BIRGing (Basking In Reflected Glory) – The tendency to enhance one’s self-esteem by heightening one’s association with a successful or prestigious group. The opposite of this is cutting off reflected failure (CORFing), or distancing oneself from an unsuccessful or low-status group.
- American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology [1]
This week, I want to look at misinformation on the web by focusing on famous people who are allegedly from Wisconsin. No one really knows why it’s important to tabulate lists of people from Wisconsin, or from Illinois, or the United States, or any other area. But people do it all the time. There’s a Wikipedia category called “List of people from Wisconsin” [2] and literally dozens of other sites, articles and blog posts with titles like, “Did you know these famous people were actually from Wisconsin?!”
Today, I want to set the record straight as to who is and who isn’t from Wisconsin. This reflects my concern (some would say obsession) with accuracy. To be “from” somewhere necessitates a birth at that location. It’s whatever your birth certificate says. You can’t be “from Wisconsin” if you were born in California or New Zealand, no matter how enthusiastically you claim Wisconsin is “your adopted home.”
This isn’t xenophobia, just simple genealogical accuracy.
At least, that’s how I see it, although there are intense debates on the web about this question. My view is, if you can be “from” somewhere just because you lived there for a while or because you have a home there (or just because you like it) then everybody is potentially from everywhere they’ve ever been. And that sounds like chaos.
Was every person listed as “from Wisconsin” on the web actually born here? Let’s analyze that question with a small sample. Since there seem to be thousands of celebrities out there, I’ll restrict the sample size by focusing on famous entertainers who are no longer with us. And, reflecting my own personal biases, my celebrities will be from the “Golden Age of Hollywood” from about 1930 to 1960.
Let’s take a look at these examples, all listed as “from Wisconsin” on various websites:
Abner Biberman (1909-1977). Hollywood actor and TV director. Born in Milwaukee.
John Elmer Carson (1910-1963). Hollywood actor who co-starred with the likes of James Cagney, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. Lived in Milwaukee (which he reportedly always thought of as his “home town”) but was born in Manitoba, Canada.
Ellen Corby (1911-1999). Best known for her role as “Grandma” on The Waltons TV show. Also acted in many Golden Era films and was nominated for an Academy Award. Born in Racine.
Brian Donlevy (1901-1972). A major Hollywood leading man of the 1930s and 1940s. Nominated for an Academy Award in 1939. Lived in Sheboygan Falls (or possibly Racine) for several years but was born in Ireland (or possibly Ohio).
Lynn Fontanne (1887-1983). Primarily acted on the stage but appeared in several films and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1931. Had a country home in Genesee Depot (Ten Chimneys, now a museum). Born in England.
Howard Hawks (1896-1977). Considered one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. Films include Scarface, The Big Sleep and Red River. Lived in Neenah for about a decade during his youth but was born in Indiana.
Harry Houdini (1874-1926). Magician and escape artist. Not a film star but one of the most often cited celebrities “from Wisconsin.” Lived in Appleton, where his father was a rabbi, but was born in Hungary.
Fred MacMurray (1908-1991). Best known for his role as Steve Douglas (the dad) in the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons. MacMurray was also a prolific Hollywood actor, including a role in the proto-noir classic Double Indemnity alongside Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson. Attended Carroll College in Waukesha but was born in Illinois.
Fredric March (1897-1975). A major Hollywood star in the 1930s and 1940s and the recipient of two Academy Awards. Born in Racine, he attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Controversially, the UW Memorial Union theatre, known as Fredric March Theater, was renamed in 2018 after allegations that March belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Exploring that controversy would require another blog post.
Hattie McDaniel (1893-1952). Played the role of Mammy in Gone with the Wind, for which she won an Academy Award (the first African American to do so). Due to segregation, she was not permitted to attend the film’s Atlanta premiere. McDaniel worked in Milwaukee briefly after the stock market crash of 1929 but was born in Kansas and lived mostly in Colorado and California.
Agnes Moorhead (1900-1974). Best known (to Boomers anyway) as Endora in the 1960s sitcom Bewitched. Moorhead was also a serious actor nominated for numerous Academy Awards. She taught school for five years in Soldiers Grove and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison but was born in Massachusetts.
Pat O’Brien (1899-1983). Prolific Golden Age actor and friend of James Cagney. Born in Milwaukee.
Robert O’Conner (1885-1962). Character actor in several hundred films. Born in Milwaukee.
Nicholas Ray (1911-1979). Visionary director of They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place (both noir classics) and Rebel Without a Cause. Led a turbulent life, including a marriage to the even more turbulent Gloria Grahame. Born in Galesville.
Spencer Tracy (1900-1967). A major Hollywood star and Academy Award winner. Partner of Katherine Hepburn until his death (while married to another woman). Starred in films with Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, William Powell and other major actors of the day. Born in Milwaukee.
Orson Welles (1915-1985). Actor and influential director best known for Citizen Cane, often characterized as one of the best films ever made. Also known for his classic role as Harry Lime in The Third Man. His later work took him to Europe after he became disgusted with the Hollywood movie machine. Born in Kenosha.
How did we do? Of the sixteen celebrities, only eight were born in Wisconsin. Our accuracy test is a simple percent correctly classified statistic.
8 correct / 16 total = 50%
Half of the people the web says are “from Wisconsin” were born in a different state or country.
On the one hand, this should come as no surprise. It’s the web, after all. But is something more mysterious going on?
Social psychologists have proposed the term BIRGing (basking in reflected glory) as an attempt to explain this type of phenomenon. When BIRGing, you inflate your own self-worth through vicarious attachments to others, reflecting the actions of those who have done great things, are famous or rich, or (sometimes) are notorious criminals.
Usually, BIRGing is used to describe the behavior of sports fans, who wear their team jersey when their team is winning or talk about the team as if they were on it. (“We played a great game last night!”) Psychologists who theorize on this behavior have even extended it to include “basking in spite of reflected failure (BIRF) and cutting off reflected success (CORS).” [2]
As the sports psychologists explain it, BIRGing relates to an “externalized enhanced position in the social environment…linked to internal psychological factors of self-image management as well as external sociological factors related to perceptions from others.” [2] So there you go.
But BIRGing isn’t always about sports. It can include parents who celebrate their child’s 4.0 semester with a Facebook post, people who name-drop and (in an inverted way) those who trash-talk.
Does constructing lists of celebrities from Wisconsin (or any other state) qualify as BIRGing? I’ll let you decide.
Sources
[1] APA Dictionary of Psychology, Basking in reflected glory (BIRGing), https://dictionary.apa.org/basking-in-reflected-glory
[2] Richard M, Campbell, Jr., Damon Aiken, Aubrey Ketit. 2004. Beyond BIRGing and CORFing: Continuing the Exploration of Fan Behavior. Sport Marketing Quarterly, V. 13, pp. 151-157.
Sources of biographies: Biography (biography.com); Encyclopedia Britannica (britannica.com); Hollywood Walk of Fame (walkoffame.com); IMDB database (imdb.com); Kennedy Center (kennedy-center.org); PBS (pbs.org); Turner Classic Movies (tcm.com); TV Guide (tvguide.com).