Did Doris Kearns Goodwin Blow It At Gettysburg?

This was originally published on forbes.com  on July 3, 2013.  This reissue is scheduled to post one year from the date of the opening ceremonies for the Gettysburg Sesquicentennial on the evening of June 30, 2013 or Day 0 in the reckoning of this real timer.  Here is the Goodwin speech which stirred up a bit of controversy.  To me it was DKG being DKG, but then I'm an Imus fan.

Of all the things I have experienced since arriving at Gettysburg on Saturday, the Doris Kearns Goodwin speech Sunday night does not rate very high on the impression list.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I am here with six other people. There is my covivant and my two friends from Central Florida and their three children.  I have decided to call the entire assemblage the Magnificent Seven, but we have not really been operating as a unit for the most part.  Thus, I was unaware that Mr. CF had led his family out of the event in silent protest until I discussed a link he sent me to this article by Tony Lee:

On Sunday, a stunned audience sat in silence as Doris Kearns Goodwin turned the keynote address at the opening ceremony for the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg into a political lecture focusing on women's and gay rights.

Now as far as  the "stunned audience sat in silence" part goes, I was there.  Here is one observation about just about everybody involved in the sesquicentennial in any way. They are a very polite bunch of people.  Of course everybody was silent.  There was somebody speaking.  Duh.  Even Mr. CF and his family were silent.  They got up and walked out.  So the one tenth of one percent of the audience that I am familiar with did not sit in "stunned silence".  Neither CV nor I were stunned and the CF family did not sit.  That does not mean that Doris Kearns Goodwin did not do a crappy job.  On reflection I think she did.  And it is not just because when you are at Gettysburg and you say Stonewall, as one word, you should be talking about how things might have turned out if General Jackson had not been involved in a friendly fire incident at Chancellorsville.

Why Doris Kearns Goodwin Was A Reasonable Choice

Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of Team of Rivals on which the movie Lincoln is based.

I have my own theory that Lincoln is a cinematic response to Birth of A Nation

Thanks in part to Birth of A Nation, the "Lost Cause" narrative, although stripped of its explicit racism, is the one most deeply embedded in popular culture.  Here is what the "infallible source" has to say about the "Lost Cause":

The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to an American literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865.Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through overwhelming force rather than martial skill. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life.

Even though, or perhaps because, it is the site of a major Union victory, Gettysburg is powerfully iconic to the Lost Cause.  You get to stand near the spot where Armistead fell

There is a bit of a monument debate, that got rather heated at one time, about whether it was troops from Virginia, North Carolina or Mississippi that made the deepest penetration through Union lines - the High Water Mark.  By all reports, the most attended public hike will be Pickett's charge today.  I was going to stand where my probable cousins in the 69th Pennsylvania stood, but I changed my mind and bought another hat and will do the walk.  After all I have a Florida CPA license to go with the one from Massachusetts.

At any rate, Lost Cause, compelling as it is and cherished as it must remain, deserves a counter narrative and that is that the small number of Americans who stood up for racial equality in the period leading up to the war were also incredibly brave.  They risked being lynched anywhere in  the country.  When war came, some of them, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, rather than going to war with neighbors and friends, would volunteer to command liberated slaves, with a promise from Jefferson Davis that, if captured, they would be considered fomenters of servile insurrection rather than officers entitled to treatment as prisoners of war.

At any rate, I see the logic in inviting Doris Kearns Goodwin to keynote the televised piece of the events of this week.  I guess when you invite somebody like that to speak, she gets to say whatever she wants.  So the screw-up, to the extent it is one, is hers alone.

What I Heard 

I wasn't bothered by her talk because it was Doris Kearns Goodwin being Dorothy Kearns Goodwin.  I had heard most of the anecdotes that she related from listening to Imus. (CV was puzzled wondering why the talk was mostly about Doris Kearns Goodwin) Also her counter narrative to Lost Cause- Abolition to Racial Equality to Women's Liberation deserves some respect, regardless of whether you agree with it.  The sesquicentennial is paying much more homage to the counter narrative than the centennial which was all Lost Cause, all the time.

