Traces the UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

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traces The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

volume 2 spring 2013 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Published in the United States of America by the UNC-Chapel Hill History Department traces Hamilton Hall, CB #3195 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3195 (919) 962-2115 [email protected]

All rights reserved. Except in those cases that comply with the fair use guidelines of US copyright law (U.S.C. Title 17), no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher. Design by Brandon Whitesell. Printed in the United States of America by Chamblee Graphics, Raleigh, North Carolina. Traces is produced by undergraduate and graduate students at UNC-Chapel Hill in order to showcase students’ historical research. Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History is affiliated with the Delta Pi chapter (UNC-Chapel Hill) of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society. Unfortunately there is no Past, available for distillation, capture, manipulation, observation and description. There have been, and there are, events in complex and innumerable combinations, and no magic formula “will ever give us masterytraces over them . . . . There are, instead, some rather humdrum operations to be performed. We suspect or surmise that an event, a set of events has taken place: where can we find the traces they must have left behind them? Or we have come across some traces: what are they worth, as traces, and to what events do they point? Later on we shall find out which events we can, from our own knowledge of their traces, safely believe to have taken place. It remains a fact, nevertheless, that the whole historical world uses the word ‘sources,’ and will continue to do so. By refusing to follow its example we shall at any rate draw attention to the fact that history is not a deductive science, but an activity and a craft.”

— G.J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Method staff G. Lawson Kuehnert traces Executive & Editor-in-Chief Founding Editors Mark W. Hornburg Executive Editor Chase Haislip Director of Finance Dr. Miles Fletcher Chief Faculty Professor, Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill Advisor Maggie Howell Senior Editors Michael Welker Gary Guadagnolo Graduate Editors Jeanine Navarrete

Editorial Board tracesAugusta Dell’Omo Anna Langley Bo Stump Grace Tatter Peter Vogel Burt Westermeier Tom Wolf Faculty Advisors Dr. Matthew Andrews Dr. W. Fitzhugh Brundage Dr. Marcus Bull Dr. Jacquelyn Hall Dr. Jerma Jackson Dr. Miguel La Serna Dr. Wayne E. Lee Dr. Michael Tsin Dr. Gerhard Weinberg Jessica Wilkerson v sponsors Department of History, UNC-Chapel Hill traces Delta Pi Chapter (UNC-CH), Phi Alpha Theta, National History Honor Society UNC-Chapel Hill Parents Council

vi donors We are grateful for the financial support of those listed below for the spring 2013 issue of Traces. Please consider sponsoring the journal by making a gift. If you would like to make a contribution, please let us know at [email protected]. Partners (up to $99) Frank and Pat Cuda Michelle and Nashat Ghabronious Anne and Jerod Kratzer Sandra Pillow Mary Blanton Vogel Supporters ($100-499) Joanne and Eugene Bernstein tracesCarillon and John Bihlmeyer Wallace and Karol Daniel John and Heather Dell’Omo Mark W. Hornburg Peter and Susan Mitchell Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel Gerhard L. Weinberg Friends ($500+) John Vann Vogel Alan Resley

vii acknowledgments

The editorial staff at Traces is indebted to the many students, faculty, staff, and friends who have supported the journal through its second year of publication. We traces especially would like to recognize Dr. Miles Fletcher and Dr. Lloyd Kramer in the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of History for their commitment to the journal over the past year. The administrative support of Wanda Wallace and Adam Kent has once again been invaluable, and Brandon Whitesell has done another incredible job on layout and design. The UNC-Chapel Hill Parents Council provided the initial grant for the publication of Traces, and we are grateful for their willingness to extend the grant for this year’s publication. viii awards

Second Prize in the Gerald D. Nash History Journal Award competition, sponsored by the Phi Alpha Theta tracesNational History Honor Society, 2012. Raymond J. Cunningham Prize from the American Historical Association for best undergraduate article on history for T. Fielder Valone’s essay, “Destroying the Ties that Bind: Rituals of Humiliation and the Holocaust in Provincial Lithuania,” 2012, published in Vol. 1 of Traces. Eugene E. Jackson Chancellor’s Award at UNC-Chapel Hill, G. Lawson Kuehnert, for his work on Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History, 2013. Gerhard L. Weinberg Prize for Best Article in European History, Trevor Erlacher, for his essay “The Specter of Fascism: Defining the F-Word,” 2013. ix table of contents xiv Note from the Editors

xvi Donors

xx Abstracts

Roundtable 1 The Legacy and Memory of the American Civil War

Articles 10 Lost Daughters of the Confederacy: Common White Women in Civil War Era North Carolina | Cassandra D. traces McGuire 35 Victim of the “Lost Cause”: James Longstreet in the Postwar South | Sam Hobbs 62 The Ironic Transformation of Lincoln’s Image in the Post-Civil War South | Lewis McCorkle 86 Hometown Hero?: The Detroit Reaction to Joe Louis | John Muhs 112 Challenging Jim Crow: Desegregation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Hannah McMillan 132 Red Books and Smoking Guns: Using Mao to Rationalize Violence in the American New Left | Luke Wander 166 Manliness on the Gridiron: Walter Camp and the Popularization of Football at the Turn of the Twentieth Century | x Kaitlyn Warren

182 Bodies in Pain: Narratives of Demonic Possession in Merovingian Gaul | Amelia Kennedy

Essays 203 The Transformative Impact of Civil War Photography | Hannah Nemer 213 Marvel Comics’s Civil War: An Allegory of September 11 in an American Civil War Framework | Berkay Max Erdemandi 224 Crosshatching in Trethewey’s Native Guard as the Ideal Texture of Documented History | Katie-Ann Majeski 230 “Working with One Hand and Fighting with the Other”: An Oral Historytraces of Kate Bradley and Community Organizing in Appalachia | Evangeline Mee 244 The Specter of Fascism: Defining the “F-Word” | Trevor Erlacher 263 Learning From David Hasselhoff: The Frustrated Desire for Historical Authenticity in Berlin | Scott Krause

Book Reviews 274 Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History | Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Walters 277 Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America | Reviewed by Jeanine Navarrete 279 Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention | Reviewed by Evan Faulkenbury xi table of contents (continued) 282 Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World | Reviewed by Joel Hebert 285 Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes | Reviewed by Mark W. Hornburg 288 Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia | Reviewed by Gary Guadagnolo 291 Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment | Reviewed by Ned Richardson-Little 294 Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States | Reviewed by Wilson Parker Film Reviews traces 299 Zero Dark Thirty and Argo | Reviewed by Brian Drohan 303 Carlos | Reviewed by Christina Hollenbeck

Exhibition Reviews 307 Searching for the Seventies: The DOCUMERICA Photography Project, Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery, National Archives, Washington, D.C. | Reviewed by Jeanine Navarrete 310 Owari Tokugawake no shihō/ Treasures of the Owari Tokugawa Family, Metropolitan Tokyo “Edo-Tokyo” Museum, Tokyo, Japan | Reviewed by Daniele Lauro 316 The Monarchy Exhibition Series: Monarchy and Life of Children under Emperor Franz Joseph I, National Museum of the Czech xii Republic, Prague, Czech Republic | Reviewed by Laura Brade traces

xiii note from the editors

Unlike last year’s edition of Traces, this volume revolves around a historical theme, with many of the articles and reviews centering on the American Civil War and its aftermath, which we have interpreted broadly to include the topics of race and civil rights. Articles cover quite a range, from the role of poor white women in the Confederate cause to Marvel Comics’ use of the Civil War as a metaphor for the debate over civil liberties in the United States post-9/11. In this year marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation it is fitting that historians revisit the ongoing significance of the Civil War period. The roundtable discussion that opens this volume offers a range of opinions on the continuing influence of the war on US culture and politics, but popular culture and news stories from this year have already reminded us of its legacy. From Steven Spielberg’s filmLincoln to Quentin Taratino’s Django Unchained, pop culture weighed in on the Civil War with a vengeance. The great distance in time has even allowed the war to serve as the object of humor, as when on Saturday Night Live Louis C.K. played Lincoln as a stand-up comedian performing at a comedy club. The assassinated president also was fair game for commercial purposes, appearing in Lincoln Motor Company ads to hawk luxury cars. Outside the world of make-believe, the Civil War continues to resonate in some telling ways. In the state of Georgia this year, atraces high school that had been holding “whites-only” proms held an integrated prom for the first time in its history. Last year, a “mixed-race” student had been turned away from the same event. Not coincidentally, Georgia is one of seven southern states that hold month-long commemorative “celebrations” of Confederate heritage and history. Less seriously but more surprisingly in the year 2013, a Cheerios ad featuring a mixed-race couple and their young daughter sparked a racist backlash on the Internet. Meanwhile, the new president of the National Rifle Association said that the role of his organization is to train civilians to “fight tyranny,” noting that what others refer to the Civil War, “we call … the War of Northern Aggression down south.” At the same time, according to a reporter for Alternet, prisons in Texas are churning out violent white supremacists who are “mentally fighting the Civil War.” xiv Here in North Carolina, a Confederate battle flag was hung inside the old North Carolina state capitol to mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, but was taken down after civil rights leaders protested its symbolism. This happened as North Carolina legislators supporting what was once known as “nullification” backed a proposal to establish a state religion and declare that each state “is sovereign,” and sent to the governor’s desk a bill to repeal the North Carolina Racial Justice Act, which was designed to eliminate racial bias in the sentencing of capital cases. This sampling of recent news stories ought to remind those of us living in the South of William Faulkner’s famous dictum: “The Past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” Clearly many people are still fighting the Civil War. A Pew Research Center poll released in April 2011 found that a majority of Southern whites thought it appropriate for politicians to praise Confederate leaders, the only demographic to think so. A CNN poll released the same month found that nearly four in ten white Southerners sympathize more with the Confederacy than with the Union. It is in such an atmosphere that Jon Hubbard, a state representative from Arkansas, published a book in which he claimed that for the “black race” slavery might have been “a blessing in disguise.” These words echo Robert E. Lee’s from 1856 that “blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa,” as “the painful discipline they aretraces undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race.” Those who wonder why civil rights activists and others take issue with the veneration of Confederate leaders might consider reviewing those leaders’ words, if their actions weren’t suggestive enough. While popular consciousness of the Civil War has eroded within the past few decades, the violence and ideological conflict of the war has left a profound scar on the country, and has affected the ways in which American historians conduct research and discuss the past. Much of the material in this volume challenges the reader to engage this long history of the American Civil War, to probe the traces of this scar.

G. Lawson Kuehnert, Editor-in-Chief & Founding Editor Mark W. Hornburg, Executive & Founding Editor xv contributors Laura Brade Laura Brade is a Ph.D. candidate in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research interests are in Central European and Jewish history.

Brian Drohan Brian Drohan is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. He studies Global and Military History.

Trevor Erlacher Trevor Erlacher is a Ph.D. student in Russian and Eastern European history at UNC-Chapel Hill. His current research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of radical, twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalism.

Berkay Max Erdemandi Berkay Max Erdemandi earned his bachelor’s degree in American studies in Turkey. He is currently a master’s student in graduate liberal studies at Duke University who is taking courses at UNC-Chapel Hill.

T. Evan Faulkenbury T. Evan Faulkenbury is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. He specializes in United States political and Africantraces American history. Gary Guadagnolo Gary Guadagnolo is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is currently writing his dissertation, an urban history of Kazan, Russia, and is also interested in spatial history and Islam in twentieth-century Russia.

Joel Hebert Joel Hebert is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. He studies post-1945 Britain and the end of the British Empire.

Sam Hobbs Sam Hobbs is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill with a major in history. His article is an excerpt from his honors thesis in history, which explores the construction of historical memory and the evolution of the “Lost Cause” mentality in the postwar American South. xvi

Christina Hollenbeck Christina Hollenbeck is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is majoring in history with a concentration on modern Europe. Her research interests include European fascism and modern Japanese history.

Mark W. Hornburg Mark W. Hornburg is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC- Chapel Hill. He studies modern German history.

Amelia Kennedy Amelia Kennedy graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012 and will be attending Yale to pursue a Ph.D. in medieval history.

Scott Krause Scott Krause is Ph.D candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is writing a dissertation on the history of West Berlin, 1945-89.

Daniele Lauro Daniele Lauro is a Ph.D. student in Asian history at UNC-Chapel Hill. He studies early moderntraces Japanese history and material culture. Katie Ann Majeski Katie Ann Majeski is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her essay was written for an English course with Dr. Rebecka Rutledge-Fisher in December 2012.

Lewis McCorkle Lewis McCorkle graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011 with distinction and honors in American history. He plans on attending law school this fall.

Cassandra McGuire Cassandra McGuire is a 2012 graduate from UNC-Chapel Hill. This fall, she will begin the MSI program at the University of Michigan School of Information, specializing in archives and records management.

xvii contributors (continued) Hannah McMillan Hannah McMillan is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill with a major in history. Her article was written in fall 2012 for a historical research seminar with Dr. James Leloudis.

Evangeline Mee Evangeline Mee graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in December 2012 with a double major in dramatic arts and interdisciplinary studies in folklore. Her essay is based on an oral history research project conducted in summer 2012.

John Muhs John Muhs is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill with a double major in history and mathematics. His article was written for a historical research seminar with Dr. Matthew Andrews in spring 2012.

Jeanine Navarrete Jeanine Navarrete is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. She studies modern United States history and Latino history.

Hannah Nemer Hannah Nemer is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill with a double major in peace, war, and defense and international American studies. She wrotetraces her essay for a course on the global history of warfare with Dr. Wayne E. Lee in spring 2012.

Wilson Parker Wilson Parker is an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studies economics.

Ned Richardson-Little Ned Richardson-Little is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is completing a dissertation on the history of human rights in East Germany.

Mary Elizabeth Walters Mary Elizabeth Walters is a Ph.D. student in history at UNC-Chapel Hill. She studies modern military history and peacekeeping. xviii Luke Wander Luke Wander is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill with a double major in history and Asian studies and a minor in creative writing. He spent six months in Beijing, China, as a Weir Fellow in 2012. His article is an excerpt from his honors thesis in history, which explores the global implications of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Kaitlyn Warren Kaitlyn Warren is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill with a double major in history and political science. She wrote her article in fall 2012 for a historical research seminar with Dr. John Kasson. traces

xix abstracts 10 Lost Daughters of the Confederacy: Common White Women in Civil War Era North Carolina | Cassandra D. McGuire This article explores the efforts of Southern writers and educators to portray the Civil War era South as a land of class harmony by writing incidences of dissent by “common white women” out of the history of the Confederacy.

35 Victim of the “Lost Cause”: James Longstreet in the Postwar South | Sam Hobbs This article describes the efforts by some white southerners to exonerate Robert E. Lee for his major Civil War defeat at Gettysburg by scapegoating his second-in-command, James Longstreet, after he joined the Republican Party.

62 The Ironic Transformation of Lincoln’s Image in the Post-Civil War South | Lewis McCorkle This article describes how Southern racists claimed Abraham Lincoln as a fellow white supremacist and attacked Reconstruction measures that challenged the South’s right to “home rule” by arguing that Lincoln would have fought against them had he been alive. 86 Hometown Hero? : The Detroit Reaction to Joe traces Louis | John Muhs This article describes Detroit citizens’ complex reaction to their hometown boxing great Joe Louis during his bouts with German star Max Schmeling.

112 Challenging Jim Crow: Desegregation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Hannah McMillan This article discusses the reluctance of some UNC-Chapel Hill officials to desegregate the school after Supreme Court decisions of the 1950s forced their hand, at the same time that many university students tended to embrace desegregation.

132 Red Books and Smoking Guns: Using Mao to Rationalize Violence in the American New Left | Luke Wander This article examines the influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on US political culture, arguing that it produced a current of revolutionary theory emphasizing the role of violence in altering public consciousness, which contributed to the radicalization of a portion of the American New Left, most notably the Black Panther Party.

166 Manliness on the Gridiron: Walter Camp and the Popularization of Football at the Turn of the Twentieth Century | Kaitlyn Warren This article discusses the growth in popularity of football in the United States during the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries, as American men sought ways to prove their strength and fortitude in the midst of social changes that challenged their masculinity.

182 Bodies in Pain: Narratives of Demonic Possession in Merovingian Gaul | Amelia Kennedy This article explores the role of pain in the development of Christian identity in Merovingian Gaul ca. 481-751, arguing that representations of pain in hagiographies,traces histories, sermons, and epitaphs portrayed the body as something that interacted constantly with supernatural forces.

203 The Transformative Impact of Civil War Photography | Hannah Nemer This essay examines the influence that Civil War photography had on military strategy during the American Civil War and the role that it played in raising public consciousness of the brutal reality of the war.

213 Marvel Comics’s Civil War: An Allegory of September 11 in an American Civil War Framework | Berkay Max Erdemandi This essay demonstrates how Marvel Comics employed the American Civil War in an allegorical way to illustrate the divisive debate over security versus liberty after 9/11.

xxi abstracts (continued) 224 Crosshatching in Trethewey’s Native Guard as the Ideal Texture of Documented History | Katie-Ann Majeski This essay demonstrates how Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey uses the metaphor of “cross-hatching” throughout her poetry collection Native Guard to explore themes related to the Civil War and race relations in the United States.

230 “Working with One Hand and Fighting with the Other”: An Oral History of Kate Bradley and Community Organizing in Appalachia | Evangeline Mee This oral history essay records the activism of women in the mountains of Tennessee as they fought exploitative coal companies and dealt with other community problems. It argues that women not only organized, but sometimes led these efforts.

244 The Specter of Fascism: Defining the “F-Word” | Trevor Erlacher This historiographical essay analyzes various attempts by historians to develop a workable definition of “fascism,” arguing ultimately for a “nominalist” approach that respects the particularities of each of fascism’straces iterations. 263 Learning From David Hasselhoff: The Frustrated Desire for Historical Authenticity in Berlin | Scott Krause This essay argues that Berlin has a unique opportunity to tell of the drama of modern European history, but fails to deliver on this potential because of Berliners’ uncertainty over the identity of their city.

xxii traces roundtabletraces Roundtable

The Legacy and Memory of the American Civil War

Fifty years ago, Life magazine asked Robert Penn Warren to meditate on the centennial of the American Civil War. In the midst of the civil rights movement, Warren claimed that “the Civil War is urgently our war.” Though a century had passed, he said that the war still “reaches in a thousand ways into our blood stream and our personal present.”1 In 1961, the memory of the Civil War continued to permeate American culture, society, and politics. As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of the war, the editors of Traces asked a group of scholars to consider the legacy of the war, much as Warren did. Respondents were asked to reflect on such issues as the continuing relevance of the memory of the war, the public’s understanding of the war, and where Civil War studies should look next. This roundtable introduces topics that are explored further in articles and reviews throughout this special volume.traces

Gerald J. Prokopowicz chairs the history department of East Carolina University, where he teaches Civil War and public history. He also hosts the podcast Civil War Talk Radio.

