Books
Luther Spoehr: Review of Gary W. Gallagher's Causes Won, Lost, & Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Anyone who has taught or written history for any length of time at any level knows that textbooks and monographs have far less influence on students than have movies, television, historical novels, and other instruments of popular culture. So it is worth investigating just what those non-academic media have been teaching the public, students and grownups alike.
Nowhere is this more likely to be true than in the case of the American Civil War, the subject of over 60,000 books, plus a vast array of movies, magazine articles, and the like. Gary Gallagher, the prolific Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, takes a well organized look at the last 20 years worth of Hollywood’s Civil War productions and over 2,750 advertisements for Civil War paintings and sculptures that were printed in Civil War Times Illustrated and two other periodicals between 1962 and 2006. What he finds will not be terribly surprising to, say, readers of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. But if Walt Whitman was right to declare that “the real war will never get in the books,” Gallagher shows that Whitman’s dictum applies even more aptly to movies and popular artwork.
Hovering over Gallagher’s study, shaping and coloring the context in which the movies and prints he discusses appear, are a historical novel, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974), and a monumental PBS television series, “The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns” (1990). Shaara’s book propelled Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from obscurity to the front rank of Union icons, while Burns’s treatment of “the American Iliad” (which also shone a spotlight on Chamberlain) is almost surely the single most influential popular narrative of the Civil War today.
Gallagher identifies four traditional approaches to the Civil War that have emerged since war ended, each of which has waxed and waned over the years. His summaries are worth quoting at length: “(1) The Lost Cause tradition offered a loose group of arguments that cast the South’s experiment in nation-building as an admirable struggle against hopeless odds, played down the importance of slavery in bringing secession and war, and ascribed to Confederates constitutional high-mindedness and gallantry on the battlefield. (2) The Union Cause tradition framed the war as preeminently an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions that threatened both the work of the Founders and, by extension, the future of democracy…(3) The Emancipation Cause tradition interpreted the war as a struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and remove a cancerous influence on American society and politics. (4) Finally, the Reconciliation Cause tradition…represented an attempt by white people North and South to extol the American virtues both sides manifested during the war, to exalt the restored nation that emerged from the conflict, and to mute the role of African Americans.”
Lest we associate the Reconciliation Cause entirely with the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gallagher directs our attention to the cover of a brochure for the movie “Gettysburg” (1993), where text above the title proclaims “SAME LAND. SAME GOD. DIFFERENT DREAMS.” Gallagher also notes that the “Union, Emancipation, and Reconciliation traditions [overlap] in some ways, as [do] the Lost Cause and Reconciliation traditions. Yet each of the four can be examined as a quite distinct attempt to explain and understand the war.”
In the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood bought into the Lost Cause with blockbuster movies such as “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone with the Wind” (1939). But it sometimes took the viewpoint of the Union Cause (and, to a lesser degree, the Emancipation Cause) with films such as “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1940) and “Friendly Persuasion” (1956). Hollywood’s recent products most often favor the Emancipation Cause, beginning, of course, with “Glory” (1989), the story of the famous black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, and its bloody assault on Fort Wagner.
The Union Cause, says Gallagher, “is Hollywood’s real lost cause…Except in ‘Gettysburg’ [1993] and ‘Gods and Generals’ [2003], white soldiers in blue fare poorly. Hollywood serves up a post-Vietnam vision of the Union army as a cruel, racist juggernaut that wreaks havoc and stands for nothing admirable.” Even “Glory” stands in this camp, to say nothing of movies such as “Cold Mountain” (2003). Poor Billy Yank is in a crossfire, caught between liberal scorn coming from the Emancipation Cause on the left and undying romanticizing of the Lost Cause on the right.
As a teacher of U.S. history for over 30 years, I can attest to how hard it is to get students to understand Northern attachment to the Union—to see that Lincoln’s appeal to the “mystic chords of memory” was based on shrewd understanding at least of Northern opinion, even if it went unheeded in the South. A popular song promised, “We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,” in 1862, before the Union Cause had been tightly linked to the Emancipation Cause. Nowadays I refer students to James McPherson’s small volume, What They Fought For (1994), particularly the chapter “The Best Government on God’s Footstool,” where Union soldiers speak for themselves. But it’s still an uphill fight, and Hollywood isn’t helping.
Tempting as it might be, however, it’s probably unfair to blame Hollywood for the general public’s ahistorical perceptions. For one thing, it’s not entirely clear just what the public’s perceptions are, although it’s likely that the Emancipation Cause is favored more than any other “master narrative.” For another, it’s difficult to tell whether movies like “Glory” create viewpoints or reflect already established ones, a chicken-and-egg problem common to all study of popular culture. Finally, it’s difficult to measure just how popular movies such as “Glory” were. “Glory,” “Gods and Generals,” and “Cold Mountain” found large audiences and won some awards, but other movies Gallagher examines, including “Sommersby” (1993), came and went without causing much of a ripple. And Gallagher devotes much more time (too much more, really) to close analysis of the movies’ plots and characters than to questions of influence beyond the theater.
Measuring the relative importance and influence of the four traditions is less of a problem when Gallagher turns to the burgeoning market for Civil War artwork: here, counting advertisements for and sales of prints with Civil War themes leaves no doubt that the Lost Cause is winning. Gallagher says that “artists identify two groups of prospective buyers: (1) serious students of the Civil War, and (2) a much larger group whose taste is shaped by [director Ron] Maxwell’s films [“Gettysburg” and “Gods and Generals”], television documentaries or the novels of Michael and Jeff Shaara.”
Contemporary artists including Mort Kunstler and Don Troiani know that buyers are looking for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Everett B.D. Julio’s 1869 painting of “The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson” is as popular today in reproduction as it ever was, imitated in prints and even sculptures snapped up by collectors. “Confederate ascendancy in recent art,” says Gallagher, “rivals that in Hollywood during the period bracketed by ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and ‘Gone with the Wind.’” Only Ulysses S. Grant and Joshua Chamberlain break the Confederacy’s grip on the Top Ten images (and Grant gets there partly because he’s half of the duo depicted at Appomattox).
Gallagher refrains from speculating very much on What It All Means, settling for an intriguing portrayal of two important arenas of popular culture where competing master narratives pull and tug at one another. It’s hard not to worry a little about a world in which media mogul Ted Turner (who brought us both “Gettysburg” and “Gods and Generals”—and even had a speaking part in the former) has at least as much impact on public understanding as the most distinguished Civil War historian. At the same time, when survey after survey reveals that many Americans know almost nothing and care even less about their past (provoking HNN’s Rick Shenkman to ask, “Just How Stupid Are We?”), it’s actually encouraging to learn that Mort Kunstler’s book of Gettysburg prints sold over 200,000 copies. Those of us “in the business” who are tempted to lament the wrong-headedness of some conversations might also take time to be glad that there are conversations out there for us to join—and to thank Gary Gallagher for letting us know what we’re getting into when we join them.
- One of the best CW movies by R.R. Hamilton (July 31, 2008 at 2:21 PM)
When you are finished with the comments for this entry, close the window to return to the blog.
