Carolyn Brown: Good afternoon.   I am Carolyn Brown.
I'm the Director of the Office of Scholarly Programs
in the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library,
and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you today
for what I know will be a very lively lecture
by Jenna Weissman Joselit.
When I heard the title, "Holy Moses," and then it followed
from there, "The Cultural History of the Ten Commandments
in Modern America," I knew we were in for a very lively treat.
And, Jenna, I have to say we're really glad to have you back
with us even if it's only for a few hours.
Jenna was here this summer and set a model for hard work and good cheer
and a really, kind of lively very personable presence.
So we have missed her and will continue to miss her.
I do want to say a word about the Kluge Center,
which is the sponsor of this lecture.
The center was established through a very generous endowment
of John W. Kluge in the year 2000 with the aim of promoting
and supporting advanced research in the collections of the library
and providing a venue on Capitol Hill where members
of Congress could have opportunities for informal conversation with some
of the world's very best scholars.
In addition to drawing the senior scholars we also have a very strong
and wonderful cohort of promising rising scholars,
they'll be the senior scholars of the future,
people who are just beginning their careers.
As you can guess from this event, we also do lectures
and symposia and small conferences.
You can find a lot more information about the Kluge Center,
more than you ever wanted to know I'm sure, on the Library's Web page,
very easy to find -- www.loc.gov --
and you'll find the Kluge Center on the front.
You can also sign up for RSSV's or to have email notification
of events, so please keep that in mind.
One more thing of the preliminaries, if you have a cell phone
or other electronic device, please turn it off.
Let me say then something about our wonderful lecturer today.
Dr. Joselit is a Professor of American Studies
and Modern Jewish Studies at Princeton University.
She has taught and lectured and published widely
on both the modern Jewish experience and American vernacular culture.
She's a frequent contributor to The New Republic
and a longstanding columnist for The Forward.
She's the author of A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise
of America, and The Wonders of America:
Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880 to 1950,
which received the National Jewish Book Club award in history.
A recipient of several grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, she's served as curator and contributor to more
than 30 exhibitions throughout the United States and Israel
and consulted on one of our relatively recent
and fabulous exhibits called "From Haven to Home."
You can still see that, there's an online version on the Web site.
I definitely recommend that to you.
While Dr. Joselit was a scholar here at the Kluge Center,
she had an opportunity to use the collections in ways
that scholars don't often always manage to do, which is to use a lot
of the special collections and get a sense of the breadth and variety
of what is actually here.
You can see how this subject, the Ten Commandments, would kind of call
for that if you're looking at it in popular culture.
So there're photographs and films and all sorts of other things
as well as what we might think of as the regular books
and journals that one can consult.
She's noted that these days the Ten Commandments cast a long shadow
on the body politic and that we have had,
and continue to have heated debates over the role
of the commandments in 21st century America.
One of the questions is have they always been so controversial
in American culture or is this something new?
Dr. Joselit has suggested that, in fact,
they have exercised a very strong hold on American imagination
from at least the mid 19th century into the 20th century for Americans
of all strives and backgrounds, who are strongly attached to discussions
of the Decalogue and the figure of Moses.
They've been incorporated in the domestic sphere
and the public sphere, the nation's visual culture,
as well as political rhetoric.
We're probably most familiar with the political rhetoric of late.
So this is one of those topics that all of us have been engaged
with in some way even if just through newspapers or in other kinds
of personal and political life.
At least for me it's not a subject I had thought about a great deal
and have been delighted to have conversations with Jenna
about this subject, and now you all get to share her wonderful insights.
So please welcome Dr. Joselit.   [ applause ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: Hello everybody and thank you
so very much for coming today.
For some time now I've been keeping company with a man named Moses.
Together we've wandered through the magic kingdom that is the Library
of Congress in search of material about one or another aspect
of the Ten Commandments, material that I'm very pleased to showcase
in this afternoon's talk.
As I made my way up one corridor and down another,
I was guided by a bevy of genial companions,
[ unintelligible ]   curators all.