The memory of the Civil War is certainly still pervasive and relevant in 2013. A quick comparison of maps showing electoral votes in recent presidential elections and maps of secession in 1861 suggests that both the military struggles of 1861-1865 and the political contests of the twenty-first century can be defined by underlying cultural fault lines that are uncomfortably

1 Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961), 101. The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

deep and unyielding. These lines still influence how the public chooses to remember the war. I believe that public understanding of the war and its causes is better today than fifty years ago, but it would be a severe indictment of our profession if it were otherwise. The real question is how much better, and here I am struck more by the pervasiveness of resistance than by our progress. Most college-educated people today are exposed to a version of the war that is not too far different from one that would have been current in graduate schools twenty years ago, when their professors or their teachers’ professors were learning. The centrality of slavery among causes of the war is widely accepted; the experiences of rank-and-file soldiers, and the families they left at home, are considered as worthy of attention as those of military and political leaders; and the role of African Americans is acknowledged. Not everyone is college educated, however, and what is learned in school does not always uproot what was absorbed in childhood. James Loewen has pointed out that even among the high school history teachers who attend his talks—people who theoretically should know better—the idea that “states’ rights” was as important as slavery as a cause of the war still carries weight. If the scholarship of two or three decades ago is still working its way into public consciousness, will it take another generation before more recent scholarly work shows its influence? I think technology will speed up the process. The Internet accelerates everything, so that today any crank can go online and instantly reach a large audience with a politically motivated distortion of some element of Civil War history—such as the mythical armies of black Confederates—something that would have taken months or years to accomplish with crude photocopied newsletters. Just as quickly, however, more knowledgeable people can counter with their own views, citing online versions of sources that were once accessible only to professional historians. Controversies can come and go, and be replaced by understanding, much faster than ever. As to where new scholarship ought to take us, five hundred words is not enough to do more than offer two quick thoughts. A promising direction is that of reperiodization, or getting out of the 1861-1865 box and seeing the war in a broader chronological context, as in Orville Burton’s Age of Lincoln. We should beware, on the other hand, of forgetting that the war was a military conflict, as recent issues of professional journals seem to do. The war is what

2 Roundtable draws the public’s attention, something historians forfeit at their peril.

W. Fitzhugh Brundadge is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies and teaches modern American history.

The Civil War does not weigh as heavily on the consciousness of Americans as it did just fifty years ago. A half-century ago the legacy of the Civil War seemed tangible at a time when the states of the former Confederacy were still enforcing legalized racial discrimination and white southern politicians still invoked the Confederacy to justify their values and policies. Some politicos and enthusiasts still periodically call for secession, but who among us takes them seriously or believes that they have a sound grasp of history? Nor has the 150th anniversary of the Civil War had much resonance in popular culture, whereas the centennial was a godsend to anyone who put pen to paper and wrote about any aspect of the conflict. We can now acknowledge that the Civil War is “past history.” A president need not be deeply informed about the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in order to understand the issues of the day, unlike, say, John F. Kennedy a half century ago. (After briefing Kennedy about Reconstruction in 1962, historian David Donald voiced alarm at his comparative ignorance of the topic.) President Obama routinely invokes Lincoln, but mainly as a voice of inclusive nationalism rather than as a source of wisdom to address pressing contemporary concerns. Meanwhile, rarely in public do we still hear anyone elevate the leaders of the Confederate cause as role models. The transformation of the legacy of the Civil War is almost certainly one of the most profound cultural consequences of the civil rights movement. As a historian, I like to think that scholars have taught Americans the “true history” of the era. Scholars can claim a measure of influence. They have produced works that have dramatically revised received wisdom about the causes of the war, the military history of the war, the roles of blacks in their emancipation and in the war itself, and in the ideas about freedom and slavery that were contested in both the Union and the Confederacy. But this scholarship would have been substantially less influential had it not been for the assault on legal and institutionalized racism by African Americans

3 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

and their allies during the twentieth century. By insisting on their humanity and on the legitimacy of their aspirations, African Americans forced white Americans to revise inherited notions about slavery, the Civil War, and the incomplete freedom that whites imposed on blacks after the war. Stated baldly, the history that had undergirded Jim Crow could not be refashioned to undergird pluralism in a desegregated America. It was this fundamental truth, as much as the hard work of historians, that transformed the way that most Americans, especially those born since 1960, think about the Civil War. The challenge remaining for historians is to better convey the sheer magnitude of the devastation that the war wrought. Americans are not inclined to look upon our wars as failures. Fifty years ago the Civil War was a “good war” because it forged a united nation that would become a world power. Now the Civil War is a “good war” because it destroyed slavery and set the nation on the path to inclusive democracy. But how often do we reflect on the fact that perhaps three-quarters of a million men died, hundreds of thousands were maimed, tens of thousands of families were scattered to the winds, and enormous quantities of wealth were destroyed in a war to protect the institution of slavery? How did our system of government and our ancestors’ system of beliefs fail so completely to prevent a calamity of this scale? Rather than seeing the Civil War as a redemptive cleansing or as evidence of our nation’s capacity to overcome and endure, we should acknowledge the Civil War as a debacle that teaches us, in equal measures, caution and humility.

Adam Domby is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies American history.

While scholarly work on the Civil War has progressed over the past fifty years, the public has not always kept up with current historiography. For example, no respected historian denies the central role of slavery in bringing about secession and the Civil War, yet in 2011 a Pew Research Center poll found that nearly a majority of Americans believed that the conflict was “mainly about states’ rights.” Additionally, younger Americans were far more likely than older—60 percent of those under thirty—to cite states’ rights as the primary cause of the war. Is our educational system simply less

4 Roundtable

effective today, or are historians failing to reach their audience? Despite the great strides historians have made in understanding the internal divisions within the South, race relations, and the creation of a “Lost Cause” memory, these advances have yet to appear in most popular histories and textbooks. In 2010, for example, a fourth-grade textbook used in Virginia inaccurately stated that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks.”2 Counting conscripted free people of color and impressed slaves as loyal Confederate supporters creates a gentler, friendlier Confederacy. Even in those few cases where African Americans may have voluntarily supported the South, their value has become far more powerful symbolically to defenders of the “Lost Cause” than they were to the Confederate war effort. These mythic black Confederates buttress arguments that race and slavery could not have been the cause of the war. The difference between the historical and symbolic significance of black Confederates becomes all the more obvious when the inflated “thousands” of black Confederates are compared to the half a million slaves who fled to Union lines during the war and the 180,000 African Americans who fought for the Union. The writing of history has been democratized: anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can publish claims to a worldwide audience. Unfortunately, students and textbook writers increasingly rely on websites of questionable quality for their research. According to the Pew survey, fifty-six percent of Americans, believed the war was “still relevant to American politics and political life.” While Americans remain fascinated by the war, they seem to have lost interest in learning about it from modern historical monographs and turn more to popular culture. Bill O’Reilly’s historically inaccurate Killing Lincoln has been a New York Times bestseller for almost a year and a half. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln received twelve academy award nominations, winning two. Robert Penn Warren said the Civil War was America’s “only ‘felt’ history,” but while Americans may still feel the war, the future of scholarship may entail wider engagement with the public. In the era of the Internet, text messaging, and tweeting, perhaps monographs are not the best tool for historians to use. While scholarly books and journals should never be

2 Elisabeth Hulette, “Local schools use history book with error about black soldiers,” The Virginia-Pilot, Oct. 21, 2010, http://hamptonroads.com/2010/10/ local-schools-use-book-error-about-black-soldiers. 5 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

replaced, they can be augmented. Blogs, websites, mobile applications, and other digital humanities projects provide new and exciting venues for historians to engage the public.

Paul Escott is the Reynolds Professor of History at Wake Forest University. Among his books about the Civil War are “What Shall We Do with the Negro?”: Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America (2009) and The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture (2010).

As Robert Penn Warren knew, the Civil War did not end at Appomattox. Its battles resumed as contests of historical memory—rival interpretations of why the war came and what it meant. The reigning memories, the dominant interpretations, have often reflected the concerns of the present more than the realities of the past. For many decades a white-supremacist southern elite won the contest of historical memory and promoted the myth of the “Lost Cause.” Later, when Robert Penn Warren wrote, the tide was beginning to turn. The success of the civil rights movement meant that Americans began to celebrate the war as a triumph of freedom, the moment when the nation ended slavery. We can be glad that memory of the Civil War no longer reaches “into our blood stream” in the ways that it did before the civil rights movement. But the fact remains that we continue to distort the Civil War to serve present-day preoccupations or agendas. Interpretations change and alter historical memory because they aid contemporary goals of society or of powerful interests. The current trend is to reinterpret the Civil War era in light of modern beliefs in egalitarianism and racial justice. As one example of current distortions, consider an article from the Associated Press that ran in newspapers all across the United States in September to mark the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The article correctly described the Proclamation as a warning, but then it reversed the warning’s content. Lincoln would free the slaves on January 1, 1863, said the Associated Press, if the South did not end its rebellion “and voluntarily abolish slavery.” In fact, as anyone who reads the Proclamation can see, Confederate states could keep slavery if they ended the rebellion and returned to the Union by January 1. By misrepresenting the Proclamation’s content, the Associated Press produced a version more attuned to

6 Roundtable contemporary beliefs and social priorities. In a similar way, some historians today are exaggerating Lincoln’s racial progressivism, re-interpreting him as a reformer totally committed to racial equality. Such misinterpretations abuse our understanding of our nation’s history. In particular, they cause us to overlook and forget the central role that racism has played in shaping society. A useful agenda for future Civil War studies would involve reexamining the importance of racism in the Civil War era, identifying the economic and social forces that supported it, and testing, against historical fact, theories as to how it can be overcome.

Kimberly Kutz is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, “Lincoln’s Ghosts: The Posthumous Career of an American Icon,” examines depictions of Abraham Lincoln in popular culture from 1865-1965.

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War has not captured the public imagination to the extent that its centennial did in the 1960s, when Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address echoed in the resounding voices of the civil rights movement, and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act finally made good on the promises of the Fifteenth Amendment. Fifty years later, another anniversary of the Civil War is passing with considerably less fanfare in popular culture, with the exception of Steven Spielberg’s recent film Lincoln. Although Daniel Day-Lewis as the eponymous hero collected his Academy Award as expected, the Oscar for Best Picture passed over the Civil War in favor of a depiction of a more recent conflict in the Middle East, as presented in Argo. Is this a sign that the Civil War is no longer the conflict that captures the American imagination? The repeated meditations on Lincoln suggest otherwise. It would be a mistake to dismiss Lincoln as nothing more than a character study of a famous man in a simpler time. After all, since the Civil War, depictions of Lincoln in popular culture have portrayed not the man himself but the myth, and myth emerges from the fears and desires of the culture that produces it. Whether he is depicted as the reluctant Emancipator of the racist age that produced Birth of a Nation or as the idealistic crusader against lynch law that Henry Fonda assumed as Young Mr. Lincoln, the Lincoln of popular myth is not the man he was but the man we need him to be. Who, then, is

7 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Spielberg’s Lincoln and what does he have to say about us and the future of Civil War history, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect? First, the appeal of Spielberg’s Lincoln as both an emotional man and a shrewd manipulator of circumstances may reflect the potential to interest mainstream audiences in the work of historians who have begun to calculate the war’s emotional costs, such as Drew Gilpin Faust, and historians of memory like Ann Marshall, who have begun to look beyond ideology and into the market to explain the origins of commemorative culture. Second, historians cannot do enough to place African Americans at the center of the Civil War narrative. Though it may be unfair to judge a biopic for championing the contributions of its lead at the expense of ordinary people, the absence of black characters in Lincoln, apart from mutely grateful recipients of Lincoln’s benevolence, reiterates the challenge for historians to study and disseminate the stories of the African American soldiers, leaders, and self-emancipated slaves who contributed to the war that decided their fate as citizens. One can only speculate about what this newest incarnation of Lincoln says about the fears and desires of the present. Perhaps the film evokes a yearning for a political messiah who can overcome the odds of national crisis and a broken political process. If so, let us not forget the words of a man who is conspicuously absent from Lincoln, Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

8 tracesarticles Cassandra D. Lost Daughters of McGuire the Confederacy: Common White Women in Civil War Era North Carolina

The North Carolina Women of the Confederacy Memorial stands in a prominent position on the lawn of the State Capitol in Raleigh. Unveiled in 1914, it depicts a seated grandmother reading to her grandson about the exploits of his father, her son, who fought and died in the Confederate army during the Civil War. The monument was commissioned in 1911 by Ashley Horne, a wealthy resident of Johnston County who was then serving as a representative in the North Carolina General Assembly. Horne was deeply disappointed that, fifty years after the war, the General Assembly had yet to approve the construction traces of a memorial to the Confederate women of North Carolina. Even as a veteran of the Confederate army, Horne maintained that the women of his state had been “as great or greater soldiers than the men,” making valuable and heroic contributions to the war effort. Horne had grown impatient waiting for the state government to commission such a memorial, so he volunteered to pay for it himself. His offer was promptly accepted, but

10 Cassandra D. McGuire

The North Carolina Women of the Confederacy Memorial in Raleigh, NC, depicts a woman reading to her grandson about her father’s heroic acts during his service in the Confederate army. (Photo by Cassandra D. McGuire.)1

Horne passed away prior to the statue’s completion.2 At the unveiling ceremony, Daniel Harvey Hill, then president of North Carolina State University, incorporated the late Ashley Horne’s words into his dedication speech, declaring, “The silent woman of the memorial will typify the uncomplaining women of the South.” This provocative statement illustrates that, in the eyes of both Horne and Hill, most North

1 Photo taken by Cassandra McGuire on September 16, 2011. This monument is one of many surrounding the North Carolina State Capitol in Raleigh. 2 R.D.W. Connor, comp., Addresses at the Unveiling of the Memorial to the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy, Presented to the State by the Late Ashley Horne (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Co., 1914), 5-6. 11 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Carolina “women of the Confederacy” were “silent,” unquestioningly and self-sacrificially supporting the Confederate war effort despite the many hardships they faced on the home front. I have termed this concept the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood,” as it promulgates a misleading portrait of the women who lived in Civil War era North Carolina. In reality, even staunch secessionists such as North Carolina plantation mistress Catherine Devereux Edmondston occasionally complained about the wartime economy and the absence of male kin. Yet women of Edmondston’s class generally had access to enough wealth to ensure their survival in a reasonably comfortable manner, even if they were inconvenienced by high prices and a relative lack of accessible male labor. Many other women in the state with far less economic security risked starvation during the war years. In this article, I refer to such women as “common whites,” a term used to describe North Carolinians who were quite poor and whose families may or may not have owned land. Common white women recognized that the wartime policies of the Confederate government, especially conscription and impressment, threatened their families’ survival by draining their already limited resources. Rather than suffering silently, many of these women made themselves heard, communicating their plight through words and actions in the hope of receiving compensatory aid.3 Notably, common white women comprise one of the least-discussed demographic groups that inhabited the Civil War era South. They are undeniably underrepresented in the accounts of the Civil War that have emerged since 1865, as until the past few decades historians typically focused upon the dominant (often upper-class and male) narrative of events. There are likely other reasons for these women’s marginalization, though. In her study of Southern womanhood in the Civil War era, Laura F.

3 Daniel Harvey Hill, “The Women of the Confederacy,” in Addresses at the Unveiling of the Memorial, 10. See also Catherine Devereux Edmondston, Journal of a Secesh Lady: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860-1866, ed. Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History Dept. of Cultural Resources, 1979). The “Myth of Confederate Womanhood” is not to be confused with the similar “myth of Southern womanhood,” which focuses upon antebellum women’s supposed complete adherence to period gender roles and expected standards of social behavior (see George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989], 5). The term “common whites” (see Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992], 1) is used throughout this article rather than distinguishing between the “yeomanry” and “poor whites,” as it is often unclear whether the women being discussed were from landowning families. It is quite clear, however, that they were white and of low social and economic status. 12 Cassandra D. McGuire

Edwards discusses the absence of common white women from the history of the Reconstruction era using an argument that applies to the war years as well. Edwards acknowledges that common white women generally kept few written records of their lives, as many were illiterate and nearly all lacked the leisure time necessary to keep a diary or journal. Therefore it has proved challenging for historians to study them. Edwards insists, however, that there is more to the story than a lack of documentation. “Historical frameworks,” she writes, “have rendered [common white women] invisible” during this general time period. Specifically, Edwards refers to the various approaches used to study the Civil War era South and surmises that many historians have simply underestimated the importance of common white women to the politics and economy of the South.4 While Edwards’s argument clarifies why many historians may have marginalized common white women, it does not adequately explain why these women were largely omitted from accounts of the Civil War written by their contemporaries. This article offers an explanation, arguing that the “Lost Cause” ideology manufactured by elite former Confederates in the post-war era to preserve the honor of the South was a historical framework that, by definition,had to exclude common white women, because the story of the “Lost Cause” included the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood.” Unlike the uncomplaining, “silent” women glorified by this myth, many common white women in the South did not harbor exclusively positive feelings for the Confederate government or for the war effort. Instead, these women represent an alternative form of Confederate womanhood in which women did not silently accept the economic hardships placed on them because of the war and Confederate policies, but rather protested and demanded aid. There is ample reason to believe that elite Southern writers and educators who stood to benefit from portraying the South as a land of class harmony and selfless devotion to the Cause may have deliberately marginalized common white women in their writings in order to hide the Confederacy’s history of dissent from both outsiders and future generations. This article seeks to bring these women’s experiences to light, exploring their reasons for dissent and their methods of protest on the North Carolina home front and serving as a counter-memorial to the monument in Raleigh, emphasizing an

4 Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 150. 13 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

alternative form of Confederate womanhood that has largely been written out of the popular understanding of the Civil War.