How She Screwed Up

I think her screw-up is that she forgot that she was not on Imus.  She had been accorded a great honor to keynote this event.  She should have spent some time preparing rather than throwing her speech together at the last minute.  We were all there thinking about an event that has had one hundred fifty years to marinate in our national consciousness.  It is not the place to celebrate last weeks Supreme Court decisions that might sweep some divisive issues off the political table.  Trying to use the Supreme Court to take a divisive issue out of the hands of the electorate was one of the things that led to the need for a National Cemetery at Gettysburg.  The seceding states were reacting to an election that threatened to mess up their major Supreme Court victory:

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.
When the Constitution was adopted, they were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State, and were not numbered among its "people or citizens."
The only two clauses in the Constitution which point to this race treat them as persons whom it was morally lawfully to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves.
Every citizen has a right to take with him into the Territory any article of property which the Constitution of the United States recognises as property. Scott v. Sandford - 60 U.S. 393 (1856)

Hooray for the Supreme Court.  They really nailed it with the Dredd Scott decision

What Was Required

The keynote speech needed to be a unifying message.  I think one of the things that we as individual Americans need to always remember is that if something really bad happens in our community, the outpouring of generous support and, if required acts of heroism, will be, in some arbitrarily large percentage, from people with whom we profoundly disagree on deeply held moral beliefs.  If the keynote speaker needed to work an up-to-the minute reference into the speech, it being on television and all,  she would have been well advised to choose the Granite Mountain Hotshots of the Prescott Fire Department.  Doris Kearns Goodwin and I might agree that the Stonewall drag queens had courage, though of a different sort than Stonewall Jackson's, but there is a time and a place for the expression of every sentiment.

In some ways, the promise that the veterans of Gettysburg made when they would walk across the large field or stand behind the stone wall and shake hands after the old men from the South had made that long walk was that we should remember that the practically insane courage that allowed that charge might be required from time to time and should be remembered, but that it is not what is required for us to live together with our differences.  That's why we have elections and when we don't like the way they turn out we wait for the next one and, in the mean time, and particularly on some special occasions, we treat one another with respect.

You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.

This parody of Goodwin is a bit amusing

Gettysburg Interlude - Understanding Historiography

This was originally published on forbes.com on July 5, 2013 as part as my Gettysburg Sesquicentennial coverage.  For the anniversary of the anniversary, I am putting this first.  The rest of the Gettysburg posts will be as close to real time as possible.  There will also be many more pictures than I put up on forbes.com

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Civil War enthusiasts.  Civil War buffs. Civil War nuts.  Call them what you want.  Despite my covivant's conviction to the contrary, I will not cop to being one of them.  The main evidence in my favor is that I embraced the Margaret Fuller bicentennial with much more enthusiasm than the Civil War sesquicentennial.  Gather 1,000 Civil War buffs in a room and I doubt you will find 20 who know who Margaret Fuller was.  When she died in 1850, she was the most famous woman in the United States of America.

Margaret Who ?

Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller inspired a generation of younger activists.  Among them was Thomas Wentworth Higginson one of the "Secret Six" who backed John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Included in the  grievances that are listed in the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union are these acts of the Northern states:

Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

So why don't Civil War buffs know who Margaret Fuller is ?  Or even Thomas Wentworth Higginson who would command a regiment and whose memoir, Army Life In A Black Regiment, is considered by some one of the best civil war memoirs.  In order to answer that question you have to think about historiography.

What is Historiography ?

According to the infallible source:

Historiography refers either to the study of the methodology and development of "history" (as a discipline), or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic. Scholars discuss historiography topically – such as the "historiography of Catholicism", the "historiography of early Islam", or the "historiography of China" – as well as specific approaches and genres, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the ascent of academic history, a corpus of historiographic literature developed.

