An insightful look at '60s Civil War centennial

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/09/25/2633642/an-insightful-look-at-60s-civil.html

A Yale historian sheds light on our own time by looking back at the Cold War, civil rights and the romanticizing of an earlier war

By John David Smith

Correspondent

Posted: Sunday, Sep. 25, 2011

In his 1961 masterpiece "The Legacy of the Civil War," Robert Penn Warren declared, "The Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history." Writing during the Civil War centennial, when Americans were abuzz with nostalgic tales of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray, Warren reminded Americans that the "Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal, as well as national, fate."

David W. Blight's richly interpretive "American Oracle" contextualizes the sentimentalized celebration of the Civil War in the early 1960s within the tense realities of the civil rights era and the Cold War. Blight, a Yale University historian, unravels the complexities of Civil War memory and meaning at a time when most white Americans considered restoration of the Union, not emancipation, as the war's grand result.

Blight penetrates the constellation of 1960s-era Civil War remembrance and reality. In these years, the Civil War centennial and the civil rights movement existed "on different planets orbiting different suns. Other times the two planets veered off course and collided." As Americans watched civil rights marchers on television being clubbed by police in Birmingham, Ala., they celebrated the war as America's national epic and denied slavery's centrality to the conflict.

To gauge understandings of the Civil War epoch during the centennial era, Blight examines works of four of America's foremost writers - Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson and James Baldwin. "Each," according to Blight, "had a compelling sense of history and was in his own way engaged in an unending quest to know the purpose of the past in life and art."

Warren (1905-1989) abhorred myths and underscored redemptive tragedy. Holding North and South equally responsible for the war, he exposed weaknesses in both the "Treasury of Virtue" (Northerners' self-serving definition as noble victors) and the "Great Alibi" (Southerners' Lost Cause justification for the war and its consequences) arguments. Rejecting a triumphal interpretation of the war, Warren branded it "a crime of monstrous inhumanity, into which almost innocently men stumbled." This, according to Blight, was "Warren's riff on the Civil Rights revolution as a crisis in motion."

Author of "Stillness at Appomattox" (1953) and other books, Catton (1899-1978) was his day's most popular Civil War historian. He considered the war a catharsis that shaped a greater America. "Catton," Blight explains, "wrote a beguiling, enjoyable military history," that endorsed the "Confederate Legend." Thanks to Catton, generations of Civil War buffs "came to 'love' the Civil War in an age when war, with its unfathomable destructiveness, was no longer lovable."

Wilson (1895-1972), a legendary cynic and iconoclast, wrote "Patriotic Gore" (1962), a monumental literary history of the Civil War era. Though vehemently antiwar, Wilson nevertheless found intriguing the war's influence on history, human values and literature. He roundly condemned Gilded Age materialism as the bitterest fruit of Union victory. Blight observes that Wilson's book "sounded the depths of those irresistible myths that have compelled Americans to make fierce claims of the past, even as they repeat its sins."

In "The Fire Next Time" (1963) Baldwin (1924-1987), an African-American, unveiled what he considered the virulent racism that infected white Americans generally and the fatuous Civil War centennial specifically. He demanded an alternative history identifying slavery as the war's cause and residual racism as its foremost legacy. "Baldwin's Civil War," Blight surmises, "was a deeply internal battle against the fear and rejection caused by racism, homophobia, and ... America's mythic sense of its own invulnerable, self-righteous, unexamined or even unknown history."

Blight's insightful "American Oracle" thus brings to mind the striking degree to which the centennial of 1961-1965, "like many pivotal moments in history, seem both oddly remote and disturbingly current."

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