From Sharon Horowitz of the Hebraic section and Peggy Pearlstein,
its luminous Chief, to Daniel De Simone of the Rosenwald Collection,
Clark Evans of Rare Books, and Zabila Yagush
[ spelled phonetically ]
of the Children's Literature Center, from Elizabeth Terry
of Architecture Design and Engineering,
to the very wonderful Sarah Willet Duke,
of Popular Applied Graphic Arts, from David Kelly, Sheraton Harvey,
and Sheryl Adams of the Reference Desk, to Eugene DeAnna,
Karen Fishman Bryan Cornell, David Saget
[ spelled phonetically ]   , and Rosemary Haines
[ spelled phonetically ]
of the Recorded Sound and Motion Picture divisions respectively.
These stewards of our patrimony not only generously share the Library's
treasures with me, they also sharpened my thinking
and quickened my sense of the possible
for which I'm deeply grateful.
When not roaming the halls or burying my nose in a book or set
of drawings or tantalizing assemblage of advertisements
like this one, I spent a fair amount of time at the Kluge Center per se,
because uncommon staff enabled people like me
to do what we do best, while away the day in lofty,
and at times, not so lofty thoughts.
For their many kindnesses, as well as their abiding commitment
to the life of the mind, I'd like to acknowledge Carolyn Brown,
the Kluge Center's most affable director, Mary Lou Reker,
my conversational partner and occasional drinking buddy,
and Robert Saladini, whose good humor consistently enlivened the
proceedings; JoAnne Kitching and her assistant Alicia Robertson
[ spelled phonetically ]
, as well as Regina Thielke saw to it that things ran smoothly,
while that wizard of the computer, Clark Allen, with great,
great stores of patience taught me how to distinguish among jpeg's,
TIFFs, bitmaps, and other foreign languages of the digital age.
To all of them, as well as to Dr. James Billington,
the Librarian of Congress, and most especially to my cherished friend
and colleague Dr. Michael Gundberger   [ spelled phonetically ]
former Chief of the Hebraic Section,
I extend my very deepest thanks and off we go.
Ever since Moses first came down from the mountain
with the Ten Commandments in tow,
the latter has exercised the collective imagination.
One of the most richly envisioned of all biblical moments,
the giving of the Ten Commandments and with it the life of Moses,
more generally, has assumed multiple forms over the millennia:
the stuff of liturgy, illuminated manuscript,
painting, sculpture, and frieze.
It's in the new world though, especially in modern America
of the 19th and early 20th centuries that the Decalogue truly came
into its own, illuminating every nook and cranny of daily life,
at home and on the street, at church and in the synagogue,
in the classroom, at the theater, and in the pages of the daily press,
where it functioned both as article and editorial.
The Ten Commandments loomed large, an inescapable presence.
You couldn't miss them.
Just about everywhere in modern America the Ten Commandments blurred
the line between the profane and the sacred, the quotidian and the holy,
to capture the nation's undivided attention.
These days, the Ten Commandments are also front and center
as its latter day champions do battle on its behalf.
One of the more divisive issues in contemporary America,
the placement of the Decalogue
in the public square has occasioned considerable debate,
much of it acrimonious, even mean-spirited at times.
Take for instance the rhetoric of the Ten Commandments Day Commission,
a group determined as they put it, "To bring the word of God back
to the forefront of our national conscience."
Toward that end it lobbies, among other things,
for an official Ten Commandments Day insisting
that a national holiday will heal the wounds of history and put paid
to those who would destroy the moral fabric of America.
Other Ten Commandment advocates go further still,
insisting that it is high time to take back the nation.
But way back when, the Decalogue's relationship to the body politic was
of a different order entirely.
For one thing, it was consensual, rather than controversial,
common ground rather than contested turf.
For another, it transcended that of religion and for
that matter, even the law.
The Ten Commandments, you see, were many things back then,
a constellation of divine do's and don'ts to be sure,
but also a cultural symbol, a rhetorical gambit,
an organizational tool, and a set of household rules.
In a nation divided by class, region, religion, race, ethnicity,
and so much else, the Ten Commandments were just
about the only thing everyone, rich and poor, young and old, northerner
and southerner, black and white, Protestant,
Catholic, and Jew, had in common.
Little wonder then that much was made of them.
