U.S...
. He first attained prominence as a Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
scholar and has served as president of the Melville Society. His award-winning books and teaching on science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
played a major role in establishing academic study of the genre. His books on American prison literature
Prison literature
Prison literature is a literary genre characterized by literature that is written while the author is confined in a location against his will, such as a prison, jail or house arrest...
have been said to open an entirely new field of study. His most recent work has focused on relations between the marine environment and American cultural history. In 2008, the American Studies Association awarded him the Pearson-Bode Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.
Life
Born in Brooklyn in February 1934, Franklin graduated from Amherst College in 1955, and served in the US Air Force from 1956 to 1959.After serving three years as a navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command
Strategic Air Command
The Strategic Air Command was both a Major Command of the United States Air Force and a "specified command" of the United States Department of Defense. SAC was the operational establishment in charge of America's land-based strategic bomber aircraft and land-based intercontinental ballistic...
, Franklin got his doctorate at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 1961 and then became an associate professor of English there. He spent the 1966-1967 school year at Stanford's campus in Paris, France, where he and his wife Jane read Marxist theory, met Vietnamese communist students and helped to organize the Free University of Paris. On his return to the US he became a prominent activist in the movement against the Vietnam War
Opposition to the Vietnam War
The movement against US involvment in the in Vietnam War began in the United States with demonstrations in 1964 and grew in strength in later years. The US became polarized between those who advocated continued involvement in Vietnam, and those who wanted peace. Peace movements consisted largely of...
. In the late 1960s, he was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Union, a Maoist organization, but in 1971 he split, along with about half the membership of the RU, to join the revolutionary Venceremos Organization
Venceremos Organization
Venceremos, Spanish for "We Will Overcome", or "We Will Prevail", was a radical left political group which took its name from the battle cry of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a revolutionary communist leader from Argentina and high ranking member of Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba.Venceremos...
. Venceremos and Franklin were specifically targeted by the FBI COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
effort. Franklin's political views and actions during that period were public, and continued despite being targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO, which used disinformation, agents provocateurs
Agent provocateur
Traditionally, an agent provocateur is a person employed by the police or other entity to act undercover to entice or provoke another person to commit an illegal act...
, and violent acts to discredit leftist
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
organizations. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show many attempts by the FBI to "neutralize" Franklin.
Stanford fired Franklin in 1972, even though he had academic tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
, for leading a group of students to occupy the computer center and urging students and faculty to strike in protest against the invasion of Laos
Laos
Laos Lao: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west...
and Stanford's involvement in the war. Firing a tenured professor was quite a feat: the University's rules provided for due process. A tenure-review committee was chosen, from professors outside Franklin's department, composed of associate or full professors who had hopes of advancement: two of them expected to become President of Stanford some day, and one of them actually did—Donald Kennedy
Donald Kennedy
Donald Kennedy is an American scientist, public administrator and academic.Donald Kennedy was born in New York and educated at Harvard University...
. A medium-sized Physics lecture hall was converted into a courtroom with the usual furniture and paraphernalia. A Los Angeles attorney, Paul Valentine, was retained to plead the University's case. Franklin defended himself, with advice from a law student and a well-known constitutional lawyer. Evidence was heard for each side, witnesses were cross-examined, and summations given, and the panel left the room to consider its verdict, which was guilty of violating the university's Disruption Policy, punishable by revocation of tenure and termination with prejudice.
Franklin was blacklisted and without regular employment for three years (although he had brief visiting faculty positions at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
and Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
). In 1975 he was hired as a (tenured) full professor at Rutgers
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
, where he has since been named the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies, and has received numerous awards for teaching and scholarship.
Work
Franklin is the author or editor of nineteen books and hundreds of articles on culture and history published in more than a hundred different academic journals, major magazines and newspapers, reference works, and anthologies. He has given over five hundred addresses on college campuses, on radio and TV shows, and at academic conferences, museums, and libraries; he has participated in the making of four films.Franklin’s main subject is American history and culture; his work aims at interdisciplinarity and broad public accessibility. He started out as a scholar of Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
; his first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology, which has been in print since its publication in 1963, examines Melville's use of mythologies most 20th-Century scholars are not familiar with: one expects references to Judaeo-Christian or Greco-Roman lore, but Melville's intellectual milieu was well-informed on many other cultures, from Meso-American to Sanskrit. In addition, Franklin produced a scholarly edition of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, which traces many obscure classical and "alien" references embedded in Melville's prose. This has recently been reprinted, but its numerous and tendentious footnotes may annoy readers who prefer to experience Melville in his own words.