Despair and Defiance: Common White Women on the North Carolina Home Front Those familiar with Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novelGone with the Wind, or the 1939 film based on it, would likely agree that the character of Melanie Wilkes represents an ideal Confederate woman. Like most of the women in the novel, Wilkes is a Southern belle from a wealthy family who was raised to exhibit ladylike manners as a devoted wife and mother. When her husband leaves to fight in the Confederate army, Wilkes cheerfully does all she can to support the country for which he is fighting, including volunteering to nurse wounded soldiers and donating her golden wedding ring to be traded for medical supplies for Southern soldiers. Her selfless and patriotic acts, which endear her to many readers, are similar to those frequently glorified in postbellum accounts of Confederate women. By focusing attention and praise upon women like the fictional Melanie Wilkes, historians and memoirists marginalize another group of white women in the South: those who could not donate valuables because they had few possessions, and those who could not afford to volunteer their labor to support the Confederate army because they needed income to support their families. These common white women and their struggles on the North Carolina home front merit further study.5 Common white women in Civil War era North Carolina experienced considerable suffering, largely due to conditions on the home front. These conditions generally worsened as the war progressed. One of the major problems faced by the Confederacy was a shortage of manufactured goods. Because the antebellum South’s economy was primarily agriculturally based, the region’s industries were far less numerous and developed than the North’s. Additionally, the Union blockade was well established by 1863, choking the economy of the South by preventing essential imports from reaching Confederate harbors. Many of the items needed on both the battlefield and the home front became difficult to obtain, causing prices to

5 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Warner Books, 1964), 158-159, 184-186. 14 Cassandra D. McGuire

soar throughout the war years. The poor naturally suffered the most, as the cost of even basic necessities grew beyond their reach. Another significant problem faced by the Confederacy was the rampant inflation of the nation’s currency. Historian Charles W. Ramsdell has written that the Confederate government’s decision to “resort to irredeemable paper money and to excessive issues of such currency was fatal, for it not only weakened the purchasing power of the government but also destroyed economic security among the people.” Furthermore, as a result of this constant devaluation of currency, the Confederate government established a tax rate so exorbitant that plantation mistress Catherine Devereux Edmondston wondered “how salaried men [could] live.” For many families in North Carolina, the combination of inflation and taxation resulted in extreme poverty and even starvation.6 The plight of the poor was worsened by the seemingly constant extortion of speculators. In her diary, Edmondston noted that “the poorer classes throughout the country … were terribly ground and imposed upon by Speculators who in some instances had the face to ask 25 and $28 per sack [of salt].” Salt was not the only item being sold at artificially high prices. Merchants seeking a profit at the expense of their neighbors purchased all manner of staple goods in order to drive prices up. In the words of North Carolinian E.T. Graham, the speculators then made “the Poor believe things [could not] be had possibly for a lower price,” thus “defrauding the helpless” people of North Carolina.7 With so many forces working against the poor people of the South, many felt disenfranchised and even betrayed by the Confederate government, which they felt had disregarded the gravity of their plight. Their frustration was further aroused by the passage of the first Confederate conscription act on April 16, 1862. This law required all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to join the army, regardless of the economic condition of their families. Many indigent families were thus deprived of their primary breadwinners, forcing common white women—many of whom had already been working for wages in the past—to take on increased

6 Charles W. Ramsdell, cited in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 81; Edmondston, 376. 7 Edmondston, 100; E.T. Graham, cited in Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 120. 15 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

responsibility for the survival of both themselves and their families.8 In addition to demanding that North Carolina women sacrifice their men, the Confederate government also laid claim to their food and other resources through the policy of impressment. Because the Piedmont region of North Carolina was protected from Union invasion until very late in the war, it remained relatively well provisioned, attracting Confederate impressment agents. These agents forcibly took many resources away from the citizenry in order to support the army, offering only the most meager compensation in exchange. Common white women who were already struggling to feed their families had practically no resources to spare, making them outraged that the government might take what little they had.9 No longer willing to accept quietly the conditions in which they were forced to live, many women from all classes began to voice their discontent by writing supplicant letters to North Carolina’s governor, Zebulon B. Vance. These letters include some of the only surviving documents written by common white women, making the letters valuable sources for historians wishing to recover these women’s voices. Because women rarely included specific details about their property holdings, income, or social class in their letters to Governor Vance, it can be difficult to discern between common white women and those of the wealthier classes. For the purposes of my research, I made educated guesses about the social class of each writer by analyzing three main characteristics of each letter: the quality of the handwriting, the writing style employed (including spelling, grammar, and vocabulary), and the letter’s content. Generally, I assume that letters exhibiting poor literacy or crude handwriting were written by common white women, as they typically would have been less educated than women of the wealthier classes. There is admittedly a margin for error in using this system, however, as a relatively wealthy woman may exhibit poor writing skills, or vice versa. Furthermore, ethnicity cannot be determined by handwriting. The letters discussed here, however, generally reflect the

8 James M. Matthews, ed., “Public Laws of the Confederate States of America, Passed at the First Session of the First Congress; 1862,” in The Statutes at Large of the Confederate States of America, Commencing with the First Session of the First Congress; 1862 (Richmond: R. M. Smith, Printer to Congress, 1862), 29-30. 9 Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 25; Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 41-44. 16 Cassandra D. McGuire issues faced by common white women and are thus relevant, even if the economic status of their writers cannot be definitively shown. Although often uneducated in matters of grammar and writing style, common white women effectively conveyed the desperation of their plight. In 1863, a woman named Ann McCormicke wrote a heart-rending letter to the governor, describing how her husband had been in the army for a year, leaving her with five children to support. She claimed, “I have nothing to eat but bread and way [whey] and little of that…. There is plenty of provision in this place but ... [the officials] will not let me have a pound of meat nor a bushel of corn and I don’t know what to do.” Another woman, Martha Coletrane, had written several months before to ask that men from ages thirty-five to forty-five be exempted from conscription, insisting that such a policy would create chaos in families like her own. “We hav eight children,” she wrote, “and an old aged mother to support, which makes eleven in our family and without my husband we are a desolate and ruined family for extortion runs so hie here we cannot support and clothe our family without [his] help.” Another letter to the governor, written jointly by a group of North Carolina women in 1863, expressed what most common white women must have been thinking regarding the Confederate government: “We have given our sons an husbands an brothers to the batle field an hav lost many of them an after so much we have done there is ... men clames to be details raging through this section clameing to have the power to [im]press any thing an evry thing they want.” She adds, “If we ar fiting for liberty let us hav it.”10 Sometimes, instead of writing letters, common white women violently protested conditions on the North Carolina home front. One of the most notable examples of a “female raid” was a bread riot that took place on March 18, 1863, in Salisbury, North Carolina. According to the local newspaper the Carolina Watchman, approximately forty to fifty soldiers’ wives gathered in the streets of Salisbury that day, armed with hatchets and determined to acquire much-needed provisions at reasonable prices, whether by bargain or by force. The spectacle of a female riot drew a crowd

10 Ann McCormicke to Governor Zebulon B. Vance, March 11, 1863, G.P. 163, Governors’ Papers – Zebulon Baird Vance, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina; Martha Coletrane to Governor Zebulon B. Vance, November 18, 1862, G.P. 160, Governors’ Papers – Zebulon Baird Vance; J.J. Coner, T.J. Holford, Lina Vess, and Sarah Holferd to Governor Zebulon B. Vance, December 23, 1863, G.P. 172, Governors’ Papers – Zebulon Baird Vance. In the direct quotations included here, I have retained the original spelling and grammar of the authors. 17 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

of onlookers who proceeded to follow the mob on its journey to the homes and shops of local businessmen accused of speculating. The women first stopped at a Mr. Brown’s house, where they demanded that flour be sold to them at a reasonable price. Mr. Brown initially refused to meet their demands, concerned with the money he would lose. Irate, the women took their hatchets and began dismantling the door to his storeroom. Before they were done, Mr. Brown changed his mind and gave the women ten barrels of flour for free, undoubtedly wanting to dispel the mob. Satisfied, the women stormed onward. Many of the other businessmen in town also gave them flour, molasses, and salt in an effort to avoid trouble. By evening, the women dispersed, having attained both the supplies and the attention that they had wanted.11 The Salisbury bread riot was certainly not an isolated incident. Around the same time, in Sander’s Mill, North Carolina, another group of women converged on a government supply center and stole desperately needed provisions. There were also several reports throughout the war of North Carolina women physically attacking Confederate officials to express their frustration with home front conditions. In February 1863, a group of women from Bladen County, North Carolina, wrote to Governor Vance, sternly advising him to limit the price of bread in order to prevent the extortion of starving citizens by greedy merchants. The women warned Vance that if he did not heed their letter, they would soon make “examples of all who refused to open there barn doors.” Not long afterward, five women robbed the Bladenboro grain depot, making good on their threat.12 While many more prosperous North Carolinians were able to take pity on these outspoken common white women, recognizing the seriousness of their economic plight, others were less forgiving. In her journal, Catherine Devereux Edmondston alleged that the Salisbury bread riot was “a small affair for plunder alone” that was “instigated by Yankees,” preferring to think of the rioters as traitors rather than to believe that anyone in her beloved Confederacy could be starving. Governor Vance also clearly stated his feelings toward the riots: “Broken laws will give you no bread, but much

11 Carolina Watchman, March 23, 1863, 2: 2-3. The article does not specifically identify the women involved in the riot as common whites, but their willingness to abandon propriety to acquire provisions suggests that they were probably from the lower classes. 12 Edwards, 93-94; Bynum, 133-134; Smith, 51. 18 Cassandra D. McGuire sorrow,” he insisted, “and when forcible seizures have to be made to avert starvation, let it be done by your county or state agents.”13 Ironically, given the public nature of their petitions to government officials and their “female raids,” one of the most effective ways in which common white women grabbed the attention of fellow North Carolinians was a relatively private matter: writing letters to loved ones in the Confederate army. Naturally, literate common white women wrote to their husbands, sons, and other male relatives in the army, sharing news and sending well wishes. In their letters, women frequently described the hardships they were facing on the North Carolina home front as they tried to survive in the wartime economy. Receiving such disheartening messages from their female kin prompted many concerned soldiers to long to return home and provide for their families. Some, like James R. Duncan, wrote to Governor Vance, expressing their concerns. “I have bin 2 years this day in the servis battling for my country and I am yet willing to do my utmost for our country,” Duncan wrote, “but it is very painful to think of my wife and children that is suffering for food.” Other soldiers did not even bother writing such letters or asking for leave. They simply deserted in large numbers, weakening the Confederacy’s forces.14 Recognizing the relationship between the tone of women’s letters and their recipients’ willingness to remain in the army, North Carolina leaders undertook a propaganda campaign to discourage women from tempting soldiers to come home. This message was spread through moralizing newspaper articles. In the August 24, 1863, issue of the Fayetteville Observer, a writer identifying herself as “Mrs. M.A.C.” implored, “Let each of us be careful that all our communications to husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in the army, breathe a healthful spirit of confidence, cheerfulness and encouragement.” She added, “How cruel to acquaint them with privations and sufferings at home, which they cannot mitigate, and wrongs which they cannot prevent.” A more ominous article published in March of that year told the story of a man who received a letter from his wife complaining of the hardships she was enduring and asking him to return home. When the man finally

13 Edmondston, 378; Zebulon Baird Vance, cited in Bynum, 125-126. 14 James R. Duncan to Governor Zebulon B. Vance, April 27, 1863, G.P. 164, Governors’ Papers – Zebulon Baird Vance. 19 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

decided against his better judgment to desert, he was caught and executed, leaving his wife “constantly haunted with the thought that her exaggerated representations of her trials and sufferings caused her husband’s death.” Again and again, North Carolina writers and officials insisted that women should be positive and encouraging in their communications with soldiers. It soon became evident, however, that in order for poor women to write optimistic letters to their loved ones, their quality of life needed drastic improvement.15 Throughout North Carolina, wealthier citizens took it upon themselves to help women and children on the brink of starvation, driven by a sense of civic pride as well as a desire to improve the morale of soldiers worried about their families. Many cities, including Wilmington and Fayetteville, successfully organized collections for the poor, with the latter amassing a total of $22,000 in the fall of 1863. North Carolina’s government also intervened. An act ratified by the North Carolina General Assembly on February 10, 1863, earmarked one million dollars for “the use and benefit of the wives and families of indigent soldiers,” including the families of soldiers who had died in battle. While this interest in supporting the poor was commendable, the system did not work as effectively as it might have. On May 16, 1863, the Semi-Weekly Raleigh Register reported that a large amount of salted pork had been purchased using a government appropriation of $500,000 for the purpose of feeding the poor, but the meat had not been distributed and had thus gone to waste. This was undoubtedly not the only incident in which the government’s money was not used efficiently.16 North Carolina’s government also sought to help common white women by providing them with jobs in war industries. This system offered the double benefit of employing women who were desperate for income while simultaneously gaining a labor force for the Confederacy’s fledgling industries. In particular, the government needed textile workers to manufacture uniforms and other supplies for Confederate soldiers. In the early years of the war, the Confederate government had depended

15 Fayetteville Observer, August 24, 1863, 2:1-2; Fayetteville Observer, March 5, 1863, 1:6. 16 Fayetteville Observer, January 18, 1864, 1:5; North Carolina General Assembly, “An Act for the Relief of the Wives and Families of Soldiers in the Army,” in Public Laws of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1862-’63: Together with the Comptroller’s Statement of Public Revenue and Expenditure (Raleigh, North Carolina: W. W. Holden, Printer to the State, 1863), 63-64; Semi-Weekly Raleigh Register, May 16, 1863, 2:3. 20 Cassandra D. McGuire upon Soldiers’ Aid Societies to sew uniforms, tents, and other supplies for the soldiers. These organizations were comprised of female volunteers from the wealthier classes who could afford to work without pay. As the war progressed, however, the Confederate government recognized a need to standardize both the distribution and quality of uniforms and thus increasingly relied upon professional manufacturers to supply the army. Although these manufacturers were generally male, they often hired women workers to fulfill their military contracts. This was the case, for example, in Salisbury, where manufacturers William Howard and James B. Beard advertised job openings for five hundred female workers in 1863. Now that women were being paid for this work, making uniforms proved to be an excellent opportunity for common white women.17 In addition to taking jobs in textile mills and as seamstresses, common white women also worked in powder mills, cartridge factories, and other war-related industries. Unfortunately, their wages often left much to be desired. For example, the twenty-nine women who worked at the North Carolina Arsenal in Fayetteville during the month of August, 1861, earned only forty to fifty cents each day, substantially less than nearly all of the arsenal’s male employees, both free and enslaved. Supporting a family on such meager earnings would have been extremely difficult if not impossible.18 North Carolinians’ attempts to provide aid for common white women generally fell short, leaving the women as restless as ever and increasingly unhappy with their government and the war. Notably, many common white women in North Carolina had not been overwhelmingly supportive of going to war in the first place. Civil War historians have long recognized that a significant number of North Carolinians sympathized with the Union during the war, and even among those who were loyal to the Confederacy, many had only reluctantly supported secession. This was particularly true of common whites, who had less economic incentive than their wealthy, slaveholding neighbors to risk their lives and livelihoods in defense of the institution of slavery. It was only

17 LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 85; Harold S. Wilson, Confederate Industry: Manufacturers and Quartermasters in the Civil War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 14; Carolina Watchman, January 12, 1863, 3:4. 18 Thomas, 107; William Bell, “Return of Hired Men Employed at North Carolina Arsenal, for the Month of August, 1861,” G.P. 153, Governors’ Papers – Henry Toole Clark. 21 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

after Abraham Lincoln began acting against the interests of Southerners— first by sending supplies to Fort Sumter, a garrison located within Confederate-claimed territory, and then by calling upon North Carolina men to help suppress the Confederate states—that North Carolina’s formerly reluctant secessionists had taken up arms against Lincoln’s administration, determined to defend their homes and society against a government they believed had become tyrannical. Ultimately, however, for many common white women whose men and livelihoods were being seized by Confederate conscription laws and impressment agents, Lincoln’s government began looking less abhorrent every day.19 Deeply concerned by growing female unrest in North Carolina, Governor Vance wrote a letter to the Confederate States of America’s president, Jefferson Davis, suggesting that the Confederacy enter peace negotiations with the Union. The letter, written on December 30, 1863, stated: I am promised by all men who advocate [negotiation with the Union] that if fair terms are rejected it will tend greatly to strengthen and intensify the war feeling, and will rally all classes to a more cordial support of the government…. We would keep conspicuously before the world a disclaimer of our responsibility for the great slaughter of our race and convince the humblest of our citizens—who sometimes forget the actual situation—that the government is the tender of their lives and happiness and would not prolong their sufferings unnecessarily.20

Governor Vance not only recognized that many common whites in North Carolina were unhappy with the Confederate government and opposed to remaining at war with the Union, but he also relayed this information to President Davis himself. It is notable that in his letter, Vance does not

19 John W. Ellis, “A Proclamation,” April 17, 1861, in William C. Harris, North Carolina and the Coming of the Civil War (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1988), 53. For more information about common white North Carolinians’ reluctance to secede, see Cassandra McGuire, “Lost Daughters of the Confederacy: Common White Women in Civil War Era North Carolina” (undergraduate thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012), 9-23. 20 Governor Zebulon Baird Vance to President Jefferson Davis (copy of the original), December 30, 1863, G.P. 172, Governors’ Papers – Zebulon Baird Vance. 22 Cassandra D. McGuire necessarily suggest that the Confederacy make peace with the Union. Instead, he only seems interested in generating propaganda for regaining the support of common white North Carolinians for the Confederate cause. While government officials and elites of North Carolina often claimed to be concerned with the physical well-being of the poor, it is clear that maintaining support for the war and the Confederate government among members of the lower classes was the ultimate goal behind most, if not all, attempts at aid. Confederate officials and their supporters expected the recipients of government aid to show their thanks by remaining loyal to the Confederate cause, creating a situation in which patriotic common white women were pitied while those who dared to be defiant were scorned. In Civil War era North Carolina, common white women became major political actors on the home front, influencing government officials’ actions and discourse through protests, petitions, and their power to convince their male relatives to desert. Why, then, are their stories largely marginalized in histories of the Confederate home front? This was certainly not due to their gender, as in the aftermath of the Civil War, many Southern women were elevated to the status of heroines and lauded in such publications as Lucy London Anderson’s North Carolina Women of the Confederacy. Instead, common white women’s marginalization seems to have been based on their social and economic class. In Anderson’s book, the vast majority of praise was reserved for women of considerable social status and wealth who “joined the poorer women in … the fields,” serving as nurses in Confederate hospitals, participating in Soldiers’ Aid Societies, and working in canteens. Just one page of Anderson’s book addresses women who worked as wage laborers for the Confederate government, but the only positions mentioned are those of clerks and copyists, jobs usually reserved for middle- or upper-class women in need of work. Other contemporary works written about Confederate women, such as Matthew Page Andrews’s The Women of the South in War Times, similarly focus on the experiences of upper- class women, portraying their activities as characteristic of Confederate womanhood while essentially ignoring the experiences of common whites. Thus, common white women, including those who grew food for the army and those who manufactured supplies in Confederate industries, are largely left out of the constructed memory of the Confederacy and of Confederate

23 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

womanhood.21 One major reason why common white women have been studied less frequently and in less detail than wealthier women is that very few written records of common white women have survived. These women kept busy providing for their families, especially during the war years, so they lacked the leisure time to keep journals and memoirs. Furthermore, many common white women were illiterate. The lack of records left behind by them in Civil War era North Carolina does not explain why they were marginalized in memoirs written by their contemporaries, however. Literate elites would not have needed documents written by their common white neighbors in order to understand their lives, as they could have interviewed the poor or simply observed their behavior. They could have written about common whites at least as knowledgeably as about African Americans, who were the subject of many social commentaries written by elite whites during the Civil War period. “Lack of documentation” does not satisfactorily explain the omission of these women’s stories from contemporary accounts of the Confederate home front. Instead, it seems that common white women were deliberately left out of the popular narrative of the Civil War and that the reason to obscure their version of events dates back to the collapse of the Confederacy.22

Constructing Confederate Memory: The Myth of Confederate Womanhood By the final few months of the Civil War, most Southerners recognized the need to prepare for life after defeat. There were many logistical concerns regarding reentering the Union, but a major ideological question also plagued many Southerners’ minds, namely how to justify the deaths of a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers and preserve the honor of the conquered South. Ideally, justification and honor would have come in the form of a military victory, with the Confederate States of America achieving international recognition of its independence. In the aftermath

21 Lucy London Anderson, North Carolina Women of the Confederacy (Fayetteville, N.C.: Cumberland Printing Co., 1926), 14-15, 57, 102. See also Matthew Page Andrews, comp., The Women of the South in War Times (Baltimore: The Norman, Remington Co., 1924), for another example of post-war recollections of Confederate womanhood. 22 Edwards, 149-150. 24 Cassandra D. McGuire of the surrender at Appomattox and the Confederacy’s collapse, however, Southerners were forced to employ a new tactic: creating and perpetuating a version of Civil War history that would cast the Confederacy’s actions, including secession, in a positive light. In the words of scholar Karen Cox, these Southerners “aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory” by rewriting history.23 The birth of the “Lost Cause” ideology is one of the most well-known ways in which Confederate history was manipulated to portray the South honorably. Realizing the difficulty of justifying slavery to future generations who would not experience the institution firsthand, and hoping to portray their motivations more favorably to outside observers, elite Southerners chose to emphasize the issue of states’ rights as the real reason for their break with the North. Furthermore, to combat the possibility of the South being remembered as a land of tyrannical whites abusing their black slaves, postbellum Southern white writers consistently portrayed the antebellum and wartime South as an idyllic setting where people of both races lived in harmony with one another and their agrarian landscape. The genteel mannerisms, peaceful setting, and charming individuals of the South described in these memoirs contrasted sharply with the increasingly industrialized and depersonalized atmosphere of many Northern cities at that time, allowing elite Southerners to claim cultural superiority over the North.24 The creation of the “Lost Cause” ideology was not the only result of the deliberate construction of Confederate memory by elite white Southerners. What I have termed the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood” arose as well. The term “Confederate womanhood” has been used by various writers to refer to the qualities that women on the Southern home front were encouraged to develop, including the willingness to sacrifice their menfolk, possessions, and labor for the good of the Cause. The “Myth” was born when postbellum Southern memoirists chose to focus their writings on women representing these qualities, creating the illusion that the Confederacy was free of female dissent. This choice was hardly surprising considering that even during the war, Confederate elites had sought to quell the discontent