For fidelity to the Ten Commandments, a fidelity that was
at once rhetorical, visual, performative, and symbolic,
fidelity to the Ten Commandments was a way of keeping faith in America.
From time to time, someone might suggest
that the Ten Commandments be revised, even contemporized.
In 1909 for example, a Harvard professor
of Economics named Thomas Carver,
thought that the nation would be well served were it to substitute
"Thou shalt not drink" in place of "Thou shalt not take the name
of the Lord thy God in vain."
"The use of God's name had become commonplace," he explained,
"was merely the property of people who possessed a dwarfed vocabulary
and a lack of breeding or good taste.
On the other hand when it came to drinking, well danger,"
as he put it, "danger hangs over our being like the sword of Damocles."
A new commandment extolling the virtues of temperance, then,
would surely come in handy.
Another academic, E.A. Ross, of the University
of Wisconsin went his Harvard colleague one better,
suggesting that Americans ought, and this is his language,
"Ought to enlarge the Ten Commandments
by adding an annual supplement
that would reflect the very latest of vices."
"Either way," responded the New York Times,
"the Decalogue is entirely good stuff."
Americans agreed.
They hung drawings of the Ten Commandments on the wall,
recited them in their prayer books, parsed them in their catechisms,
and, if Protestant, encountered them along with the Lord's Prayer
and the Apostles Creed
as textualized images in their churches.
Increasingly, Americans also imported the Decalogue and Moses too
into the medium of stained glass providing the R&H Lamb Studios,
one of the nation's leading manufacturers and distributors
of ecclesiastical furnishings, with a steady stream
of commissions like this one.
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, technology combined with faith
to make the Ten Commandments even more accessible.
The latest advances in bookmaking made it possible for the literate
to read all about them, while the growing sophistication
and affordability of lithography enabled even the youngest
of Americans to render them a part of their play.
Thanks to the Providence Lithograph Company, baseball cards had nothing
on these brightly covered,
even sprightly little Bible picture lessons, as they were called,
of Moses' life and the giving of the Ten Commandments.
Gown-ups too had the opportunity to parlay their familiarity with Moses
and the Ten Commandments in novel, even playful ways.
In 1890, the pedigreed man of the Order of Cincinatus not only put
on an elaborate pageant, "A biblical spectacle" they called it,
in Cincinnati no less, theatricalizing Moses' encounter
with Pharaoh, they also produced a sumptuously illustrated booklet
from which these beautifully detailed
and evocative images are drawn in commemoration of the occasion.
Elsewhere throughout the nation, America's Jews grafted the giving
of the Ten Commandments onto a new-fangled ritual,
the exchange of Jewish New Year's cards, at once incorporating Moses
into a new visual universe,
while also enlarging the parameters of modern Jewish life.
I'm not sure whether the incongruity of wishing one's friends
and family members a decidedly happy New Year amid the scenes
of a glowering Moses smashing the Ten Commandments simply escaped
those who produced these cards, or whether the conflation
of the two represented a way to salute both history and sociology.
In any case, greeting cards that ushered in the New Year
and the presence of Moses and his Decalogue were widespread
in the early years of the 20th century.
Later still, as the technologies of daily life grew even stronger,
stereopticon slides and then motion pictures transferred the vastness
of the Sinai Desert where the Ten Commandments were given,
from the one dimensionality of the printed page into the realm
of the multi-dimensional, the sensory,
and the downright spectacular.
When in 1923, don't panic this is right,
when in 1923 Cecil B. DeMille released the first
of his two cinematic extravaganzas about the Ten Commandments,
audiences had trouble restraining themselves, or so we are told.
Eyewitness spoke of being lifted from their seats
with sheer excitement as hundreds of charioteers plunged directly
into their line of vision in pursuit of the fleeing Israelites.
Equally riveting was the scene in which a white-bearded Moses,
played by the veteran stage actor Theodore Roberts,
received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai.
A tour-de-force of technology,
these moments of cinematic magic had few rivals, prompting contemporaries
to speak of their undreamed of sumptuousness
or as the New York Times film critic explained, "There has been nothing
on films so utterly impressive as the thundering and belching forth
of one commandment after another."   Let's see for ourselves.