In order to understand what the Civil War means to people now and how it came to mean that, you have to study historiography.

Idiot's Guide To Civil War Historiography

To say that you can boil Civil War historiography into two schools might seem absurd, but I think a reasonable case can be made.  Among enthusiasts, on either side, the two schools are the right one and the wrong one or the things that "they" want you to believe and the truth.  As somebody once told me, my problem is that I am an Aquarian and want everyone to get along.  So I will refer to the two schools as Lost Cause and Neo-abolitionist.  Fortunately, I did not make either of those terms up so I can go to the infallible source for definitions.

Lost Cause

The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to an American literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865.Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through overwhelming force rather than martial skill. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life.

Neo-Abolitionist

Neoabolitionist (or neo-abolitionist or new abolitionism) is a term coined by historians to refer to the heightened activity of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The term was soon used by leading historians to refer to the moral impulses of historians influenced by the Civil Rights movement in their studies of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation and Jim Crow. Bradley (2009) says, "Inspired by the civil rights movement, neo-abolitionist historians such as John Hope Franklin, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Eric Foner took their cue from DuBois and placed blacks front and center in their Reconstruction narratives." They led a re-evaluation of Reconstruction and its aftermath that focused on the significance of full citizenship and suffrage for African Americans. Thus Allen C. Guelzo (2009) refers to "the most recent neo-abolitionist histories from Henry Mayer and Paul Goodman" as well as "older neo-abolitionists like James McPherson, Howard Zinn, and Martin Duberman.".George M.Fredrickson (2009) says, "Neo-abolitionist historians profess to derive their standard from the abolitionists of Lincoln's own time."

Who Is Right ?

You have to be kidding to ask that question. Lost Cause believers and Neo-abolitionists ask different questions of different sources.  They can both tell true stories that are deep and rich and inspiring.  Lost Cause has one very serious weakness. In order to continue to believe wholeheartedly in the full Lost Cause narrative, you have to avoid reading material that is written in the South before 1862.  If you are a Lost Cause enthusiast, I would never try to talk you out of it.  I would ask that you read just one thing -  Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.  Read it a couple of times and then explain it to me.  The only theory that I have been able to come up with is that it was really all about tariffs, but they were embarrassed about that, so they just said it was about slavery.

Why Did They Fight ?

When people start arguing about this they usually do it by setting up straw men that are relatively easy to knock over.  Nobody has ever seriously maintained that Northern soldiers were incipient NAACP supporters.  There were probably not that many officers who would give speeches where they said they were an army fighting to make other men free.

You will, however, find Lost Cause enthusiasts "proving" that they are right by showing how racist Northern soldiers were.  My own reading leans me towards concluding that a large portion of the Southern elite was very pro-slavery.  A very small portion of the Northern elite were militant abolitionists.  Regular folks - there is a lot of controversy and a lot of problems with the evidence.  The debates can make you a little crazy.  Maybe most Southern soldiers did not come from slave-holding families - depending on how broadly you define family.  On the other hand, if you are twenty years old and don't own a car or a house, it does not mean that you would not like to own one.  Clearly, though, to the extent there was an idealistic motivation for most regular folks, it was that bad guys were trying to take their country away.  Some of them thought they lived in a bigger country than others.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along ?

The Lost Cause had a pretty good historiographical run.  It served the interest of white people in both the North and the South.  And it is not as if you cannot find a lot to support it.  Lost Cause people may have buffed up the image of Robert E. Lee a bit, but they had really great material to work with.  Paul H. Buck explained the process in his Pulitzer Prize winning Road to Reunion in 1937.

The memories of the past were woven in a web of national sentiment which selected from by- gone feuds those deeds of mutual valor which permitted pride in present achievement and future promise. The remarkable changes that had taken place within the short span of a single generation had created a national solidarity hitherto unknown in American life. The reunited nation was a fact.