23 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 1. 24 Ibid., 1-2. 25 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

of common whites in order to unify the imagined white community of the South. This aim continued to guide many Southerners in the postbellum era, encouraging them to downplay the diversity of Southern whites and to refuse to acknowledge common white dissent during the war. Instead, in their postwar remembrances, Southern elites suggest that all of the region’s whites were united in their unyielding support for the Confederacy. This was certainly not true. As previously shown, many common white women were not willing to make sacrifices for the good of the Cause, as they were already on the brink of starvation. Instead, they undermined the Confederate government by encouraging desertion and organizing riots. These women did not fit into the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood,” nor did their activities promote the peaceful, idyllic Southern atmosphere claimed by the “Lost Cause” ideology. Because the experiences of these women in Civil War era North Carolina contradicted the narrative of the Confederate past that Southern elites wished to establish, their stories were largely left out of the new histories being written by Southerners. Had stories of common white women rioting and voicing anti-Confederate sentiments become widespread, the notion of the South as a place of unified adherence to the “Lost Cause” would have been jeopardized. Rarely, brief accounts of common white women’s activities during the war were included in postbellum publications. For instance, North Carolina historian Cornelia Phillips Spencer recalled seeing soldiers’ wives weeping after receiving cotton cards from the state government, crying aloud to God to bless Governor Vance for helping to clothe their families in their time of need. Decades later, another North Carolinian, D. H. Hill, recalled how even those poor Confederate women who were near starvation refused to tolerate desertion, demanding that their husbands return to battle. Notably, in these stories, specific names of women were not included. This brings into question the veracity of these stories, as they may be based upon hearsay, or they may be propaganda created to emphasize the devotion that the “Lost Cause” inspired among all classes. Regardless of whether the stories are true, they convey the dominant attitude held by Southern elites that common white women proved themselves worthy of commemoration only by willingly and openly supporting the Confederate government and

26 Cassandra D. McGuire the war effort despite their many hardships on the home front.25 The realities of political dissent and anti-war sentiments among common white women on the Confederate home front posed a particular problem in the state of North Carolina. Because of North Carolinians’ hesitation to secede from the Union, they often had been accused of being less devoted to the Confederate cause than residents of the Deep South states. During the war, North Carolina newspaper editors had fought these allegations with editorials, insisting that the state had done plenty to prove its loyalty. An editorial in the October 19, 1863, issue of the Fayetteville Observer stated that North Carolina “has now in the field more men than she can well spare, and in addition to this she has troops for home defense.... She is clothing and shoeing all her troops in the Confederate service.” Concluded the Observer, “It is impossible that such a State, or any considerable portion of her people, should be untrue to the Southern cause. They are true. They have been so from the first.”26 After the war, North Carolinians found themselves in the even more difficult position of having to prove their honor to both Northerners and Southerners. Like the residents of the other former Confederate states, North Carolinians generally subscribed to the “Lost Cause” ideology, which showed the Confederacy in a less negative light to those living outside the former slave states. At the same time, North Carolina elites used their postbellum writings to emphasize the state’s contributions to the Confederacy and to justify the state’s relatively late secession. A prime example of such politically motivated postwar writing is Cornelia Phillips Spencer’s book, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina. Spencer emphasizes that many North Carolinians had been reluctant to secede from the Union, foreseeing the dire consequences that war would inevitably bring. North Carolina’s Unionist statesmen were largely unheeded by the “extremist,” pro-war enthusiasts from the Deep South states, but when Virginia and Tennessee joined South Carolina as members of the Confederacy following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, North Carolina chose Southern solidarity over isolation. “What was left for

25 Cornelia Phillips Spencer, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina (New York: Watchman Publishing Company, 1866), 20; Daniel Harvey Hill, “The Women of the Confederacy,” in Addresses at the Unveiling of the Memorial, 12. 26 Fayetteville Observer, October 19, 1863, 2:5. 27 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

her,” asks Spencer, “but to stand … in the South and with the South?”27 Even while justifying North Carolina’s secession to readers outside the former Confederacy, Spencer also tried to mend the state’s rift with the rest of the South. Although she admitted that North Carolina’s reluctance to go to war was undeniable, Spencer maintained that the state had provided as many resources and soldiers to the Confederate army as possible. She argued that there was an “implicit and entire surrender by the whole Southern people,” including North Carolinians, “of their dearest civil rights and liberties, of their lives and property into the hands of the Government, for the support of [the] war.” She was certainly including the white women of Civil War era North Carolina in this generalization, as elsewhere in her book she praises them for their “heroic” willingness to undergo food and clothing shortages, increased workloads, and numerous other hardships for the good of the Cause. Spencer places Confederate women on a pedestal, asking, “Who shall question the course of the women of the South in this war, or dare to undervalue their lofty heroism and fortitude, unsurpassed in story or in song?” As a well-informed observer of the North Carolina home front, Spencer surely would have witnessed or heard accounts of protest and anti-war feeling among the state’s common white women. However, she chose to ignore this reality of dissent when describing Confederate women. While her book briefly mentions the “Peace Party” that arose in the state during the last eighteen months of the war under the leadership of W. W. Holden, Spencer focuses on showing how Governor Vance worked to quash the movement. She also fails to mention how many common white women likely supported this movement for peace. Spencer’s omission is not particularly surprising, since just as dissenting common white women did not fit in well with the “Lost Cause” ideology throughout the South, their activities in North Carolina contradicted the image of the state that Spencer endeavored to portray. In her construction of the memory of North Carolina in the Civil War years, Spencer chose whose memory would be preserved and whose would be lost.28 Elite women’s interests were also at work in the shaping of Confederate memory. Immediately after the war, many white women of the upper

27 Spencer, 14-17, 70, 105. 28 Ibid., 30, 49, 110, 123-127. 28 Cassandra D. McGuire classes became heavily involved in the preservation of the Confederate past. Those who had previously participated in Soldiers’ Aid Societies and other female-led wartime volunteer initiatives were easily drawn to the post-war Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs). These associations were established throughout the South as early as 1865 to protect and perpetuate the ideology of the “Lost Cause,” and they persisted until 1890 when elite white women began forming similar groups known as the “Daughters of the Confederacy.” Four years later, on September 10, 1894, these localized groups of “Daughters” came together to establish the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a national organization of Southern women committed to honoring their Confederate dead and to educating future generations about “Confederate culture” as they understood it.29 Notably, the white women who joined LMAs in the months and years immediately following Confederate defeat were motivated to do much more than preserving the past. They also needed to shape their present. In particular, elite young ladies who had come of age during this tumultuous era realized that the cultural role of the plantation mistress that they had been groomed for no longer existed in the absence of slave labor. They would need to redefine Southern womanhood in a way that applied to the “New South,” but they were determined to retain the values concerning race and class that had characterized the “Old South.” Ultimately, this need for a new ideal of Southern womanhood was merged with a desire to defend the “Lost Cause” and to idolize the antebellum South. Elite young women began using their written recollections of the war to venerate Southern culture and to shape a new motif, which historian Victoria Ott has aptly named “the Confederate belle.” Ott describes this notion of the “Confederate belle,” which she has observed in various forms in Southern diaries and memoirs, as a “self-sacrificing daughter who exchanged ... frivolities ... for a life of war work and material hardships in the name of southern independence.”30 For many Southerners, this notion of the “Confederate belle” quickly became synonymous with their overall conception of “Confederate womanhood.” The elite female membership of LMAs lauded Confederate women for “blend[ing] self-sacrifice with stamina and fortitude,” and they

29 Cox, 2, 10. 30 Victoria E. Ott, Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 135. 29 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

enthusiastically promoted these qualities to young women throughout the South. As the LMAs (and, eventually, the UDC) became progressively involved in determining the curriculum that would be taught in Southern schools, the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood”—the idea that all Confederate women were willing and self-sacrificing supporters of the Confederate government and Southern independence—was increasingly passed on to future generations of Southerners.31 Just as the anti-Confederate sentiments entertained by many common white women precluded their commemoration within the ideology of the “Lost Cause,” their failure to comport themselves according to the values of Southern womanhood held dear by elite white women meant that common white women were largely incompatible with the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood.” A “Confederate belle” would never riot in the streets or encourage desertion from the army. Ultimately, the “Confederate belle” was a perfect inhabitant for the idealistic Old South created by the imagery of the “Lost Cause” ideology. The “Lost Cause” and the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood” easily merged to dominate the realm of Confederate memory while excluding the memory of common white women. Undoubtedly, in the eyes of most white Southern writers, officials, and intellectuals during the postbellum years, most if not all of whom would have belonged to the former slaveholding class, these women’s dissent during the war was best forgotten.

The North Carolina Women of the Confederacy Memorial Throughout the decades following the war, the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood” was cemented into Southern memory. Eventually, it came to be viewed as indubitable fact. Widespread subscription to the myth is reflected in the speeches that were given at the 1914 unveiling of the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy Memorial. The memorial depicts a grandmother reading to her young grandson about the heroic acts of his father during his service in the Confederate army. Bronze relief sculptures mounted on the sides of the statue’s pedestal reveal that the soldier died in battle, leaving his loving mother bereaved. While the young boy grasping his father’s sword symbolizes his inheritance of the Confederate past and of his father’s bravery, the true emphasis of this memorial is on the bravery

31 Cox, 26, 86. 30 Cassandra D. McGuire

of the female figure, who sacrificed her son to the Confederate war effort.32 Daniel Harvey Hill, then president of North Carolina State University and the son of a Confederate general, gave a rousing speech at the memorial’s unveiling, recognizing the valor and dedication of North Carolina women during the Civil War. He cited their intolerance of deserters, their ability to meet new challenges as heads of households in their husbands’ absence (specifically, managing slave labor on their plantations), their participation in various volunteer efforts to support the soldiers, and their willingness to sacrifice all for the Confederacy. Clearly, the women being praised were of the elite class, as common white women would not have had slaves to manage and would have needed to spend their time financially supporting their families rather than volunteering their labor.33 In his speech, Hill incorporated the words of the memorial’s late patron, Ashley Horne, to describe the idea which had underlain the memorial’s creation, that “the silent woman of the memorial will typify the uncomplaining women of the South.” If taken literally, this statement implies that the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy Memorial was commissioned to honor women who probably never existed, as even those women in North Carolina who ardently supported the Confederacy, such as Catherine Devereux Edmondston, frequently complained about the hardships that they faced. More likely, it is meant to refer to those women who selflessly supported the Confederate war effort even while undergoing extreme hardships on the home front. This interpretation, however, still excludes many North Carolina women, particularly those common white women who openly expressed political dissent toward Confederate policies during the war years. These women had struggled to survive in the wartime economy, and they had grown frustrated with the government’s failure to improve home front conditions. Because these women were unwilling to suffer silently, they were not included among the “Women of the Confederacy” being commemorated by this memorial.34 In the last speech given at the unveiling ceremony, North Carolina Governor Locke Craig made a strong assertion which, when viewed alongside the very real dissent practiced by many common white women

32 Locke Craig, “Address of Acceptance,” in Addresses at the Unveiling of the Memorial, 24. 33 Hill, 10-20. 34 Ibid., 10. See also Edmondston, Journal. 31 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

during the Civil War, reveals how well their story had been obscured in North Carolina by 1914. “Had the men and the women of the South been recreant,” declared Governor Craig, “had they shrunk from the sacrifice of war, their children today would be the disinherited heirs of the promise, a dishonored and degenerate people.” While previous writers and speakers had avoided addressing the anti-Confederate sentiments held by many North Carolinians, particularly among common white women, Governor Craig unequivocally denied the existence of dissent in the Confederacy. Furthermore, his statement emphasized the complete unacceptability of acknowledging Confederate dissenters when recounting the history of the Civil War era South, as it would jeopardize not only the memory of the Confederate dead but also the honor of the Confederates’ descendants. It is notable that, in 1914, many people who had experienced the Civil War years firsthand, albeit at a young age, would have been living. However, despite these living witnesses, the story of dissent among common white women during the war had already been obscured and largely forgotten.35 The work of generations of elite Southerners had successfully instilled the “Myth of Confederate Womanhood” into the popular consciousness of the South. It was likely this myth that inspired Southern author Margaret Mitchell to pen her 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, presenting the nation with the epitome of Confederate female devotion in the character of Melanie Wilkes. This sustained manipulation of the Confederate past to emphasize and romanticize the experiences of elite white women has resulted in common white women’s voices being mostly lost from Civil War history. Ironically, their marginalization was largely engineered by fellow Southern women who were willing to sacrifice historical accuracy and to undermine the feelings and experiences of common whites in order to enhance their own class’s heritage.

The Return of the Repressed One day in 1864, a woman named Franny Jordan and two of her female neighbors confronted a band of Confederate soldiers in Moore County, North Carolina. The soldiers had taken Jordan’s teenaged son away from her, intending to force the young man to enlist. For Jordan, her duties as a

35 Craig, 25. 32 Cassandra D. McGuire mother far outweighed any obligation she might have to the Confederate government or its army, and so she pursued the soldiers, anxious to see what could be done to resolve the situation and to have her son returned to her. As she and her companions neared the Confederate troops, they were accosted for challenging military authority. The soldiers then physically threatened one of the young women, aiming their guns at her and ripping her dress as she struggled to get away. But the women were able to flee before the situation became more violent.36 This story illustrates that the experiences of common white women on the North Carolina home front were anything but “common.” There are undoubtedly many such fascinating, if largely untold, stories about this group of dissenting women. There is still much left to be learned about them, such as what they thought of their society and how they organized group actions like the Salisbury bread riot. Because common white women in Civil War era North Carolina have yet to be heavily researched, there are many possibilities for future study. One approach that could prove rewarding would be to research the specific experiences of individual common white women. This would undoubtedly be challenging due to the dearth of records they left behind, but any surviving historical documents could potentially be supplemented by oral histories collected from the women’s descendants. Although family anecdotes would be difficult if not impossible to verify, they would provide a better understanding of the personalities of these women, about whom historians know so little. Furthermore, by presenting detailed accounts of specific common white women, including their names, backgrounds, and personality types, a historian might “create” memorable historical figures within the broad, amorphous category of “common white women.” Just as plantation mistress Catherine Devereux Edmondston is often used by historians to represent elite female life in Civil War era North Carolina, common white women could have their own representatives, such as Franny Jordan. The striking quality of Jordan’s story, recounted above,

36 Victoria E. Bynum, “Occupied at Home: Women Confront Confederate Forces in North Carolina’s Quaker Belt,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 155. See also Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and its Legacies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 37-38. 33 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

illustrates how effective such research could be in conveying the violence and insecurity of the home front experience. It is important that common white women continue to be remembered and studied, as their stories provide a valuable counter-narrative to the dominant description of life on the Confederate home front. Their experiences reveal the severity of conditions and the unhappiness of residents within the allegedly idyllic Confederacy. Furthermore, the efforts that these women made to have their plight heard and to elicit aid was extraordinary, given the period in which they lived and the gender constraints of that time. As the memory of the Civil War grows distant and less personal, it might finally be possible to separate reality from romance in the Civil War era and to consider those alternative forms of Confederate womanhood that have been repressed.

34 Sam Hobbs Victim of the “Lost Cause”: James Longstreet in the Postwar South

As a Confederate general in the Civil War, James Longstreet commanded the First Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia, serving as Robert E. Lee’s most trusted advisor and second-in-command. Longstreet led his men through almost every major engagement of the war in the eastern theater, from the First Battle of Manassas to the surrender at Appomattox, earning a reputation as one of the Confederacy’s best fighters and most capable generals. Yet less than ten years after the war, most white southerners blamed Longstreet for the South’s defeat at Gettysburg, and history remembered traceshim as Lee’s reliable but slow lieutenant. How did Longstreet’s reputation fall so far so fast? Longstreet’s lengthy and controversial career in the postwar South is one of the most interesting and yet overlooked parts of his life. He was the only senior Confederate officer to become a Republican, and he joined the party of Lincoln and abolition just three years after the war, at the height of Reconstruction. As a result, his standing among white southerners plummeted. Longstreet’s unpopularity thus made him the target of a campaign to exonerate Lee for the loss at Gettysburg by making Longstreet the scapegoat. The campaign was highly effective and his damaged reputation did not 35 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

begin to recover for over a century. The controversy surrounding Longstreet was a product of larger issues in the postwar South concerning politics and historical memory. The South was devastated from the war both physically and psychologically. Its people struggled to cope with defeat and to adjust to the profound changes that defeat effected, particularly the emancipation of one-fifth of its population from slavery. White southerners sought to protect their society from what they saw as the distortions and designs of their Northern conquerors. In their view, Reconstruction was a punishment intended to prolong their suffering and to subjugate them to the rule of the newly freed and enfranchised blacks. In response to the challenges and insecurities of defeat and to the threat posed by Reconstruction, a movement developed among former Confederates known as the “Lost Cause,” or the “Confederate tradition.” The “Lost Cause” was a broad movement that changed over time and lacked uniformity. Historians have accordingly struggled to define its precise boundaries. It has been described as a myth, a civil religion, and a tradition, but the best definition for the purposes of this essay is “the dominant complex of attitudes and emotions that constituted the white South’s interpretation of the Civil War.” It was the avowed purpose of the “Lost Cause” to preserve and interpret the “true” history of the Confederacy, to consciously shape the public’s memory in “one of the most highly orchestrated grassroots partisan histories ever recorded.”1 Some of the basic “truths” that the “Lost Cause” sought to establish were the causes of the war and the South’s defeat. According to white southerners, secession was a constitutional response to violations of their state’s rights. Slavery was not the cause of the war, merely an incident. The South was not defeated, but was overwhelmed by the Union’s superior numbers and resources. These arguments helped restore the South’s sense of honor, which was a cornerstone of this effort to glorify the Old South. In addition to promoting its version of history, the “Lost Cause” was an attack on the policies of Reconstruction. Its advocates maintained that Reconstruction was an act of oppression, and they forcefully articulated their opposition to it in terms of white supremacy. Through the “Lost Cause,” white southerners launched a war of ideas to determine the meaning of the war and the fate of

1 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 259. 36 Sam Hobbs

Reconstruction.2 One of the earliest organizations for the promotion of the “Lost Cause” was a coalition of Virginians under the leadership of Jubal Early. The Virginians focused on celebrating the military glory of the Confederacy, and they deified Confederate heroes Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Of course, their lavish praise of the Confederacy’s military prowess naturally raised the question of defeat, for which the Virginians relentlessly promoted two explanations. The first was the argument that the North’s advantage in manpower simply overwhelmed the South. The second was the “Longstreet-lost-it-at-Gettysburg” explanation, in which Longstreet’s failure to attack at the time ordered cost Lee the battle, and subsequently the war. It was a grossly exaggerated and baseless claim, but that did not prevent it from resonating in white southerners’ memory of the war. In the postwar South, white southerners-turned-Republicans, or scalawags, were held among the lowest in esteem. They were thought of as traitors to their race, and for that reason white southerners often said scalawags were inferior even to freed blacks. White southerners’ portrayal of scalawags became a central part of the myth of Reconstruction that they created. Because Longstreet was the most prominent scalawag in the South, examining his experience helps to reveal some of the falsehoods of this myth. When Longstreet declared his support for Republicans and Reconstruction after the war, he placed himself in opposition to the “Lost Cause,” which was tantamount to a betrayal of the South. His military record subsequently became the victim of “Lost Cause” dogma, a testament to its power and endurance in Southern society. Longstreet’s postwar career therefore provides a lens through which to examine the politics of Reconstruction in the South and the role of this mythology in shaping historical memory.