John, the film clip please.   [ music ]
How do you like that?   [ laughing ]
But film wasn't the only medium to celebrate the Ten Commandments.
We need to get off this and back to the slides.
There we go.
Recorded sound in fact also furthered ones appreciation
of the Ten Commandments, inspiring masterful vocalists
such as George Beverly Shea, the musical counterpart to Billy Graham,
solemnly to intone one commandment after another
on a long-playing record amid the doleful strains
of cellos and violins.
For their part, politicians also made a lot of noise
when it came to the Ten Commandments.
Throughout the 1880s for example they incorporated references
to the Decalogue into their platforms: "We will stand
on the site of God and the Ten Commandments" was one very popular
refrain, and with that they set in motion a political commitment
to the Ten Commandments that continues through to our own time.
Meanwhile, back in Kansas in 1893, a state legislator named Walters went
so far as to propose a bill
that would actually make the Ten Commandments an official part
of that state's criminal law.
Those who would violate its provisions would be punished not
just by the wrath of God, but by the long arm of the state.
Violators of the Seventh Commandment, that's the one
on adultery, would be punished by being incarcerated
in the state penitentiary for life while those contravening the
provisions of the Fifth Commandment, that's the one
on honoring your parents, would find themselves just $500 poorer.
Barely making it out of committee, the proposed bill was the subject
of numerous sarcastic editorials and the butt of many jokes
at the legislator's expense.   "He has the courage
of his absurdities," remarked one newspaper.
Said another, "This proposition shows the fertility
of the legislative mind."
Equally popular throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries was the way
that the Ten Commandments had become something of an organizational tomb,
taming the unruly, the unfamiliar, and the unyielding.
Unsure of how to grow tomatoes?   No need to fret, all you had
to do was consult the Ten Commandments of pomology.
Unsure of how to get the most out of your piano?
Why, just pick up a copy of the Ten Commandments of piano practice.
[ laughter ]
Affairs of the heart left you unmoored?
How about the Ten Commandments of love?
Even tavern keepers got into the act as this tongue and cheek,
multilingual broadside of 1873 makes clear,
"Thou shalt have no other host but me" exhorts the First Commandment
of the tavern owner, while the Third insists,
"Leave not thy pocketbook at home."
Of course, there's also an alternative version
of the Third tavern-keeper's Commandment that says,
"Thou shalt visit a tavern on Sundays and holidays."
The Decalogue's application to this most sacrilegious, this most mundane
and humdrum of setting,
showed clearly just how familiar the American public was
with its symbolic value.
It also underscored the Decalogue's malleability
as an instrument of social control.
Lending itself to so many different iterations, modalities,
and contexts, the Ten Commandments received its fullest treatment
at home, where it lodged itself squarely
within the domestic economy.
It's here, it's here that the imagery of the Decalogue was
at its most inventive, perhaps even its most
characteristically American.
This poster, filling the eye, was nothing if not exuberant
in its embrace of the Ten Commandments, which it festooned
with flowers and laurel leaves and cheerful scenes of daily life.
Bursting with color, this was no stony harsh and patriarchal account
of the Ten Commandments designed to put the fear of God
in its practitioners, this version and many others just
like it softened, feminized, and even daintified the Decalogue,
removing its prescriptions from on high and the province
of bearded old men and placing them well within everyone's reach.
Children's books did much the same thing.
Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish publishing houses,
especially in the aftermath of World War II,
all had a go at translating the Ten Commandments into a series
of easily memorized household rules, rendering the Ten Commandments
in the colors fancied by Americans of the 1950's and setting them
within the familiar trials
and tribulations of boyhood and girlhood.
These post-War meditations
on the Decalogue not only took away its hard edges,
they made the Ten Commandments a part of the moral equipment
of daily life for the average American boy and girl.
So making our way through children's books and broadsides
and motion pictures, through playthings, stained glass windows,
greeting cards and all manner of pageantry, we've taken the measure
of America's interest in the Ten Commandments
and found what, exactly?   What does America's relationship
with the Ten Commandments demonstrate?
What does it tell us about ourselves and our history?