Lost Cause was not a purely Southern invention.  Even a governor of a Northern State, a Medal of Honor winner, wounded six times and promoted to Major General had a hand in it. Joshua Chamberlain wrote:

I was told, furthermore, that General Grant had appointed me to take charge of this parade and to receive the formal surrender of the guns and flags. Pursuant to these orders, I drew up my brigade at the courthouse along the highway leading to Lynchburg. This was very early on the morning of the 12th of April. ......

At such a time and under such conditions I thought it eminently fitting to show some token of our feeling, and I therefore instructed my subordinate officers to come to the position of 'salute' in the manual of arms as each body of the Confederates passed before us. .......
The General [Gordon] was riding in advance of his troops, his chin drooped to his breast, downhearted and dejected in appearance almost beyond description. At the sound of that machine like snap of arms, however, General Gordon started, caught in a moment its significance, and instantly assumed the finest attitude of a soldier. He wheeled his horse facing me, touching him gently with the spur, so that the animal slightly reared, and as he wheeled, horse and rider made one motion, the horse's head swung down with a graceful bow, and General Gordon dropped his swordpoint to his toe in salutation.

Around the same time that Road to Reunion was published Lost Cause entrenched itself firmly in popular culture.

For the last fifty years neo-abolitionism has been gaining ground.  It won the colleges early.  If you win the colleges, within a generation you have the high schools and the elementary school. The centennial was all Lost Cause all the time, but the sesquicentennial is heavily neo-abolitionist.  As you walk into the museum at the visitor center you see a sign that says in part:

Americans fought one another over three fundamental issues: the survival of the union, the fate of slavery, the common rights of citizenship - what it means to be an American -the war resolved the first two issues.  The nation struggles with the third to this day.

Now that is neo-abolitionist with a vengeance.

How Do We Get Along ?

We get along by practicing a form of apartheid.  The educational system is neo-abolitionist.  Popular culture remains Lost Cause to a significant extent.  The educational system does not pay very much attention to the actual war.  Civil War buffs do not pay very much attention to what happened other than things relating to the actual conduct of the war.  When I was a history major, one of the professors told me they did not offer a course specifically on the war itself, because when professors  did that they always ended up with a couple of pain-in-the-ass nineteen year old buffs who knew more than they did.  I'm sure that has evolved some, but when I was at the Pickett's charge event, a high school history teacher from South Carolina was grumbling about the curriculum not having anything about actual battles.

How Does It Work At Gettysburg ?

Gettysburg is ground zero for both interpretations.  I think what the organizers for the Sunday night televised event did was invite Doris Kearns Goodwin to the wrong party.  Her speech aggravated some people by being too much about Doris Kearns Goodwin.  It outraged other because of its reference to the DOMA decision.  When Doris Kearns Goodwin said "Stonewall", she was not talking about how the battle might have turned out had General Jackson not encountered friendly fire at Chancellorsville.  If Doris Kearns Goodwin had given the same speech four and a half months from now and a few hundred yards to the east, only the self-absorption would have been aggravating.  The high water mark and July 3 will forever belong to the Lost Cause and nobody should try to disturb that. Neo-abolitionists have a very strong claim on the Gettysburg address where it was reconfirmed that we are dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.

My next post will be about the July 3 experience, which, like the Centennial, was all Lost Cause all the time.

You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.

 Afternote

 Like many people I think of the rise of Neo-Abolitionist views as beginning around the 1960s.  Lost Cause enthusiasts will still refer to them as "revisionist".  A recent book I read The Southern Past - A Clash Of Race And Memory by W. Fitzhugh Brundage gave me a bit of a different perspective.  We will often think of Lost Cause as the Southern version, but that would be while accurate, perhaps imprecise.  Lost Cause is the white Southern version.  Black Southerners in their segregated schools learned a history that was more celebratory of emancipation.

Day 0 Pickett's charge reenactment not on the battlefield.