Longstreet’s Early Life and Military Career Before considering how Longstreet’s enemies rewrote his history after the Civil War, it is necessary to rehearse the trajectory of his early life and military career. Longstreet was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, on January 8, 1821. He spent his childhood years living in the small north

2 Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 16; Blight, 259, 258-266. 37 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Georgia town of Gainesville, but at the age of nine he moved to his uncle’s cotton plantation in Westover, Georgia, to attend a preparatory academy in hopes of attaining an appointment to West Point. His uncle, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, was “one of the finest minds of the antebellum South,” an accomplished jurist, a newspaper editor, and a Methodist minister. When Longstreet’s father died in 1833, Augustus assumed the role of parent and was a crucial influence during Longstreet’s youth.3 Because his mother lived in northern Alabama with her relatives after his father died, Longstreet was able to secure an appointment to West Point from Alabama in 1838. He was a mediocre student at West Point, but he met many men who became famous during the Civil War. George Pickett, D.H. Hill, Lafayette McLaws, U.S. Grant and William S. Rosencrans were all close friends. He was known for being independent and exceptionally strong, and like his uncle, he enjoyed a game of cards and whiskey, and was typically well liked. He graduated third from the bottom of his class and was assigned to the infantry as a brevet lieutenant.4 During the Mexican-American War, Longstreet served from the Army of Observation to the occupation of Mexico City. He never commanded more than one hundred men, but his “conspicuous bravery” and proven competence earned him a promotion to brevet major by the end of the war. Serving in a variety of positions, Longstreet gained valuable experience in combat, tactics, and administrative duties. His experience was mostly on the offensive, and he was lucky not to have been severely wounded, except for a leg wound at Chapultepec.5 Longstreet lived with his wife and children in Texas until he accepted a position as paymaster in New Mexico. As the crisis of 1860-1861 unfolded, he opposed secession, but felt he had no choice but to join the fight if his state passed ordinances of secession. Following the capture of Fort Sumter, he resigned his commission in the US Army and reported to Richmond for orders.6 Longstreet received a commission on July 1 as a brigadier general under

3 William Garrett Piston, Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 2-3. 4 Ibid., 4-5. 5 Ibid., 5-7. 6 James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1896), 29-30. 38 Sam Hobbs

General P.G.T Beauregard, who gave him command of the Fourth Brigade, which was ordered to defend Blackburn’s Ford, a key position in the line behind Bull Run Creek from which to protect Manassas Junction. On July 18, three days before the Battle of Manassas, a Union brigade attacked Longstreet’s position. Although outnumbered, his men repelled several assaults and even attempted, briefly, to counterattack. At one point, when his raw troops faltered and broke the line, Longstreet “rode with saber in hand for the leading files, determined to stop the break.” He was not involved in the Battle of Manassas, but his performance at Blackburn’s Ford earned him the praise of General Beauregard.7 Longstreet was promoted to major general, but both Beauregard and Joseph Johnston, the commanding general, tried to have him promoted further to be their second-in-command. When the Union army landed in the east Virginia peninsula in the spring of 1862, General Johnston ordered Longstreet to the rear of the army to protect its retreat. At Williamsburg, he fought a forward unit of the Union army and skillfully delayed their advance. Johnston said of the engagement: “Longstreet’s clear head and brave heart left me no apology for interference.” In the subsequent Battle of Seven Pines outside of Richmond, Longstreet misunderstood his verbal orders and placed his troops too far to the right, exposing a gap in the Confederate lines and disrupting their attack plan. According to one of his biographers, this marked “the lowest point in his military career,” but Johnston praised him in the battle reports and Longstreet never admitted any fault, instead laying the blame with Generals Smith and Wilcox.8 When Johnston fell with severe injury, President Davis replaced him with General Robert E. Lee. Longstreet felt then and after the war that Johnston was the best officer in the Confederacy. Of the replacement he commented, “The assignment of General Lee to command the army of Northern Virginia was far from reconciling the troops to the loss of our beloved chief.” At that point Lee had a shaky reputation, but he quickly initiated an aggressive campaign to dislodge the Union army from the peninsula. The campaign succeeded in forcing the Union to retreat, but at a very high cost. Longstreet criticized Lee for issuing conflicting orders and General Jackson for his sluggish execution, but Longstreet won high praise

7 Piston, 12-14; Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 39. 8 Piston, 15-16; Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 80; Piston, 19. 39 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

from all quarters for his “quick movements” and “hard fighting.” When Lee reorganized his army in the summer of 1862, he took care to make Longstreet his second-in-command, giving Jackson a subordinate position, and Lee and Longstreet soon became close friends.9 The Union and Confederate armies next faced each other at the Second Battle of Manassas. Lee was eager to attack, but Longstreet cautioned that he was “urging nothing less than a piecemeal attack on an unknown force over unknown ground” and requested permission to do a thorough reconnaissance. Lee assented, but the Federals acted first, sending their columns against Jackson on the left. When Jackson requested reinforcements, Longstreet supported him instead with artillery fire. Years later, he wrote: “When they were fairly in range every gun was opened upon them, and before they had recovered from the stunning effect, I sprung every man that I had to the charge, and swept down upon them like an avalanche.” He concluded, “The effect was simply magical. The enemy broke all to pieces.” This engagement represented Longstreet’s ideal battle formula, a resolute defense followed by a timely counterattack.10 Following his decisive victory at Second Manassas, Lee decided to invade Maryland. Longstreet supported the plan, but he objected to dividing their forces in order to capture Harper’s Ferry, calling it “a venture not worth the game.” Lee was adamant, however, and the army split, with Jackson’s command marching to Harper’s Ferry and Longstreet advancing towards Sharpsburg. The Union army had the benefit of discovering the Confederate battle plans by a “lost dispatch,” and they arrived at Sharpsburg sooner than Lee expected. Fortunately, Jackson rejoined the Army of Northern Virginia in time for the Battle of Antietam, the single bloodiest day of fighting of the war. Lee was badly outnumbered and likely would have been crushed if not for the Federals’ uncoordinated and piecemeal assault. The fighting was desperate, and after committing his reserve, Longstreet “used his own presence at the front to bolster his weakening firing line in a display of courage, tenacity and resolution” that earned him his oft-cited sobriquet as Lee’s “old war-horse.” Despite the tremendous energy and efforts of

9 Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 112; Piston, 20-22. 10 Ibid., 23; Longstreet, “The Mistakes of Gettysburg,” in The Annals of the War: Written by Leading Participants North and South, ed. Alexander McClure (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1994), 630-631. 40 Sam Hobbs

Longstreet and others, the Confederates would have been overwhelmed had General A.P. Hill not arrived with the remaining troops from Harper’s Ferry.11 Lee’s trust and confidence in Longstreet was well established by the end of 1862. He reorganized his army into two corps, the first under Longstreet and the second under Jackson, and promoted them both to lieutenant general. However, Lee dated the appointments to give Longstreet the higher rank as his chief lieutenant, while he expressed reservations about Jackson being “by no means so rapid a marcher as Longstreet” and having “an unfortunate habit of never being on time.” In contrast to postwar impressions, Longstreet clearly enjoyed an intimate relationship with Lee, who he said “always invited the views of [Longstreet] in moves of strategy and general policy, not so much for the purpose of having his own views approved and confirmed as to get new light, or channels for new thought.” In spite of their relationship, Longstreet was not without doubts about Lee’s tactics and strategy. He still thought Johnston was the superior officer and considered Lee to be a “master of the science but not of the art of war.” These doubts, however, do not suggest he did not respect Lee’s character or command.12 Lee and Longstreet achieved a great victory at the Battle of Fredericksburg, considered to be “the neatest and cheapest” victory of the war. Longstreet formed his line in a sunken road behind a stone wall that formed a natural trench at the base of some hills. To improve further the advantages of this terrain, he instructed his men to build extensive field fortifications. Although facing the mass of the Union army, the enemy never came close to breaching his position. Lee’s casualties were barely forty percent of Union losses, and Jackson’s un-entrenched men suffered almost twice the casualties of Longstreet. Fredericksburg was a powerful lesson in the advantages of the defensive.13 Around this time, Longstreet introduced a new feature to warfare. The “traverse trench” was a system of short walls built perpendicular to the main trench wall at regular intervals that separated men into a series of compartments that were covered on each flank, greatly diminishing

11 Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 201; Piston, 25-26. 12 Piston, 30; Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 158, 288. 13 Piston, 32–34. 41 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

their exposure to artillery. It was an important innovation, providing another example, on top of his tactical prowess at Second Manassas and Fredericksburg, of Longstreet’s understanding of the power of defense. After the war, he was falsely characterized as excessively cautious, but in reality he had a better understanding than most of his contemporaries of modern warfare.14 In the spring of 1863, the Confederate War Department assigned Longstreet to the Virginia and North Carolina coastal region to gather supplies and provisions and to check the growing Federal presence in that area. This was his first quasi-independent command, and though he secured sufficient provisions, his efforts to dislodge the Union army from New Bern, North Carolina, and Suffolk, Virginia, failed. The Secretary of War praised Longstreet, however, for his “restraint” in not sacrificing many casualties for a peripheral objective, and declared the campaign a success.15 Because of this assignment Longstreet was not present for the Battle of Chancellorsville, but afterwards he came up with an interesting plan designed for the relief of Vicksburg, under siege by General Grant, proposing to reinforce General Bragg’s army in Tennessee with Johnston’s army in Mississippi and his own two divisions from Suffolk. That “combination once made should strike immediately in overwhelming force upon [Union General] Rosencrans, and march for the Ohio River and Cincinnati.” In theory, Grant would be forced to abandon Vicksburg to meet this threat in the North. Longstreet’s plan demonstrated his appreciation of the importance of the western theater, a common criticism of Lee, and his knowledge “that the only way to equalize the contest was by skillful use of our interior lines.” In the end, Lee rejected the plan in favor of his own plan to invade Pennsylvania.16 Lee sought to relieve pressure on Virginia and perhaps to draw Union troops from the West to counter the threat to Washington, DC. Longstreet supported the proposal but stressed that the campaign should be offensive in strategy, defensive in tactics, suggesting “that we should work so as to force the enemy to attack us, in such good position … which might assure us of a grand triumph.” Lee agreed with this approach, but when the two

14 Ibid., 35. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 331, 327. 42 Sam Hobbs armies met unexpectedly in Gettysburg on July 1, he resolved to attack. As the initial fighting broke out in mid-afternoon, Longstreet’s men were still a day’s march away, and they had to wait for General Ewell’s fourteen-mile- long wagon train to pass before starting at 4:00 p.m. They camped late that night for about two hours, three miles from Gettysburg. Meanwhile, their commander deliberated with Lee on the course of action for the next day. Longstreet proposed flanking the enemy’s left and occupying a position between the Union army and Washington, from which they would threaten Federal communications and force the enemy to attack. Lee rejected this proposal, believing a flanking movement would expose the Confederate train, and announced his intention to strike the Union army where it stood.17 Longstreet’s two divisions began to arrive at general headquarters early on the morning of the second, while Pickett’s division was not expected until later that day. At 11:00 a.m., Lee ordered Longstreet’s men to attack by a concealed route on the right “as soon as practicable,” granting permission to wait for one last brigade expected within the hour. The concealed route doubled the distance to their appointed position, and an oversight in reconnaissance—the Confederate cavalry was missing- in-action—compelled the columns to make a countermarch at one point. When they finally reached their position, the Union line on their front was much changed and strengthened since the information collected in the morning. Longstreet’s subordinates requested permission to delay and even suggested a flanking movement similar to his earlier proposal, but the attack proceeded as planned. The fighting began around 4:00 p.m. and Longstreet’s divisions made considerable progress against a superior enemy in strong position, but they received no help from the other corps, who did not coordinate their assaults with Longstreet’s as instructed to prevent the Union from concentrating against him.18 On the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Longstreet once again pressed for a flanking maneuver, but Lee refused. Instead, Lee ordered Pickett’s division, supported by several brigades from the Third Corps, to make a frontal assault on Cemetery Ridge, while the remainder of Longstreet’s corps defended the right flank. Longstreet expressed his objections to the plan in strong terms, at one point saying to Lee: “The

17 Ibid., 331; Piston, 49-52. 18 Ibid., 53–58. 43 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

fifteen thousand men who could make successful assault over that field have never been arrayed for battle.” Lee insisted, and the infamous charge was made following an epic but ineffective artillery barrage. It was the worst defeat of the war for the Army of Northern Virginia, and although Lee assumed complete blame for the disaster, Longstreet was ultimately held responsible.19 After Gettysburg, the government in Richmond was more amenable to suggestions of a concentration of forces in the West. When Longstreet asked to be transferred to General Bragg’s army in east Tennessee “to arrest the march of Rosencrans,” Lee and President Davis assented. By the time he reached the Army of Tennessee, Rosencrans had pushed it into Georgia, and Bragg immediately gave him command of a wing of the army during the middle of the Battle of Chickamauga. His wing was in chaos, but “no other officer in the South could have taken control as quickly and smoothly or with such self-confidence as Longstreet at Chickamauga.” Within hours he launched a powerful assault, and when a gap emerged in the enemy lines, he “drove Rosencrans and half his army from the field in one of the greatest routs of the war.” Bragg’s army was unable to pursue their defeated adversary, but Longstreet earned a new nickname, the “Bull of the Woods.”20 The remainder of his time in the Army of Tennessee was plagued by squabbling, dissent, and failure. Bragg had been quarreling with his subordinates long before Longstreet’s arrival, but Longstreet did nothing to calm the waters. In fact, he later became the leader of the anti-Bragg faction. The feud between them continued to escalate until it literally split the army, with Bragg maintaining the siege of Chattanooga and Longstreet moving against Federal forces at Knoxville. Longstreet had ignored intelligence at Chattanooga, which gave the enemy an opportunity to reopen their supply lines, and his performance at Knoxville was no more successful, ultimately settling in for a siege during the winter of 1863-64. At this time, he began to have problems within his own command. He relieved McLaws, a lifelong friend who had served under Longstreet since Seven Pines, for his apathy and loss of nerve since Gettysburg, but McLaws responded with accusations of his own and soon had his dismissal overturned. Another dispute emerged between Longstreet, several of his

19 Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox, 386, 391-394. 20 Ibid, 433; Piston, 70-71. 44 Sam Hobbs subordinates, and the War Department over promotions, and he eventually arrested one of his officers. These problems did not originate with Longstreet, but his management was poor, as “he was too partisan towards protégés … and downright petty and vindictive toward those who opposed him.” Nevertheless, he was never in danger of losing his command, and an investigation by the War Department found that “General Longstreet possesses the confidence and affection of his officers and men.”21 In April 1864, Richmond ordered Longstreet to return to Lee’s army in Virginia, but he did not remain for long. In an incident strikingly similar to Jackson’s tragic death, Longstreet’s own men accidently shot him during the Battle of the Wilderness, sending a minie ball into his throat and out his right shoulder, an injury that affected his voice and troubled his right arm for the rest of his life. It might have killed a man of lesser size, but Longstreet recovered and returned to Lee’s army before the end of 1864. In the waning days of the war, Lee depended more and more on Longstreet. Once Grant captured Petersburg, Lee had to abandon Richmond, and for the last ten days of the war Longstreet’s men never lost their order and discipline as they protected the army’s retreat to Appomattox against almost continuous assaults by the enemy.22

Longstreet’s Postwar “Apostasy” Longstreet’s immediate postwar reputation is instructive, especially when compared to his reputation only a decade later. During the war, he did not receive the public attention his experiences merited, as most coverage was provincial and the papers in Virginia, where he spent the bulk of the war, heavily favored their native sons. For this reason, and because he did not fit the image of the puritanical Jackson, the cavalier Stuart, or the aristocratic Lee, he never became a public hero like these men. However, “as the Confederacy’s senior lieutenant general and veteran of both of the major theaters of war,” he was “well-known” and “greatly respected, especially by the common soldiers.” Longstreet was typically described as a “bulldog,” “a commander of great skill and energy,” and “the best fighter in the whole army.” Given later charges of slowness, lethargy, and excessive caution, his

21 Ibid., 74–81. 22 Ibid., 88–91. 45 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

portrayal as “a rapid marcher whose troops were never late, a soldier hard hitting in the attack and resolute in the defense” is revealing. He was best remembered as “Lee’s intimate friend” and “most trusted lieutenant.” In short, Longstreet was rightfully known as one of the Confederacy’s best and most valuable commanders.23 Longstreet’s plan was to follow his longtime aide and close friend, Captain T.J. Goree, to Texas, where he could settle with his family and begin a new life as a civilian. On the way to Texas, however, they stopped in New Orleans, where he remained. New Orleans was a popular destination for many Confederate leaders, including two former members of Longstreet’s command, Edward and William Owen, who offered him a partnership in their cotton brokerage business. The firm of “Longstreet, Owen and Company” opened on January 1, 1866, his name lending distinction and prestige to the firm. Three months later, he was elected president of a New Orleans insurance company, and the combination of these two business positions afforded Longstreet a comfortable salary and lifestyle.24 During a public address in the summer of 1866, Longstreet avoided political questions and was modest about his own influence, calling himself a “humble citizen—in fact, only a prisoner of war on parole.” Referring to the debate over Reconstruction, he remarked: “If I approach Mr. Johnson I am called a traitor; if toward the Radicals, I am called a rebel; therefore, I must be content to remain on the fence.”25 At that point the struggle between President Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction policy was reaching its climax. Johnson’s plan was decidedly lenient, providing for the broad application of amnesty and pardon and requiring of the former Confederate states only that they renounce secession and accept the Thirteenth Amendment. Republicans in Congress believed this policy abandoned the fruits of the war the Union had just won at so much expense and sacrifice. In their view, it “put enormous authority back in the hands of white southerners, but without any provisions for black civil or political rights.” From late 1865 to 1868, the Radical Republicans in Congress took control of Reconstruction and acted to address the

23 Ibid., 96–99. 24 Thomas Robinson Hay and Donald Bridgeman Sanger, James Longstreet: Politician, Officeholder, and Writer (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 321-323. 25 New York Times, June 20, 1866. 46 Sam Hobbs shortcomings in President Johnson’s plan. To Johnson’s requirements for readmission to the Union, they added the Fourteenth Amendment, which established equality before the law and extended citizenship to the native- born regardless of race. When the southern states rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress divided the former Confederacy into five military districts and made black suffrage a condition of readmission to the Union. White southerners balked at these conditions, especially on the issue of black rights. One Virginian wrote to a leader of the Radical Republicans, asking him: “Which feeling is strongest in your Abrahamic bosom—love of the negro, or hatred of the white man of the South?”26 Following the passage of the Military Reconstruction Acts in March 1867, which put the South under military occupation, the editor of the New Orleans Times sent out a request to prominent men in the area for their opinions on Reconstruction. Longstreet was the first to respond, beginning a series of public statements on politics that sealed his postwar fate. He acknowledged that he was inexperienced in politics and could “only speak the plain, honest convictions of a soldier.” Indeed, soldierly conceptions of duty and the terms of war largely defined his approach to the issue. From his perspective, it was a simple question of accepting defeat and submitting to the terms of the victors. Longstreet reminded his audience, “We are a conquered people.… There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors.” If the goal of the South was readmission to the Union with its full and equal rights restored, then “the only means to accomplish this is to comply with the requirements of the recent Congressional legislation.” Some skeptics responded that Congress would not honor its commitments once the South had met its conditions, to which Longstreet counseled, “Let us accept the terms as we are in duty bound to do, and if there is a lack of faith, let it be upon others.” His was a pragmatic approach to Reconstruction. Without suggesting that he approved of Republican policy, Longstreet simply recommended following the law. The newspaper praised his advice and declared his views “in full unison” with its own. At that point, his opinions were in concert with a number of other former Confederate leaders.27 Not three weeks after he published his first letter, and perhaps