For starters, there's no question that the popularity
of the Ten Commandments had much to do with the religious character
of 19th and early 20th century America.
Of a piece with the nation's absorption in the Bible,
its affinity with the ancient Israelites, its valorization
of Moses as the prototypical pioneer and lawgiver,
and its self-fashioning as the promised land, the special
and abiding relationship its citizens enjoyed
with the Ten Commandments reinforced America's sense of itself
as singular and blessed, as the fulfillment
of the biblical narrative.
But then, there's even more to it than that.
The popularity, the appeal of the Ten Commandments in 19th
and early 20th century America also had to do with the way it promised
to impose order on the shapelessness of this great land,
the neatness of its prescriptions, their very formulaicness
in fact provided a structure capable of containing and,
in the most literal sense, of domesticating the unwieldiness
of both geography and of human nature.
This concluding image I think says it best.
Fashioned in the wake of the Civil War, it featured the Bible,
which was open to the passages from Exodus
that contain the Ten Commandments.
The text, flanked by two powerful unequivocally American cultural
symbols, Lady Liberty on one hand and Justice on the other,
the text rests on a third national symbol, that of the American Eagle.
The entire composition renders the Ten Commandments an American text,
not a biblical one, and situates it squarely within the context
of the New World, not the ancient Near East.
Taken as a whole, the composition stakes out a claim
to the Ten Commandments as an American document,
or at the very least as one tailor-made for the new Zion
that was the United States.
Both the visual imagery and the emotions
that sustain it speak of hope.
To a generation that had just undergone the most wrenching
of displacements and dislocations, what better way, what better way
to summon up the promise of stability
than by evoking the Ten Commandments
and harnessing them to justice and liberty?
A vote of confidence in the American people to do right by one another,
the Ten Commandments here and elsewhere make manifest the idea
of repair, the prospect of deliverance,
and the possibility of redemption.
That said, I'd like to give the very last word to music.
As it happens, there is a wealth of vocal, instrumental,
and choral music that attests to how the Decalogue made its way
into the oral, as well as the ocular realms of American culture.
Two examples come to mind.
One drawn from country music, the other from American pop traditions.
The first is the "Ten Commandments and the Law" sung by Skip Graves
and the Gasconade River Boys, and the second is the "Ten Commandments
of Love," performed by the Moonglows.
I've chosen to end my talk this afternoon with these pieces in part
because they underscore the extent
to which the Ten Commandments have insinuated themselves
into our culture, contributing through text and image,
object and sound to what makes us American.
But the real reason for contributing my talk in a musical key is,
if truth be told, that I've always wanted
to leave my audiences humming.   [ laughter ]
So here are Skip Graves and the Gasconade River Boys singing the
"The Ten Commandments and the Law," and then followed
by the Moonglows and "The Power of Love."
[ music ]
Skip Graves and the Gasconade River Boys:* We all know the Ten
Commandments, some say them every day.
We've learned all about them, about the time we learn to pray.
They cover everything wrong in this world so why do we need the law?
But are written by man and twisted around and so full of flaw.
Moses brought down the Commandments from top of Mt. Sinai,
If we would all abide by them, law enforcement could say goodbye.
If we could just have peace on Earth this kind of life would end.
We would live to be old with joy with peace among all men.
The Ten Commandments cover all the law that man has tried to make.
They turn them around to fit their needs until the laws they break.
The Ten Commandments are the law, but man can't understand
that God is smarter than he is, because he's the master of the land.
Men always try to make things better but without God always fail.
We all swear upon the Bible, then won't let it prevail.
Every courtroom in this country has a Bible on the bench with rows
of rows of law books but the commandments they don't heed.
With rows and rows of law books but the commandments they don't heed.
Jenna Weissman Joselit: And now the Moonglows.
[ music ]   Moonglows:* One.
Thou shalt never love another.   Thy shalt never love another.
Two. And stand by me all the while.   And stand by me all the while.
Three. Take happiness with the heartaches.
Take happiness with the heartaches.
Four. And go through life wearing a smile.
And go through life wearing a smile.
Oh, how happy will be if we keep the Ten Commandments of love, of love.
