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Cold War and Post Cold War US Civil War Novels

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Cold War and Post Cold War US Civil War Novels Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 "To the latest generation": Cold War and Post Cold War U.S. Civil War novels in their social contexts Jeffrey Neal Smithpeters Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Smithpeters, Jeffrey Neal, ""To the latest generation": Cold War and Post Cold War U.S. Civil War novels in their social contexts" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2933. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2933 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “TO THE LATEST GENERATION”: COLD WAR AND POST COLD WAR U.S. CIVIL WAR NOVELS IN THEIR SOCIAL CONTEXTS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and A&M College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Jeffrey Neal Smithpeters B.A. Ouachita Baptist University, 1994 M.A. University of Arkansas, 1996 May 2005 © 2005 Jeff Smithpeters All Rights Reserved ii “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We - even we here - hold the power and bear the responsibility.” --Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my parents, Dwight and Linda, for their unending support and somehow knowing I could do this when I did not. I also thank my dissertation committee chair and patient mentor Rick Moreland, who kept me going, kept my plans practical and read drafts incredibly quickly and helpfully. Erica Zimmer has been my lifeline on so many days when I felt like one of the characters in Chapter Six. Dr. Johnny Wink, mentor of mentors, started the course that led to this. So much of this belongs to him. Meanwhile, the General, Leonard, and Cow Cat also kept me cheered and entertained, whether they knew it or not, but most of the time they knew it. And I cannot forget Brown Cat. Requiescat in pace. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………..iv Abstract....………………...…………………………………………………...…vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1 Part I Chapter One: “But I Imagined It:” MacKinlay Kantor Reports For Ideological Duty……………………………………………………………………………....12 Chapter Two: Andersonville as “Preview of Buchenwald”: The Ideological Use of an Historic Analogy.………………………………………………………..…36 Chapter Three: Andersonville’s Contribution to the Cold War Consensus: “Good” Confederates, German Civilians and “American” Science…..…………65 Part II Chapter Four: “So Natural There Seemed No Alternative”: The Vietnam War Era in The Killer Angels……………………………………...…………………..95 Chapter Five: “You May Hear of It, General:” Longstreet and Lee as Dove and Hawk in The Killer Angels…..…………………………………………….……129 Part III Chapter Six: “We Must Disenthrall Ourselves:” Postmodernist and Confused Characters in the Civil War Novels of the Last Twenty-Five Years….………..153 Chapter Seven: “Of Course It Would Mean Something Like That:” Three Models of Meaning in Civil War Novels of the Past Twenty-Five Years..…….193 Conclusions and Possibilities for Future Inquiry……………………………….243 Works Cited…………………….………………………………………………252 Vita……………………………………………………………………………...260 v ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that readings of the Civil War novels published in America since 1955 should be informed by a consciousness of the social forces at work in each author’s time. Part One consists of a study of the popular Civil War novel, 1955’s Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor; part two, 1974’s The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Chapters One through Three explain that Kantor was especially fitted for the ideological work going on in Andersonville, then outlines the way that novel tried to contribute to the transition between World War II and the Cold War. The book attempted to aid in the process by which Americans were persuaded to shoulder the financial and military burden for the protection of West Germany and West Berlin. Chapters Three and Four examine The Killer Angels, arguing that Shaara’s decision to feature Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Twentieth Maine’s defense of Little Round Top is a working-through of the longing for a different, more creative style of leadership after the Vietnam War came to be perceived widely as a disaster. On the Confederate side, the conflict between Generals Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet parallels the conflict over the war in Vietnam. Part Three examines about a dozen Civil War novels published in America in the past twenty-five years. In Chapter Five, I argue that these novels partake in the postmodern tendency toward the creation of characters who experience a confusion of perception and identity in the face of the unending cascade of information coming at them, and respond in ways typical of postmodern vi characters. Chapter Six offers three models for the way contemporary novels explore the Civil War’s meaning: the multiplicity novel, the 1990s anti-war model, and the counter-narrative model, which are all described using examples of each kind of book. vii INTRODUCTION This study is divided into three sections. The first two are investigations of two leading Civil War novels from the middle of the twentieth century in their immediately contemporary contexts. The third section offers readings of several late twentieth century Civil War novels that, despite the conventional tendency to view many of them as stylistic throwbacks, abound in characters exhibiting a distinctly postmodern brand of confusion. These recent novels also manifest the difficulty settling on the Civil War’s meaning that has pervaded their era’s commentary on the subject. While the first two sections are done in the vein of cultural criticism, with the customary use of the novels to identify corresponding tendencies in the authors’ worlds, the last section is more an exercise in literary interpretation, in which an argument about over a half dozen novels is supported by specific readings from the novels themselves. The first section examines MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville (1955), perhaps the most important Civil War novel to be published in the few decades after Gone With the Wind and Absalom, Absalom! The three chapters of this fist section will make the case that Kantor’s novel is as much about World War II and the coming of the Cold War as it is about the US Civil War. The first chapter argues that Kantor made a conscious effort, and ultimately a successful one, to market himself as the ultimate all-American, mainstream writer. He deliberately chose subject matter that built for him a reputation as a patriotic chronicler of the American experience. To the extent that his strategy was amply rewarded, in sales, in critical acclaim and in prizes won, his work should be read as a manifestation of the way those who decided American policy hoped the public at large would think about the Civil War and about more contemporary questions. 1 Chapter Two reads Andersonville as a novel informed by the experience of the Holocaust. In attempting to argue plausibly that America had suffered a similar tragedy in its own history, he had to read the record in a way that favored the sadism of the Andersonville prisoner of war camp’s Confederate administrators and ignore contrary evidence of their attempts to save the lives of Federal soldiers. This chapter details these historical misreadings and considers their effects on the novel. The third chapter of this section suggests that Andersonville is a contribution to the effort to make Americans more likely to assent to the Cold War-era policy of alliance with the German people against the Soviet menace. By revealing that the Claffey family is unable to stop the tragedy unfolding in the prison stockade on their central Georgia land, the novel makes an argument for American common ground with those Germans who were, as the argument went, obviously unable to stop the genocides. This rough analogy was an attempt to contribute to the understanding among Americans that financing the reconstruction of West Germany and West Berlin should not be seen as coddling those who tolerated the Holocaust. The second section examines the oft-taught and lavishly filmed novel by Michael Sharaa, The Killer Angels (1974), finding in it enactments of the conflicts and fears of the late Vietnam War era on the battlefield of Gettysburg. In Chapter Four, two of the novel’s northern heroes resemble the most positive public image of the dead Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, and their deeds answer the longing of a confused nation for an idea of their leadership. In Chapter Five, I argue that the novel uses the relationship between the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet to work through America’s intergenerational conflict over the war in Vietnam. The older Lee’s headlong pursuit of a recklessly aggressive attack on the Union position, and the younger Longstreet’s 2 preference for the defensive and his more evident sensitivity regarding the deaths of his troops are informed by the tensions between the so-called hawks and doves as the war in Vietnam took its toll during the time The Killer Angels was being written. The novel’s emphasis on Longstreet’s relative youth and Lee’s age, Longstreet’s preference for more modern tactics and Lee’s for massive Napoleonic frontal assaults is a transference of the 60s intergenerational argument over Vietnam and over America’s foreign policy in general to a Civil War setting.
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