26 Blight, 44–48. 27 New Orleans Times, March 19, 1867; Hay and Sanger, 331. 47 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

encouraged by its positive reception, Longstreet published another. In it he argued that “the political questions of the war should have been buried upon the fields that marked their end.” The South had surrendered, forfeiting its claim to secession and ending “the former political relations of the negro.” Southerners needed to accept the fullness of defeat and apply themselves to Reconstruction with “the sincerity of purpose which will command success,” instead of the present strategy of “masterly inactivity.” They had no other choice: recourse through the law was not available, as “the only available law is martial law, and the only right, power,” and resistance was not only hopeless, but there was no just cause for it beyond the one already settled. Longstreet proposed to bury the hatchet and to “relieve ourselves from our present embarrassments by returning to our allegiance, in good faith, to the General Government under the process laid down by Congress.” This letter used stronger language than his first and was more critical of intransigent diehards, but he still did not express support for the Republican Party. This letter drew the attention of local Republican politicians, however.28 When one of these Republicans, John M. G. Parker, wrote Longstreet to compliment his letter and ask for his further views on public affairs, Longstreet responded, after several weeks of consideration, with another letter he allowed Parker to publish in the New Orleans Times. Before releasing it to the public he showed it to his uncle Augustus, who advised his nephew to keep it private. “It will ruin you, son, if you publish it,” his uncle warned. “We are not ready yet to hear such hard counseling.” Longstreet began his letter to Parker by asserting a maxim he thought was self-evident: “The highest of human laws is the law that is established by appeal to arms.” In very direct terms, Longstreet reiterated his opinion that the issues under debate then were the same as “the great principles that divided the political parties prior to the war,” that “the sword has decided in favor of the North, and what they claimed as principles cease to be principles, and are become law.” Up to this point, the letter was a reaffirmation of his previous statements.29 In the passage following, however, Longstreet made a critical departure: “Like other Southern men, I naturally sought alliance with the Democratic party, merely because it was opposed to the Republican party,”

28 New Orleans Times, April 7, 1867. 29 Hay and Sanger, 334; New Orleans Times, June 8, 1867. 48 Sam Hobbs

he wrote. “But as far as I can judge, there is nothing tangible about it except the issues that were staked upon the war and there lost.” In other words, he could not support the Democrats because they refused to acknowledge the military bill and amendments, and thus based their platform on ignoring the law and rejecting the results of the war. In his view, the military bill and amendments were “peace offerings.” These were simply the terms of the settlement.30 Equally important were his comments on black rights. Democrats opposed black enfranchisement and denied the federal government’s right to legislate on suffrage. Longstreet countered that blacks were already enfranchised, and to oppose that fact accomplished nothing except to concede any chance of their support. Furthermore, “the exclusive right of the States to legislate upon suffrage will make the enfranchisement of the blacks a fixture amongst us,” for at the time most white southerners were disenfranchised and “black voters were the core constituency of Southern Republicanism and the means to power in 1867-68.” Instead, Longstreet proposed to extend black suffrage to all the states, including the North, and in so doing retain the option to “remove it by the remedy under republican principles of uniform laws upon suffrage.”31 Nuances aside, Longstreet had announced his opposition to the Democrats and his support of black suffrage. The editorial accompanying his letter observed that he had joined “a party whose whole policy seems to be one of vindictive persecution and abuse of his late Confederates in arms.” Longstreet responded the next day, complaining that the article was “calculated to mislead” and failed to explain how his entire purpose was to suggest the best means of relieving the South from its present condition. His statement that “the war was made upon Republican issues, and it seems to me fair and just that the settlement should be made accordingly” was widely censured and ridiculed. Even Longstreet’s old friend D.H. Hill wrote in his magazine that “either our gallant friend’s theology or his loyalty is at fault.” Northerners and Republicans, in contrast, lauded his views.32 His apparent embrace of black suffrage did some of the greatest damage

30 New Orleans Times, June 8, 1867; Blight, 47. 31 Ibid. 32 New Orleans Times, June 8, 1867; Daniel Harvey Hill, “Editorial,” The Land We Love, August 1867, 355-356. 49 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

to Longstreet’s reputation. This position opened him to the charge of being a “Black Republican,” or someone who supported black equality, one of the most pejorative insults possible of a white southerner at the time. Of course, the charge was a mischaracterization of his views. In a private letter to a friend, Longstreet clarified his stance. “Since the negro has been given the privilege of voting, it is all important that we should exercise such influence over that vote, as to prevent its being injurious to us, and we can only do that as Republicans,” he wrote. He saw black suffrage as a fait accompli, and for that reason directed his efforts towards managing this new reality instead of uselessly opposing it. Moreover, it was a matter of necessity. “Congress requires reconstruction upon the Republican basis,” he wrote. “If the whites won’t do this, the thing will be done by the blacks, and we shall be set aside, if not expatriated.” Longstreet made the point that the only way forward was through Republican Reconstruction, the alternative being to cede control of the Republican Party and thus Reconstruction to the blacks. In the latter case, blacks would not only have suffrage but would hold political office. The argument epitomized his pragmatism, but Longstreet failed to communicate his commitment to white supremacy as convincingly in his public statements. As a result, white southerners “saw only that he had dared to suggest collaboration with the party of abolition.”33 The issues of politics and race were virtually indistinguishable in the postwar South. For the Democrats, “white supremacy was the cornerstone” of their opposition to Republicans and Reconstruction. They reserved some of their deepest wrath for scalawags, or native southerners who aligned with the Republicans, among whom Longstreet was easily the most prominent. A popular definition ran: “A scalawag is a white man who thinks he is no better than a Negro and in so thinking makes a correct appraisal of himself.” For white southerners, it was far more than a political disagreement. As the “Lost Cause” ideology began to emerge, with its claim that the South was never really beaten, they started to view “Reconstruction as a continuation of the same struggle in a different manner.” For this reason, Longstreet’s embrace of Reconstruction seemed like a betrayal of the cause, calling into question his loyalty and motives.34 Longstreet was not ostracized when he counseled submission to

33 James Longstreet to R. H. Taliaferro, July 4, 1867, reprinted in Piston, 106; Piston, 107. 34 Blight, 101; Piston, 110, 109. 50 Sam Hobbs

Reconstruction, but only after he announced his intention to join the Republican Party. The prevailing view of scalawags was that their support of Republicans was a naked attempt to curry favor with the party in power so as to advance their own interests at the expense of the South. Longstreet was viewed no differently. As one modern historian has noted, “Scalawags supposedly sold out the South for personal gain just as Judas had betrayed Christ for silver.” Religion was a major element of the “Lost Cause.” Southerners often compared their defeat to Christ’s sacrifice and their suffering under Reconstruction to early Christian persecution. As a part of this narrative, “the Lost Cause was transforming the Southern soldier, living and dead, into a veritable saint.” Longstreet’s heresy put him at odds with this redemptive narrative, exposing not only his motives but his Confederate past to attack.35 It did not help his defense when less than two weeks after his controversial letter appeared in the newspapers, Longstreet received a pardon. The timing was coincidental, but it reinforced the perception that his decision was a political tradeoff. Ironically, although accused of switching parties for personal gain, Longstreet’s political affiliation caused such a backlash that it affected his business, and he felt compelled to resign from his firm with the Owen brothers and to transfer his insurance interests to his friend General Hood. He never sought political office until after his business interests collapsed in late 1867.36 During the presidential campaign of 1868, Longstreet endorsed his old friend General Grant. They had been cadets at West Point together, were stationed at the same post outside St. Louis in the mid-1840s, and had served in the Mexican-American War. Their only encounter in the Civil War was at Appomattox, where they had a cordial reunion despite the somber occasion. Longstreet even introduced Grant to his cousin, Julia Dent, who later became Grant’s wife, making them kinsmen. Of their relationship, Longstreet said, “Ever since 1839, I have been on terms of the closest intimacy with Grant.” Thus, it is not surprising that Grant nominated Longstreet for surveyor of the port of New Orleans shortly after his inauguration. His confirmation elicited nine hours of debate in the Senate, but he received the post with an annual salary of six thousand dollars. So began Longstreet’s lengthy career

35 Piston, 111, 112. 36 New York Times, Sept. 25, 1893; Hay and Sanger, 340-341. 51 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

in the Republican Party.37 Once he became a recipient of political patronage, his reputation as an opportunistic scalawag was sealed, leading to his subsequent ostracism. Over the next several years, Longstreet served in a variety of positions during one of the most turbulent periods in Louisiana’s history. In 1870, he became president of the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad and was appointed the adjutant general of the state of Louisiana. Taken together with his post as surveyor, his salary was between ten and fifteen thousand dollars. His time was well paid, but not well spent, as he became identified with one of the most notorious and controversial Reconstruction governments in the South.38 When a bitter clash between factions of the Republican Party consumed Louisiana politics in the early 1870s, Longstreet did his best to avoid the dispute. His disgust reached a boiling point in 1872, and to illustrate his discontent he resigned his post as surveyor of customs and as adjutant general. He was still far from unemployed, retaining his commission as major general in the state militia and receiving another lucrative position in 1873. As commander of the state militia, it fell upon Longstreet to quell an insurrection of White League forces who sought to depose the Republican administration by force of arms. On September 14, 1874, he led the state’s largely black troops against the insurgents, many of whom were Confederate veterans. The militia put up a pitiful fight, and the White League took control of New Orleans until federal troops arrived. For his part, Longstreet was shot and captured. It was a humiliating experience, which he had wanted no part in, and the lasting impression of Longstreet leading black troops against white veterans was devastating to his reputation.39 His frustration with the Republican Party was so great in 1872 that he temporarily gave his support to the Liberal Republican movement. Liberal Republicans represented that portion of the party for whom “the wartime idealism and the egalitarian vision of the radical Republicans survived without passion.” They wanted to be done with Reconstruction and to focus on reconciliation. In the end, they proposed to “restore southerners

37 New York Times, July 24, 1885. 38 Hay and Sanger, 336, 349. 39 New York Times, March 13, 1872; New York Times, January 9, 1872; Hay and Sanger, 365, 370-371. 52 Sam Hobbs to equality and return blacks to their proper place.” Longstreet’s attraction to their platform was natural, considering that he never subscribed to Republican ideology in the first place. He retracted his support for the movement, however, once he felt it had lost sight of its original purpose, noting, “We have been drawn on, step by step, until we find ourselves not only out of the Republican Party, but about to enter the Democratic ranks.” On this point he was firm, however: he would not become a Democrat.40 Following the disastrous White League riot in 1874, Longstreet moved to Georgia, returning to the same area in northern Georgia where he grew up as a boy. There he received a mixed reception. One man wrote to the local newspaper in Gainesville to warn his neighbors: “paint your skin black…. A white man who would even speak to him is not worthy [of] the name of a Georgian.” When he arrived, Longstreet built a house outside of town for his family and bought another in town for use as a hotel. Meanwhile, he served a stint as postmaster before being appointed as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1880, where he spent a brief and uneventful year. Longstreet’s main foray into Georgian politics occurred after he returned.41 In 1881 he finally received the appointment he had been lobbying for, US Marshall of Georgia. It was a lucrative post, paying ten thousand dollars a year, and it gave its occupant considerable influence. Reconstruction had ended and Republicans were no longer in power in any of the Southern states, but Longstreet received his position by federal appointment. During his time as Marshall, Longstreet also became a leader of the White Republican Party, whose purpose was to lay the foundation for a durable Republican Party in Georgia composed of respectable white men. The competing faction of the party sought to maintain the old coalition of carpetbaggers and black voters, which Longstreet viewed as shortsighted. He thought that the best strategy was to emphasize issues of “commerce” rather than dwell on “the prejudices which have operated in withholding equality of political rights.” As a result of their differences, the other side maneuvered to remove Longstreet as Marshall. Their plots received a boost when Longstreet’s office came under investigation for corruption. Longstreet was never implicated in any wrongdoing, as his only mistake was to retain his predecessor’s deputies.

40 Blight, 123-126; New York Times, October 20, 1872. 41 New York Times, June 28, 1875; New York Times, July 28, 1884. 53 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Ultimately, the investigation forced the resignation of his Chief Deputy, Longstreet’s son, and resulted in the conviction and sentencing of another deputy for fraud and perjury. While the scandal provided credible cover, many suspected that Longstreet’s removal from office in 1884 was politically motivated. He did not hold office again until 1898, when he was appointed US Commissioner of Railroads, which he held until his death in 1904.42

The “Lost Cause” Collects a Scalp Longstreet had been a loyal and active Republican for over thirty years, but he received no credit for his consistency from white southerners. Rather than view his commitment as proof of the sincerity of his motives, they faulted him for never admitting his error in judgment and returning to the fold of the Democratic Party. In the eyes of many he had betrayed the South, and his name was associated forever after with Radical Reconstruction. The most lasting consequence of Longstreet’s apostasy was the smear campaign of his war record. The effect of this campaign was not immediate, however. Even after his infamous letter of 1867, the South generally acknowledged Longstreet as one of its best generals, even though he never became a public hero. His backwoods origins, no-nonsense practicality, and fondness for cards and whiskey simply did not fit with the nostalgic version of the Old South propagated by the “Lost Cause.” In addition, no state laid claim to Longstreet. He was born in South Carolina, grew up in Georgia, received his appointment to West Point from Alabama, and lived in Texas for over a decade before the war. His politics and lack of popular heroism did not directly impugn his military reputation, but merely made it susceptible to attack. The event that triggered these attacks was the death of Robert E. Lee on October 12, 1870. White southerners always revered Lee, but his reputation ascended to new heights after his death. Shortly afterwards, two principal memorial associations formed in Virginia to raise funds for a monument to Lee, one based in Richmond and the other in Lexington. Beginning with these two associations, a key group of Virginians formed a coalition of Confederate organizations under their leadership, including the Association

42 New York Times, December 19, 1882; New York Times, June 1, 1880; New York Times, January 17, 1884; New York Times, July 21, 1884; New York Times, July 22, 1884; New York Times, October 23, 1897. 54 Sam Hobbs of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Southern Historical Society. The Virginia coalition was instrumental in the development of the “Lost Cause” myth, functioning as “the first sustained movement to define and exploit the Confederate tradition.” As its origins would suggest, one of the central tenets of the coalition was to preserve the memory of Lee. In reality, it was a campaign to deify him. The coalition “proclaimed his character flawless” and praised “his unsurpassed abilities as a military commander.” They elevated him to such a degree that Lee became “virtually incapable of error.” The Virginia coalition treated similarly the memory of Stonewall Jackson. The main leaders of what has been called the “cult of Lee” consisted of Jubal Early, William Nelson Pendleton, J. William Jones, and Fitzhugh Lee, R. E. Lee’s nephew. It is no coincidence that these were the same men who sabotaged Longstreet’s record.43 In order to create an image of Lee as infallible, the Virginians needed to shift his mistakes onto someone else’s shoulders. His major blunder, and the one for which he was most criticized during the war, was the defeat at Gettysburg. Longstreet’s unpopularity made him the ideal candidate for scapegoat, as it “increased the inclinations of southerners to believe the worst about him.” While the Virginians publicly denied that politics had anything to do with their attacks, their correspondence tells a different story. In addition, Longstreet had dared to criticize Lee, allowing the Virginians to frame the debate as a choice between Lee and Longstreet.44 The assault began with a speech by Jubal Early in January 1872, in which he claimed that during a night conference with Ewell, Rodes, and Early after the first day at Gettysburg, Lee had expressed his intention to attack at dawn the next day with Longstreet’s corps. Longstreet’s failure to attack until 4:00 p.m. had supposedly cost Lee the battle and the war. The following year, Pendleton went on a lecture tour of the South to deliver eulogies of Lee, which he used as an opportunity to bolster Early’s case against Longstreet. His main contribution was to reveal that Lee had asked him to do a reconnaissance early on the morning of July 2 because Lee expected Longstreet to attack at dawn. Pendleton continued, “Lee’s acceptance of responsibility for the disaster amounted to a magnanimous cover-up unparalleled in history.” With these speeches, Early and Pendleton laid the

43 Foster, 63–71. 44 Piston, 117–120, 129. 55 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

foundation for the argument that Longstreet lost the war at Gettysburg.45 The argument reached its fruition with the Gettysburg series published in the Southern Historical Society Papers (SHSP). The pretext for the series was a request by an anonymous foreigner for the views of leading Confederates on why the South lost the battle at Gettysburg. The first response listed a number of fatal errors, including the delay of Longstreet’s attack on both the second and third day of the battle. However, the author, Colonel William Allan, also held Ewell and A.P. Hill responsible for defeat for neglecting to take Cemetery Hill on the first day and for failing to provide support to both of Longstreet’s attacks. In the following article, Fitz Lee absolved Ewell and Hill for the lack of coordination, arguing, “The failure of cooperative effort was the result of the different degrees ofpromptness with which General Lee’s orders for attack were carried out.” In his view, it was “difficult to conceive” why the assault of the second day “should have been delayed until 4PM.” On the third day, Fitz Lee noted that Longstreet did not begin until two hours after Ewell’s attack. Walter Taylor, a former aide to General Lee, also contributed a response, repeating the charges of delay and adding the assertion that the attack of the third “was not made as designed.” According to Taylor, Longstreet was supposed to use all of his divisions, but only ordered Pickett’s forward.46 Early followed these articles with one of his own, presented as a crystallization of the responses to the foreigner’s inquiry. Early reiterated his claim that Lee had ordered Longstreet to attack “at a very early hour on the morning of the 2nd,” and that the failure to do so was the fatal error of the battle. If not for Longstreet’s sluggishness, “we would have achieved the anticipated victory, for Meade’s whole army had not then arrived until about 3PM.” Furthermore, “cooperation would have taken place had the attack been promptly made at the time expected.” The narrative for the failure of the assault on the third was similar: Longstreet delayed, precluding cooperation with the other corps, and he did not observe his orders to employ all of his divisions for the charge. Noting Longstreet’s opposition to Lee’s plan, Early speculated, “He did not enter into those attacks with the spirit of confidence so necessary to success.” Early boldly asserted that

45 Ibid., 118, 121–122. 46 William Allan, Southern Historical Society Papers (hereafter, SHSP), August 1877; Fitz Lee, SHSP, August 1877; Walter Taylor, SHSP, August 1877. 56 Sam Hobbs if Lee had won Gettysburg, the Confederacy would have won the war. By this logic, Longstreet was the only obstacle between the South and its independence.47 In addition to exonerating Lee, Early’s account of Gettysburg served another purpose. One of the preoccupations of the Virginia coalition was explaining defeat. Articles in the Southern Historical Society Papers repeatedly made the case for the “overwhelmed-by-superior-numbers” excuse, but “Longstreet-lost-it-at-Gettysburg” presented another possible explanation. This explanation had the benefit of identifying a scalawag as the source of the South’s present predicament. Longstreet did not immediately respond to the accusations against him, evidently content to let his record stand for itself. Around the time that the controversy spilled into the pages of the SHSP, he decided to end his silence and accepted a request by the Philadelphia Weekly Times to provide a full account of the battle. He wrote, “I have been so repeatedly and so rancorously assailed that I feel impelled by a sense of duty” to respond. Longstreet felt the attacks were politically motivated, and his old friend, Thomas Goree, agreed. “Pendleton has presumed upon your present unpopularity to make charges which he otherwise would not have dared to utter,” Goree wrote. Two other former subordinates, Alexander and McLaws, wrote to their old commander to express their dismay at the false charges against him, providing their own accounts of the battle in support of Longstreet.48 In response to the alleged sunrise attack order, Longstreet collected statements from Lee’s former aides to discredit the notion that the order ever existed. W.H. Taylor responded: “I never before heard of the ‘sunrise attack’ you were to have made. If such an order was given you I never knew of it, or it has strangely escaped my memory.” Charles Marshall similarly had no “personal recollection” of the order, and he noted that there was nothing in Lee’s official report to suggest “he expected the attack to begin earlier.” Not only did Charles Venable have no knowledge of the order, he could not