Five. Thou shalt always have faith in me.
Thou shalt always have faith in me.
In everything I say and do.   In everything I say and do.
Six. Love me with all your heart and soul -- Love me with all your heart
and soul -- until our life on earth is through.
Oh how happy we will be if we keep the Ten Commandments of love.
Love, oh sweet love.   Oh, oh so grand.
You will find since the beginning of time it has ruled in all the land.
Seven. Come to me when I am lonely.   Come to me when I am lonely.
Eight. Kiss me when you hold me tight.
Kiss me when you hold me tight.   Nine. Treat me sweet and gentle --
treat me sweet and gentle -- when we say goodnight.
Oh, how happy we will be if we keep the Ten Commandments of love.
Oh how happy we will be if we keep the Ten Commandments
of love, of love.   The Ten Commandments of love.
Jenna Weissman Joselit: There you have it.
Thank you.   [ applause ]
Thank you.   Thank you.
Of course.   Questions, comments?
Yes. Male Speaker:   [ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: I'll repeat the question.
Can't hear.   Male Speaker:
[ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: What do you mean, at least you, right?
Male Speaker:   [ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: To?   References to?
In humor? In humor?   Male Speaker:
[ inaudible ]   Jenna Weissman Joselit: Okay.
I'll repeat the question.
The gentlemen said that he liked the survey,
particularly the humorous dimensions, the humorous iterations
of the Ten Commandments and wonders why it is in recent times
that one doesn't find the Ten Commandments construed
in quite that way.
I would say in a nutshell that it ain't no laughing matter anymore.
That's probably what's going on.
Today the Ten Commandments has become such a source of divisiveness
that people can't laugh it.
I think that the stakes seem to be so incredibly high today in terms
of approbation or demonizing the Ten Commandments
that people can't laugh at it.
I think it would be a good idea if they did, but they don't.
So I think in a way the relationship of the Ten Commandments
to humor bespeaks the broader relationship
in which the Ten Commandments finds itself
at any particular point in time.   Yes. Ms. Phyllis?
Female Speaker:   [ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: I'll repeat the question
from my wonderful friend, Phyllis, who traveled all the way
from New York to be here today.
The question is, in the course of my research did I anticipate or come
across things that I had not anticipated coming across?
And I would say, yes, every single day here at the Library of Congress.
I had a running list, a tab, an inventory of catalog
of what I thought I would find and I found that
and I would find all sorts of wonderful things including some
of the goodies that you've seen up on the screen.
For example, I had no idea that one of the unprocessed collections here
at the Library, that of the Lamb Studios,
had so much unbelievable stuff relating to Moses
and the Ten Commandments from cartoons of stained glass,
not the stained glass itself, but cartoons of the stained glass,
discussions of the stained glass,
bills of lading, things of that sort.
So that was an unanticipated bonus.   I found tons of children's material.
Who knew? I had no idea that there was so much children's literature.
The playthings, those little playing cards?
That was a complete and unanticipated bonus
that Sara Willet Duke and I stumbled across in looking through
yet another set of unprocessed collections.
So I think without tooting the horn of the Kluge Center and the Library
of Congress unduly, that's the magic of this institution,
that you go in with a certain set of notions
and not only are they expanded, but they're also confounded.
Yes, Eric?   Male Speaker:
[ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: Yes, both of them.
Good question and then I'm going to ask you a question
as to why you asked that question.
Were the two songs I had played, particularly the Ten Commandments
of Love, just a curiosity, just a blip, or was it a very popular song?
It was an extremely popular song that actually lent itself
to many different iterations.
One of the more interesting of which is also in the Library of Congress
and that is a selection of the U.S. Army Recording Station or some
such thing, in which the song is sung by Peaches and Herb, or Herb
and Peaches, another '60s group, so yeah, it does have legs.
Why do you ask?
Male Speaker: I was just wondering if you were driving around
[ inaudible ]
. Jenna Weissman Joselit: You'd hear this.
Yeah. Male Speaker:   [ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: You would hear it
and you would not sit up straight.
It would probably be experienced as make-out music --
[ laughter ]
-- which adds another layer of complexity
to our relationship to the Ten Commandments.