His second book, Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (1966), which has gone through several editions and been widely adopted as a classroom text, inaugurated the serious study of science fiction and identified such classic American authors as Irving
Washington Irving
Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works...
, Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
, and Melville as pioneers of this genre, hitherto largely neglected by literary critics. His Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
: America as Science Fiction won awards in 1981 and 1983; in 1990 he was named the Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. In 1991 he was Guest Curator for the “Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
and the Sixties” exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum
National Air and Space Museum
The National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution holds the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world. It was established in 1976. Located in Washington, D.C., United States, it is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and...
of the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
; this show subsequently traveled to the Hayden Planetarium
Hayden Planetarium
The Hayden Planetarium is a public planetarium, part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, currently directed by astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson....
.
Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist established Franklin as a leading authority on American prison literature. Released in 1989 into an expanded third edition, this book has been widely used by historians, penologists, literary critics, and sociologists. Franklin’s 1998 anthology Prison Writing in 20th-Century America is a basic classroom text.
In his 1988 War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Franklin turned his interest in science fiction to an examination of the American fascination with superweapons. His book presents a view that, ironically, from Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the first commercially successful steamboat...
’s submarine Nautilus
Nautilus (1800 submarine)
Nautilus, first tested in 1800, is often considered the first practical submarine, though preceded by Cornelius Drebbel's of 1620.-Background:...
in the eighteenth century to the death-dealing weaponry of the late twentieth century, superweapons ostensibly designed to end war have proved capable of exterminating the human species. The expanded 2008 edition explores how this cultural history led to the seemingly permanent state of warfare of the twenty-first century. War Stars is informed by Franklin’s own earlier experience as a former navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.
Franklin has been publishing on the history of the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
and its role in American literature and culture since 1966. His M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America, and his co-edited Vietnam and America: A Documented History have been widely used in courses on the Vietnam War. His 2000 book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies synthesizes this previous work and extends it into an overview of 21st-century American culture. One of Franklin's major themes in writing about Vietnam is that the supposed existence of surviving U.S. prisoners of war
Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
in Vietnam after the war is a myth created after 1980 with the aid or tacit approval of the Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
White House, and that the psychological foundation of the myth arguably lies in the justifications the Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
White House offered for the Vietnam War in the years before 1973: namely, that it was a war to bring the POWs home.
Franklin’s most recent book, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (2007), is an interdisciplinary study of the role of menhaden
Menhaden
Menhaden, also known as mossbunker, bunker and pogy, are forage fish of the genera Brevoortia and Ethmidium, two genera of marine fish in the family Clupeidae.-Description:...
in American environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural history from the seventeenth into the twenty-first centuries.
Books
- The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2007)
- Vietnam & Other American Fantasies (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)
- Prison Writing in 20th-Century America (Penguin, 1998)
- The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems (Bedford/St. Martins, 1996)
- M.I.A., or, Mythmaking in America, New York: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1992. Revised and expanded paperback edition, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8135-2001-0
- War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1988). Revised and Expanded Edition, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
- Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (Oxford University Press, 1982)
- American Prisoners and Ex-prisoners, Their Writings: An Annotated Bibliography of Published Works, 1798-1981 (L. Hill, 1982)
- Robert A. HeinleinRobert A. HeinleinRobert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre. He set a standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of...
: America as Science Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1980) - Countdown to Midnight: Twelve Great Stories about Nuclear War (DAW Books)
- Back Where You Came From: A Life in the Death of the Empire (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975)
- The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-52 (Anchor Books, 1972)
- From the Movement Toward Revolution (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971)
- Vietnam and America: A Documented History (co-author)(Grove/Atlantic)
- Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the 19th Century (Oxford University Press; Rutgers University Press, 1966)
- The Wake of the Gods: MelvilleHerman MelvilleHerman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
's Mythology (Stanford University Press, 1963)
External links
- Franklin's web page
- Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America web page
- An SF Bay Guardian article about the FBI and Franklin
- Prison Writing in 20th Century America, book review from The Mantle