47 Jubal Early, SHSP, August 1877. 48 James Longstreet, “Lee in Pennsylvania,” in Annals of the War, 415; T. J. Goree to James Longstreet, May 17, 1875, Longstreet Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter, SHC); James Longstreet to Edward Porter Alexander, August 9, 1869, Alexander Papers, SHC; Lafayette McLaws to James Longstreet, June 12, 1873, McLaws Papers, SHC. 57 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

“believe any such order would have been given,” for on the morning of the second, Lee was still trying to decide whether to attack on the right or the left. Finally, A.L. Long did not recall an order to attack at sunrise “or at any other designated hour,” but rather as early as practicable. When Longstreet quoted these statements at length in his account, it should have put the question of a sunrise attack order beyond dispute.49 However, the Virginians were unrelenting. Early responded that the aides’ statements only showed that they did not know of the order, not that it did not exist. In any event, the more important question was whether Longstreet was slow in executing his orders, not the exact hour he was supposed to attack. Even if Lee did not give the order until 11:00 a.m., as Longstreet claimed, Early maintained that there was no excuse for the delay until 4:00 p.m. To this end, Longstreet provided a detailed account of his troops’ movements on the second day. He explained that the distance from headquarters to their position on the right was actually a three-mile march, a length that the concealed route doubled. Additionally, he had to order a countermarch at one point because of faulty reconnaissance. In spite of the countermarch, when compared to a similar movement by Jackson at Chancellorsville, Longstreet’s troops actually made good time.50 According to Longstreet, “The only amendment that would have ensured, or even promised victory, was for Ewell to have marched in upon the enemy’s right.” He cited the failure of Ewell to support his attack, as Lee ordered, with an advance along that part of the line as the most important blunder of the day, allowing the Union army to concentrate its considerable resources against Longstreet alone. Early blamed Longstreet for the lack of coordination, saying that if the attack had begun on time, Ewell would have been prepared to advance in support. To this charge, Longstreet was indignant: “His orders were to remain in line of battle, ready to cooperate with my attack whenever it should be made. If he was not ready in the afternoon, it is folly to say that he would have been ready at sunrise.”51 Regarding Pickett’s charge, Longstreet denied that Lee’s orders were

49 W.H. Taylor to James Longstreet, April 28, 1875, Longstreet Papers, SHC; Charles Marshall to James Longstreet, February 7, 1875, Longstreet Papers, SHC; Charles Venable to James Longstreet, 1875, Longstreet Papers, SHC; A.L. Long to James Longstreet, May 3, 1875, Longstreet Papers, SHC. 50 Jubal Early, SHSP, December 1877; Longstreet, “Lee in Pennsylvania,” 422-424. 51 Longstreet, “The Mistakes of Gettysburg,” 624, 626. 58 Sam Hobbs for him to send his entire corps against Cemetery Ridge. If those were his orders, Longstreet countered, Lee would have fixed the mistake himself, for “I was in the immediate presence of the commanding general when the order was given for Pickett to advance.” In addition, to use his entire corps would have been a poor decision. It would have left the charge itself and Lee’s army as a whole vulnerable and exposed to a flank attack. Also, it is doubtful that more divisions would have made the infamous charge a success. Instead, it likely would have added to the magnitude of the slaughter. It was true that Longstreet objected strongly to Lee’s plan, but that should be a credit to his military judgment, not a reason to blame him for the plan’s failure.52 Longstreet devoted considerable space to outlining his disagreements with Lee during the Pennsylvania campaign. He felt strongly that the campaign should be offensive in strategy, defensive in tactics. For this reason, he disagreed with Lee’s intention to attack and favored a flanking movement, which would have put their army between the Federals and Washington, placing pressure on the Union to attack. Lee rejected his proposals, but Longstreet remained convinced that his course was the wiser policy. In fact, he claimed that Lee came to the same realization and wrote Longstreet to that effect six months later: “Had I taken your advice at Gettysburg, instead of pursuing the course I did, how different it might all have been.” Early and the others doubted the authenticity of the alleged letter, but Erasmus Taylor wrote Longstreet to say that he had read the letter and remembered the same statement almost verbatim. Lee’s admission validated Longstreet’s strategy, but more importantly, it undermined the Lee cult’s argument that his famous assumption of guilt after the battle—“It’s all my fault”— was a magnanimous gesture rather than a reasoned judgment.53 While Longstreet was right on the military questions, he lost the war for public opinion. Throughout his writings on the war, Longstreet was highly critical of Lee. His praise for Lee’s character and abilities as a commander is lost in the numerous errors he identifies in Lee’s decisions. Early capitalized on Longstreet’s criticism of Lee and skillfully cast the controversy as a choice between Lee and Longstreet: “Either General Lee or General

52 Longstreet, “Lee’s Right Wing at Gettysburg,” The Century War Series: Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Castle Books, 1990), 345; Longstreet, “Lee in Pennsylvania,” 429-431. 53 Longstreet, “Lee in Pennsylvania,” 434; Erasmus Taylor to James Longstreet, 10 September 1889, Longstreet Papers, SHC. 59 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Longstreet was responsible for the remarkable delay that took place in making the attack. I choose to believe that it was not General Lee.” By this point, Lee’s reputation had become so well established that to make a critical remark of him was tantamount to destroying one’s own reputation. In the end, Longstreet’s defense did him more harm than good. He came across as incredibly arrogant in his writings. As one historian has noted, “No plan of Lee’s was so good that Longstreet did not claim to have offered a better one, nor did Lee’s strategy ever prove weak without Longstreet’s having predicted that it would.” He commented on battles and strategy with great accuracy, but without acknowledging the benefit of hindsight. In addition, he occasionally exaggerated the odds he faced, such as on the second day at Gettysburg, and overstated his contributions relative to others, as in his account of Second Manassas. When he wrote of his agreement with Lee to pursue an offensive strategy with defensive tactics in Pennsylvania, he presented it as almost a contractual understanding between equals, which added to his image as ambitious and insubordinate. In his defense, Longstreet displayed none of these characteristics or tendencies during the war. They were the product of years of frustration of watching Lee and Jackson become idolized while he suffered constant abuse and degradation.54 The attacks against Longstreet stuck. The custodians of the Confederate tradition succeeded in making him the scapegoat for Gettysburg, and they shaped his reputation for over a century. The image of Longstreet is of a reliable but overly cautious and deliberate commander. There was no daring or genius about him. He was a plain, determined fighter with an excessive penchant for the defense. A myth developed that Jackson was Lee’s right- hand man and closest confidant. Rather than a bulldog or commander of great energy, Longstreet was known thereafter as slow, stubborn, arrogant, and petty. In short, he was the victim of a calculated and effective character assassination. It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of the “Lost Cause” in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not only the South’s, but the nation’s memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction is still informed by the tenets of that tradition. Longstreet’s epic fall from one of the most respected

54 Piston, 147. 60 Sam Hobbs generals of the Civil War to the culprit responsible for the South’s defeat is a testament to its power to shape historical memory. Longstreet’s tarnished reputation deserves to be remembered along with Lee’s infallibility and states’ rights doctrine as one of the great accomplishments of “Lost Cause” mythmaking. Longstreet did not become an enemy of the “Lost Cause” because he rejected his Southern heritage or criticized the Confederacy. He was a target the second he became a Republican. Politics was inseparable from the “Lost Cause.” For white southerners, Reconstruction was a continuation of the ideological battles behind the war, which is why they considered Longstreet a traitor and deserter of the cause when he joined the party of the North. The “Lost Cause” was as much about the present as it was about the past, for its proponents understood the power of the past to shape the future. In this way, the South was able to win the peace, even after it lost the war. The mission of the “Lost Cause” was to establish the “true” history of the Confederacy. Yet there was very little truth in Longstreet’s reputation after the Gettysburg series appeared in the Southern Historical Society Papers. For this reason, the “Lost Cause” challenges how we perceive history. History is not always written by the victors. Though Longstreet may have underestimated the time span, posterity has eventually rewarded his faith: “I do not fear the verdict on Gettysburg. Time sets all things right. Error lives but a day—truth is eternal.”55

55 Longstreet, “The Mistakes of Gettysburg,” 633. 61 Lewis McCorkle The Ironic Transformation of Lincoln’s Image in the Post-Civil War South

The 1909 centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth took on the trappings of a religious ritual. Huge celebrations, laudatory speeches, and editorials paying homage overflowed in white and black communities alike. On Lincoln’s February 12 birthday, outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone at Lincoln’s birthplace memorial in Kentucky before a large, rain- drenched crowd. One year before in Collier’s magazine, Roosevelt had declared: “No more blessed thing could have happened to a great democratic republic like ours than to have had this man … develop into its hero and savior.”1 At Lincoln’s memorial, Roosevelttraces continued sounding religious notes by declaring that the sixteenth President possessed “the gentler virtues commonly exhibited by good men,” who could “fight valiantly against what he deemed wrong, and yet preserve undiminished his love and respect for the brother with whom he differed.”2 President-elect Taft stated that “one cannot read Abraham Lincoln without loving him,”

1 Merrill Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 180. 2 Anna Maria Gillis, “Lincoln’s Centennial,” Humanities – Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, January/February, 2009. 62 Lewis McCorkle and that there was more “inspiration for heroism” in his story than in any other man’s in history. According to the New York Times, the appropriate sobriquet for the president one hundred years after his birth was “Lincoln the Beloved.”3 Throughout that centennial year, praise for Lincoln rolled in from almost everywhere. Journalist Herbert Croly said that Lincoln possessed “a kind of human excellence” that made him the supreme symbol for the nation.4 Booker T. Washington praised Lincoln as “a great moral leader, in whose patience, tolerance, and broad human sympathy there is salvation for my race.”5 Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy lauded Lincoln as “a Christ in miniature, a saint in humanity.”6 By way of contrast, one might have expected prominent Southern politicians at that time to fire back vitriolically when asked to assess Lincoln. But when asked “Was Lincoln Great?” by the Baltimore Sun, former populist and racial-progressive-turned-Negrophobe Tom Watson wrote an article unequivocally praising Lincoln. In his column of February 7, 1909, Watson said that Southerners thought “kindly” of Lincoln. “We honor his memory,” he claimed, noting that Southerners “think he was broad-minded, free from vindictiveness, free from sectionalism, free from class hatred.” He added, “We think he was a strong man, a sagacious man. We have always regarded his assassination as the worst blow the South got after Appomattox.” According to Watson, Lincoln “alone could have stemmed the torrent of sectional hatred,” and could have restored “the seceding States … without that carnival of debauchery and crime known as the Reconstruction Period.”7 Historians have noted Southern appreciation of Lincoln around this time by “New South” progressives like the Atlanta Constitution owner and editor Henry Grady and future President Woodrow Wilson. Grady, a Georgia native like Watson, believed that “there was a South of slave and secession,” but “that South is dead.” He claimed that the New South approach “presents a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of

3 Peterson, 186. 4 Ibid., 176–177. 5 Ibid., 173–174. 6 Ibid., 185. 7 Thomas Watson, “Was Lincoln Great?” Baltimore Sun, February 7, 1909, 13. 63 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

this complex age.”8 Grady and his allies claimed Lincoln as the first “typical American” to reunite the South with the rest of the country, in the hopes that reunion would lead the South past its traditions of sectionalism and agrarianism. Tom Watson, however, rejected the New South’s vision for the region, becoming “the embodiment of the new rebellion” against it.9 Watson’s stump speeches were rarely published by Grady and his supporters, who controlled most of the Southern papers at the time, but his notes for an 1888 speech laid out his thoughts on the New South approach. In these notes, he rejected apologetics. “Shame to Southern men who go to Northern banquets and glory in our defeat,” he wrote, calling this behavior “unpaternal,” and “parricidal.”10 His severe racism was the emotional underpinning of his politics. He and other firebrands expertly courted the support of the “redneck” by stoking frustrations stemming from widespread poverty and racial tension. Although New South advocates also believed in white superiority, the biggest difference between the two movements’ racial beliefs was their attitude toward lynching. Grady believed that white supremacy should dominate “not through violence … but through the integrity of its vote and the largeness of its sympathy and justice.”11 Watson, on the other hand, observed that because blacks “simply have no comprehension of virtue, honest, truth, gratitude, and principle … we have to lynch him occasionally … to keep him from blaspheming the Almighty, by his conduct, on account of his smell and his color.” Watson added that the “lynch law is a good sign,” because it “shows that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”12 Because of his appreciation of the antebellum South and his viciously racist ideology, Watson’s pro-Lincoln sentiments seem shocking, but he was hardly an outlier. Other unmistakable racists like Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, James Vardaman, and Thomas Heflin consistently praised Lincoln

8 William Cooper and Thomas Terrill, The American South: Part 2 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 477. 9 C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 126-127. 10 Ibid., 106. 11 William F. Brundage. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 192. 12 Woodward, 374. 64 Lewis McCorkle

as well. Watson’s article in the Baltimore Sun was part of a larger post- Reconstruction movement among like-minded Southern leaders to claim the former president as a friend and champion of Southern customs, traditions, and values. These Southern racists attacked Reconstruction measures that challenged the South’s right to “home rule” by arguing that Lincoln would have fought against them had he been alive. They also claimed Lincoln as a fellow white supremacist to appeal to their constituency. This strategic embrace of Lincoln by racist Southerners was consistent through Southern political history, and it increased during the civil rights battles of the mid-twentieth century. To help convince white moderates across the nation that segregation was necessary and beneficial to both races, Southerners praised the former Union president for his conservative wisdom in race relations. As the prospects for widespread acceptance of their message dwindled by the 1970s, this embrace of Lincoln significantly declined. Neo-Confederate and white supremacist organizations shifted from political advocacy to local remembrance, leading to a strong re-emergence of anti-Lincoln sentiment and literature.

Lincoln as Opponent of Radical Reconstruction Tom Watson was not the only Southerner to pay tribute to Lincoln in the Baltimore Sun on Lincoln’s centennial. Democratic Senator Frank Gary of South Carolina, a close friend and ally of Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, wrote that Lincoln was “without a doubt one of the most wonderful men of the nineteenth century,” and was “the right man in the right place at the right time” as president. He also mentioned that, at the end of the war, Lincoln was “great enough and magnanimous enough to do justice to all.” Without John Wilkes Booth’s actions, Gary argued, the “conservative views of Lincoln would have prevailed.”13 Watson and Gary’s articles in the Baltimore Sun both concluded by focusing on the recent trouble caused by Northern control during Radical Reconstruction. By cloaking their attacks on Reconstruction in admiration for Lincoln, they established that although they did not want the South to start another civil war, Radical Republicans had overstepped their bounds in challenging white superiority in the South. This pro-Lincoln,

13 Frank Gary, “The South’s Great Loss,” Baltimore Sun, February 7, 1909, 14. 65 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

anti-Reconstruction strategy is evident in most Southern praise of the former president throughout this period. South Carolina Governor and United States Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman had strategically used Lincoln’s legacy like this for years before Watson and Gary’s Baltimore Sun articles. Tillman was arguably Watson’s strongest ally in appealing to the “redneck” vote. In his youth, Tillman was a major player in the Hamburg riots of 1876 and the Edgefield Plan that caused multiple African American deaths and widespread voter intimidation, effectively disenfranchising all blacks in South Carolina. As governor in 1892, Tillman declared that the black man “must remain subordinate or be exterminated,” and as a senator, Tillman told a militia officer that blacks were “almost the only reason why men should continue to give their time and money to maintain military organizations.”14 Despite these pronouncements, Tillman found multiple opportunities as senator to embrace the “Great Emancipator.” In 1899, Tillman delivered a speech in Chicago defending the Democratic “Chicago Platform,” telling the audience that it had South Carolinians’ unanimous support. The platform was right when first introduced in 1896, Tillman argued, and it “will be right next year, and right is right, and right means right in the language of Abraham Lincoln.”15 In 1903, Tillman again made a point to mention President Lincoln while on the Senate floor. TheNew York Times reported that Tillman stated Lincoln was “the greatest of modern men,” and quoted Tillman as saying “And I, from South Carolina,” using repetition to emphasize the paradox of a South Carolina senator admiring Lincoln: “I, from South Carolina, tell you so, and feel honored in doing it.”16 Alabama Senator Tom Heflin was, as historian Harry Barnard put it, “a lesser figure of the species of ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman and Tom Watson.” Watson, Tillman, and Heflin’s success in appealing to the psyche of poor whites in the South was perfectly captured by LIFE magazine’s 1951 obituary of Alabama’s most iconic racist. The writer attributed Heflin’s political success to his incredible ability to convince Alabamans that a vote for Heflin, a Ku Klux Klan leader, was “a vote against the Big Fellers who

14 David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2002), 194-5; Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1944), 401. 15 “Speech of Senator Tillman,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 21, 1899, 2. 16 “Senator Tillman, Despair of Analysts,” New York Times, April 25, 1904, 9. 66 Lewis McCorkle

owned the earth and ran the state … proving that they … were every bit as good as the Big Fellers … and by natural arrangement better and smarter than the Negroes.”17 In 1901, Heflin helped draft language for the Alabama Constitution that essentially barred African Americans from voting.18 Later, as a congressman in Washington, Heflin was indicted for shooting an African American man after trying to forcibly eject him from a streetcar. He ended up accidentally shooting a white passerby as well.19 Unsurprisingly, all charges were dropped after Heflin paid the white man’s medical expenses, and this episode did not decrease his popularity in Alabama. Eleven years later, in 1912, Heflin was surprisingly a major figure in debating the design and location of the upcoming Lincoln memorial. This debate became a battle over how the United States would remember Lincoln’s legacy for years to come. Heflin favored the Potomac site, according to author Jeffrey Meyer, so it “could impress the tourist with one clear message about Lincoln to carry home. Had Lincoln lived … the South would not have known the horror of Reconstruction.”20 Heflin praised Lincoln again in 1929 as he honored Confederate veterans at Arlington National Cemetery. The speech was mostly a standard “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War until he stated: “The assassination of Mr. Lincoln, who was born in the South, in Kentucky … was the saddest blow the South suffered.” He continued, “I believe had he lived we would have loved these sections back together, certainly he would have saved the South from the ordeals suffered in reconstruction.”21 The Washington Post reported that Heflin’s references to Lincoln were interrupted by applause from the Southerners in attendance. Although those Southerners supported Heflin’s embrace of Lincoln, it is difficult to say how prominent this pro-Lincoln sentiment was in the South generally. In 1902, the United Confederate Veterans’ historical committee wrote a unanimously supported report that ended by stating, “We Southern people once regarded Abraham Lincoln as one of the most despicable creatures …