Yes, sir? Male Speaker:   [ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: Yes.   Yes. Male Speaker:
[ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: So this gentleman points
out that there are many different ways to both translate
and to tabulate the Ten Commandments and today
that is a very, very sore point.
In point of fact, it's one of the reasons that the public display
of the Ten Commandments in Texas
and in Kentucky made their way all the way up to
through the court circuit and to the Supreme Court because a lot
of people have argued that the version that is historically
on most Ten Commandments' monuments privileges the Protestant not the
Catholic or the Jewish versions,
and so that's been a big bone of contention.
Earlier on, the division was not such a contentious issue;
people were mindful of it a little bit, but by and large they were
so eager to showcase the Ten Commandments as an entity
that those kinds of potentially fractious issues were buried.
I'll give you another example: the Fraternal Order of Eagles,
the organization that sponsored so many of the large-scale monuments
that are seated throughout the country these days,
was concerned back in the '50s about the differing numbering systems,
the different translations, and so it actually made a point
of convening boards of rabbis and Catholic priests,
and Protestant ministers to arrive at a version
that it thought was most congenial, and it's that version that is
in many cities throughout the United States today.
Yeah, Amy?   Amy Schwartz
[ spelled phonetically ]   :
[ inaudible ]   Jenna Weissman Joselit: Yes.
Amy Schwartz:   [ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: Amy Schwartz asks given the example
of the Kansas legislator who wanted
to make the Ten Commandments an actual part, a legal part,
an authorized part of his state's constitution, was that,
I guess you're asking, was that an anomaly or -- Amy Schwartz:
[ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: No, it wasn't it an anomaly that he failed.
Church and State still reigned way back in 1893, as it did today.
It didn't fail, but what it did do in addition to generating a lot
of jokes and some really fiercely worded editorials,
not just in Kansas, but throughout the eastern seaboard,
but was to make it clear that people were reckoning with the power
of the Ten Commandments as a political ideology,
not just as a religious one.
I know of, I could be wrong, but at this stage of my research,
I know of no other effort that succeeded at least
to integrate the Ten Commandments as a matter
of American jurisprudence into our system.
Anybody else?   Carolyn? Carolyn Brown:
[ inaudible ]
Jenna Weissman Joselit: Carolyn Brown asks whether
or not I have any notion as to when that transition happens
from the Ten Commandments being something that's part
of our common property to something that divides us.
From something that cut across kinds of religious communities
and associations into something that seems to be unabashedly
and unequivocally the property of just the religious right,
and in a nutshell, that's the problem of the book.
That's the interpretive burden of the book to try not only
to historicize that, but to get to the bottom of it.
Clearly we're in such a different mindset and way of looking
at the Ten Commandments today that the idea that they can be anodyne
and unifying strikes us as so strange.
Why that is I can just offer up two very brief off the cuff notions,
and the first is that today society is so fragmented and so divisive
and we don't share a common core of ideology.
And, in fact, we like our divisiveness,
we like being vulcanized and so that things
that in the past might have served as agents
of integration today are not, they're agents of disintegration.
So I think that's one.
Number two, I think given the religious rights, in a way,
hijacking of the Ten Commandments it sets up a red flag so that
when people see the Ten Commandments they become very worried
about that very porous relationship between Church and State,
and the Ten Commandments becomes a wedge into either holding up
or destroying that wall of separation.
So I think like all of these avatars of the Ten Commandments,
they represent who we are at a particular point
in time, that they're not static.
In fact, one could even think of the Ten Commandments
as having a life history much as any other historical social phenomenon
and I think that's what the book, and the fullness
of time will try and uncover.   All right.
So I just want once again to thank you for coming and to leave you
with one last thing and that is that in 1876, quite a ways ago,
the Reformed Church Messenger,
a very popular liberal Protestant magazine, put forward a plea
to urge its readers to give the Ten Commandments what it called,
"a little airing, a little more airing."
"Yes," it said ringingly, "let us ventilate those old commandments."
Well I'm really delighted that more
than a century later we've also had the opportunity to do just that,
to air and ventilate those old Ten Commandments.
Thank you very much.
[ applause ]   [ end of transcript ]