17 “The Passing of Tom Heflin,” LIFE magazine, May 7, 1951, 40. 18 Elbert L. Watson, “J. Thomas Heflin,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, October 13, 2010. 19 “Confederates’ Reunion,” New York Times, May 30, 1901, 2. 20 Jeffrey Meyer, Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 211-212. 21 “Survivors Pay Honor to Dead of Lost Cause,” Washington Post, June 3, 1929, 1. 67 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

now we honor him for his unquestioned sincerity, patriotism, and ability.”22 Yet in 1903, the Confederate Veterans of Mississippi aggressively opposed the state historian’s decision to hang a picture of Lincoln in the capitol.23 It seems clear that Southern leaders in Washington thought publicly admiring Lincoln was a winning strategy in defending their racial beliefs. Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman, an outspoken racist who once claimed that “we would be justified in slaughtering every Ethiop on the earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one Caucasian home,” loved the former president, even making a pilgrimage to Springfield in 1909 to honor the “immortal” and “wondrous” man.24 Vardaman was direct in applying Lincoln’s statements to contemporary racial problems. While speaking on the Senate floor in 1914, Vardaman said that he had studied Lincoln’s ideas on racial equality, “and I have often said, and I repeat here that my views and his on the race question are substantially identical.”25 The senator was apparently referencing Lincoln’s 1858 defense of white superiority, along with his consistent political support of African colonization and social segregation. He failed to mention Lincoln’s more enlightened statements on race during the later years of presidency, however, and his belief that blacks had just as much right to economic opportunity and freedom as whites. Vardaman’s supporters also used Lincoln to defend the senator’s racial positions. In 1907, the novelist Harris Dickson published the “Vardaman Idea” in the Saturday Evening Post, where he argued that Vardaman understood that “we have to make laws for the utterly distinct moral and intellectual requirements of the respective races,” just as Lincoln had “realized it fifty years ago.”26 Lincoln had the same opinions on race as Vardaman because he subscribed to the idea that “the skull of the negro is different,” and Vardaman was simply “maintaining” Lincoln’s racial ideology.27

22 “Confederates’ Reunion,” New York Times, May 30, 1901, 2. 23 “Southern Sectionalism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 10, 1903, 6. 24 Andrew Ferguson, “When Lincoln Returned to Richmond,” The Weekly Standard, December 2003, 21-39. 25 John Hope Franklin, “The Use and Misuse of the Lincoln Legacy,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 7 (1985): 33. 26 Harris Dickson, “The Vardaman Idea,” Saturday Evening Post, April 27, 1907, 5. 27 Ibid., 3-4. 68 Lewis McCorkle

Lincoln as Supporter of African Colonization As national opposition to Jim Crow laws in the South grew throughout the twentieth century, Southern racists believed their values and traditions were again under attack by an intrusive federal government that wanted to institute a “Second Reconstruction.” As this battle stepped into the national spotlight, use of Lincoln’s legacy by Southern racists largely shifted to Vardaman’s approach, directly quoting Lincoln to claim him as a supporter and ally of white superiority and racial separation. In both 1938 and 1939, Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo introduced the “Greater Liberia Act” in the hope that the idea of voluntarily sending blacks back to Africa could gain momentum. Like many Southern senators, Bilbo believed voluntary colonization could be an alternative to civil rights legislation. Bilbo, who was a former Baptist minister and liberal in respects other than race, paradoxically found early support from African American leaders like W.E.B. Dubois, who believed that racial separation was necessary for blacks to prosper. The bill was quite ambitious. Because Liberia was not big enough for the entire black population, Bilbo believed that the United States could purchase British and French West African lands in exchange for forgiving their World War I debt, and the territories would have “full autonomy” as a US commonwealth. Public and press opinion was strongly against the plan, and the alliance between Bilbo and black nationalists was so weak that it never seriously had a chance of being implemented.28 Introducing the colonization bill in a rambling four-hour oration in 1938, Bilbo declared that Hitler’s “Germans appreciate the importance of race values,” that those of mixed descent were “the saddest spectacle on the planet,” and that “God created the whites. I know not who created the blacks. Surely a devil created the mongrels.”29 When he introduced the bill again in 1939, however, the Mississippi senator had toned down his racist rhetoric, and he instead called on the legacy of Lincoln to make his proposal politically palatable. Citing Lincoln’s clear support for colonization as a senatorial candidate and as president, he claimed that the Act would fulfill at last Lincoln’s “noblest aspiration.”30

28 Michael Fitzgerald, “‘We Have Found A Moses’: Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and the Greater Liberia Bill of 1939,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 2 (1997): 302. 29 Senate Journal, 75th Cong., 3rd sess., May 24, 1938, 7361-7365. 30 Peterson, 351. 69 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

By 1939, Bilbo had learned that he could not attack his most useful allies when trying to explain the Act’s merits. After his racist rhetoric in 1938 he had lost a lot of black support, both financially and ideologically. In 1939, he instead let the Great Emancipator’s opinion do the persuading. Many blacks still loved and admired Lincoln. Dubois, for example, said that Lincoln was “perhaps the greatest figure in the nineteenth century,” and he was to be admired “not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet he triumphed.”31 Lincoln’s legacy as the liberator of the black race would encourage black nationalists to support a return to their homeland. Lincoln’s legacy as a pragmatic leader would also make colonization seem more reasonable to whites. Using Lincoln in this way moved the contemporary debate about colonization away from racism to a “noble aspiration” that would benefit both races, a much more politically advantageous position for Bilbo. In 1946, Bilbo claimed Lincoln as an ally again, albeit for a much different reason. After being accused of voter intimidation in the Democratic primary, he faced a hearing before the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee. The Senate subsequently refused to seat him. In the hearing, he admitted to saying that “the best way to keep a Negro from voting [was] to visit him the night before.” Later, when asked to clarify his views on race, he stated with a laugh, “I agree with Abraham Lincoln. He said Negroes ought not to be allowed to vote, hold office or serve as jurors. I think Abraham Lincoln is a pretty good authority for a Democrat to quote.”32 There was a new Republican majority in the Senate in 1946, and Bilbo was clearly trying to save his political career by daring Republican senators to disagree with the founder of their party. But his use of Lincoln was not only partisan and strategic. In his mind, preventing blacks from voting was something that even Lincoln approved of. At the age of sixty-nine and fighting oral cancer that would soon claim his life, Bilbo seemed mystified that this belief would cause the downfall of his political career and force him to leave the Senate chamber in shame. In 1954, six months after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, one of the most influential religious leaders in the Deep South called on Lincoln in defense of segregation. Dr. G.T. Gillespie, a Presbyterian

31 W.E.B. Dubois, Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 1197-1198. 32 “Bilbo Denies He Coerced Negro Voters,” Washington Post, December 6, 1946, 1. 70 Lewis McCorkle

minister who served as the President of Belhaven University in Mississippi for thirty-four years, delivered a sermon in front a Presbyterian Church titled “A Christian View on Segregation.” Admitting that the Bible contained “no clear mandate for or against segregation,”33 Gillespie was forced to argue that “it does furnish considerable data from which valid inferences may be drawn in support of the general principle of segregation as an important feature of the Divine purpose.”34 But because Christian texts and teachings alone could not definitively defend segregation, he appealed to the revered leaders of the American civil religion. Thus he dedicated the last part of his sermon to explaining, in detail, the views of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T. Washington on racial equality and separation, concluding that each agreed that racial segregation was in the best interest of the American people. Gillespie astutely quoted many of Lincoln’s most controversial statements to prove his support of segregation. Like Bilbo, he emphasized Lincoln’s belief in African colonization to deal with the newly freed slaves after the Civil War, claiming that Lincoln was working on putting a proposal before Congress at the time of his death. Gillespie then quoted from Lincoln to prove his belief in racial separation. In 1862, speaking to a group of Northern black leaders in Washington, Lincoln declared, “You and we are different races … whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss … it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated.” And again in 1858, in his Charleston debate with Stephen A. Douglas, he stated that he was “not now, nor ever [had] been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … nor making voters or jurors of negroes … nor to intermarry.” He added, “There is a physical difference … which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together.” Gillespie then expressed regret over Lincoln’s assassination. Like earlier white Southerners, he argued that Lincoln’s death allowed Radical Reconstruction to destroy the South again. “It is perhaps greatly to be deplored that the great plans of Lincoln … were frustrated and defeated by

33 The biography given on a copy of the sermon, reprinted by the White Citizens’ Council, stated that Gillespie “has been widely commended for his forthright and courageous stand on public questions, and likewise for his fair-minded and charitable attitude toward those who differ with him.” 34 Dr. G.T. Gillespie, Sermon, “A Christian View on Segregation,” November 4, 1954, McCain Pamphlet Collection, University of Southern Mississippi Libraries (Hattiesberg, MS), 8. 71 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

his tragic and untimely death. In retrospect we may well count it the greatest disaster which ever befell the South and the nation.” But in this sermon, Gillespie wrote his own history of Lincoln as a Southern segregationist, promoting Lincoln’s character to give their shared segregationist beliefs more legitimacy. Gillespie called Lincoln “one of the wisest and most farseeing of American statesmen.” Going even further, he then claimed that Lincoln’s vision was “prophetic,” saying that “in the Providence of God, it is yet possible” to deal with segregation following Lincoln’s “patient spirit and the kindly impulse of his great heart.”35 By claiming Lincoln’s “prophetic” vision, Gillespie was able to reassure his audience that segregation was consistent with both the Christian and American tradition, framing it as a sacred cause rather than a racist custom. Abstract defenses of segregation like Gillespie’s aside, Southern segregationists needed specific legal arguments to reverse or circumvent civil rights laws and rulings. Surprisingly, Lincoln’s legacy was of use to segregationists here again. In 1956, Ross Barnett, a former head of the Mississippi Bar Association who would later become the governor of Mississippi, turned to Lincoln while defending residents of Clinton, Tennessee, charged with blocking court-ordered integration in the town’s public high school. During his closing argument, after telling the all-white jury that the “Constitution is above the Supreme Court,” Barnett argued that “Abraham Lincoln set the course when he said he wouldn’t abide by a ruling of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Decision.”36 His argument was that these men could not be guilty of violating a Supreme Court edict if the decision itself was unconstitutional, and that Abraham Lincoln was ideologically on their side. The importance of this case was not lost on contemporary observers. The Chicago Daily Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and other papers featured headlines that were similar to that of the Los Angeles Times: “Clinton Trial Defense Cites Lincoln’s Stand; Asserts President’s Refusal to Abide by Dred Scott Ruling Affects Integration.”37 It did not seem to matter to Barnett or the press that Lincoln, in one of the famous 1858 Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates, actually said: “We do not propose that … as a mob we will decide

35 Gillespie, 14–15. 36 “Lincoln Cited as Defense in Clinton Trial,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 23, 1957, 1. 37 “Clinton Trial Defense Cites Lincoln’s Stand,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1957, 8. 72 Lewis McCorkle him to be free … we do not propose that … we will in any violent way disturb the rights of property thus settled. We opposed that decision as a political rule.” Lincoln concluded, “We propose … to have it reversed if we can and a new judicial rule established.”38 Barnett was correct, however, in claiming that Lincoln believed that the Dred Scott decision was legally wrong. Barnett purposefully manipulated Lincoln’s views because he understood the symbolic meaning of agreeing with him. If he could convince his fellow Southerners on the jury that Lincoln had blazed the trail for the Clinton citizens’ racist and illegal actions, they would be more likely to vote not guilty. Indeed, instead of simply quoting Lincoln’s belief in white superiority, Barnett was arguing that President Lincoln believed that states could nullify Supreme Court decisions. Presenting Lincoln in this light might be enough to convince some white segregationists that they were following in the steps of no less a lawyer than Lincoln.

Lincoln as Hero of the White Citizens’ Councils Among those who turned to Lincoln’s legacy to support segregation, some of the most active were associated with the White Citizens’ Councils. Headquartered in Mississippi, the WCC served, as historian David Goldfield notes, “as the coordinating force for massive resistance to desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s.”39 The WCC was a loosely connected network of twenty-five state organizations that included over half a million members by the mid 1950s. Its ranks were filled with powerful businessmen, professionals, and public officials, and its unofficial nickname was the “uptown” or “country club” Ku Klux Klan. In contrast to groups like the KKK, the WCC claimed that it focused on reversing integrationist legislation through proper legal channels. Group leaders were confident that educating white citizens on the benefits of segregation for both races would eventually help turn public opinion in their favor.40 The WCC knew early on that championing Abraham Lincoln as a supporter of their goals would enhance its legitimacy and popularity.

38 Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (Cleveland: The Burrows Brother Company, 1894), 233. 39 Goldfield, 263. 40 Phillip Luce, “The Mississippi White Citizens Council: 1954-1959” (B.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1960). 73 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

In 1956, a New York Times reporter pretending to be a visiting schoolteacher requested some literature from the WCC in Atlanta, Georgia. Along with material on the Council’s aims and purposes, the reporter received a book titled “The Supreme Court, the Broken Constitution and the Shattered Bill of Rights” and a pamphlet titled “The Ugly Truth About the N.A.A.C.P.” The reporter also received “a listing of purported prosegregation statements by Abraham Lincoln.”41 In a 1962 speech to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, William Simmons, a WCC leader, demonstrated the effectiveness of using Lincoln’s segregationist legacy. After reminding his audience that “the white south won a total victory in Reconstruction by showing its determination to fight and by organizing,” Simmons turned his focus to Lincoln. The Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger writer who was present wrote that Simmons “recalled … Lincoln’s own attitude was well known for white supremacy,” and said that “Lincoln had grave doubts about the political capacity of negroes. All his life, Lincoln felt that the only solution … lay in colonization.” The speech had such an effect on the audience that the SCV immediately announced it would be put in pamphlet form and distributed widely across the South.42 Encouraged by the success of this speech, Simmons spoke at more events in the coming years. In February 1963 he delivered an address at Yale University, and two weeks later he spoke at the University of Notre Dame. Although the title of the speech changed from “Race Relations and Civil Rights: A Southern Point of View” to “Why Segregation is Right,” the substance was barely altered. After arguing that civil rights was not applicable to school integration, Simmons attempted to convince both audiences that the North’s race problem was just as dire as the South’s. The North would soon have to deal with this “crisis,” and segregation was the answer because there were historical precedents for it in the North. To support this argument, Simmons told both groups of students that “President Lincoln had serious doubts about the political capacity of negroes, and he had no

41 John Popham, “Organized Resistance to Racial Laws Grows,” New York Times, December 2, 1956, 9. 42 Charles Hills, “Reconstruction Fight Is Urged By Simmons,” Clarion Ledger, February 4, 1962. 74 Lewis McCorkle appetite whatsoever for social equality.”43 In early 1964, Simmons delivered another address at the University of Hawaii, and sent the Director of Public Relations for the Citizens’ Councils of America, Richard Morphew, to deliver a similar address five days later at Beloit College in Wisconsin. In comparison to his 1963 talk, Simmons dramatically increased the amount of time dedicated to President Lincoln. In a sprawling account of Lincoln’s racial beliefs, Simmons argued that as a candidate for the Senate, Lincoln supported denying free blacks admission to the state of Illinois, let alone citizenship. He then aggressively attacked the common historical account of the Emancipation Proclamation, emphasizing Lincoln as a politician understanding the tools of war, not as an ideologically driven abolitionist who cared about emancipation or racial equality. He told the audience that the Proclamation purposefully “could not be enforced where it applied, and it did not apply where it could be enforced.” The Proclamation was meaningless, and Simmons mocked the integration leaders who pressed their demands under the slogan “Free by ’63,” because they evidently knew more “about mob psychology … than history.” Finally, he argued that “the use of President Lincoln’s name in current civil rights agitation” was bizarre. He stated that Lincoln had always been a firm supporter of colonization. Furthermore, even if colonization was not a possibility, Lincoln believed that the white race should always dominate. In light of these facts, Simmons insisted that “the ‘Great Emancipator’ of 1862 was what would have been called a ‘white supremacist’ in 1942 and an ‘extreme racist’ in 1962.” In these speeches, Simmons self-consciously applied Lincoln’s legacy to convince college students that segregation was appropriate and correct. Simmons knew these were not Southern schools, and that many of the students were predisposed to believe that segregation was racist, immoral, and un-American. He explicitly admitted that he hoped the students would be shocked, saying in the middle of his speech in Hawaii that “if any of you

43 Citizens’ Councils of America, “Race Relations and Civil Rights: A Southern Point of View to the Yale Political Union,” February 28, 1963, SCR ID# 99-36-0-49-1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Citizens’ Councils of America, “Why Segregation is Right: Presented at Notre Dame University,” March 7, 1963, SCR ID # 99-30-0-49- 1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 75 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

have any question concerning the authenticity of Lincoln quotations I’ve just used, please see me at the conclusion of this program and I’ll be happy to give you the volume and page numbers.”44 When delivering this address at Beloit, Richard Morphew prefaced Lincoln quotations by telling the audience to “remember” that he was “still quoting from Abraham Lincoln.” Morphew also began discussing Lincoln’s belief in white superiority by declaring, “You might be surprised to know that Lincoln … was an out-an-out white supremacist.”45 To challenge their preconceived notions of race and civil rights, there was no better way than to show that Lincoln was strongly on the side of the white South, and against the integrationists and the current federal government. Simmons received a surprising congratulatory letter after his speech in Hawaii. Erle Johnston, Jr., Director of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, wrote to Simmons that it was “one of the best speeches I have ever read on the subject.” These two had previously had a very ugly relationship that ended in Simmons’s influence in the Governors’ Office weakening substantially, and Johnston and Simmons were portrayed as enemies in the press.46 Whatever the reasons for Johnston’s letter, he made sure to praise Simmons’s use of Lincoln in the speech. “I would also like to congratulate you on the promotion of Abraham Lincoln’s comments.… We, too, have quoted Lincoln in our Speakers Bureau talks and it always has seemed to have an effect on the listeners.”47 Men like Simmons and Johnston understood the importance of claiming Lincoln’s legacy at this time, and the Councils’ use of the president would only increase in the coming years. Simmons was convinced that Lincoln’s legacy was critical to the mission of the WCC. As editor of the group’s newspaper, The Citizen,

44 Citizens’ Councils of America, “Civil Rights and the Negro Revolution: Presented at the University of Hawaii,” February 20, 1964, SCR ID # 99-30-0-100-1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 45 Citizens’ Councils of America, “The Citizens’ Councils and the Negro Revolution: To a Convocation at Beloit College,” February 25, 1964, SCR ID # 99-30-0-98-1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 46 William Street, “Conflict Over Council Chief Swirls Around Ross Barnett,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, December 7, 1962. 47 Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, “Letter from Erle Johnston to William Simmons,” February 25, 1964, SCR ID # 99-30-0-97-1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 76 Lewis McCorkle he dedicated the entire February 1964 edition to Lincoln. The front of the newspaper featured a photo of the Lincoln Memorial, the site of the Washington, DC, Civil Rights March and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech that had occurred less than six months before, on August 28, 1963. Underneath the photo of the statue, the issue promises to give the reader “Abraham Lincoln’s Real Views on Race!” In the Editorial Opinion, Simmons claimed that Lincoln was a proud white supremacist, but “his name and memory have been kidnapped by dishonest integrationists in a brazen historical theft, hoping thus to use the ‘Great Emancipator’s’ prestige for their own devious ends.” He was concerned that lies about Lincoln had been imparted “so massively and relentlessly that there are today areas in this country where people unknowingly accept it as gospel.” Simmons then explained that to save Lincoln’s legacy from “such a disgrace,” the Citizens’ Councils of America were instituting a national advertising campaign to spread Lincoln’s true views to Americans, and this special Lincoln issue was just the beginning. The issue not only quoted Lincoln’s racist rhetoric, but also his views on self-government and governmental checks and balances. Simmons handpicked any sentence from Lincoln that could be understood as offering implicit support for segregation as a state issue, like this one from Lincoln’s third debate with Senator Douglas in 1858: “I hold myself under constitutional obligations to allow the people in all the States without interference, direct or indirect, to do exactly as they please, and I deny that I have any inclination to interfere with them.” In addition, like Barnett, Simmons pointed to Lincoln’s opposition to the Dred Scott decision, writing that Lincoln “warned that if the Supreme Court can set government policy, ‘the people will have ceased to be their own rulers!’”48 The issue ends with quotes that represent Lincoln’s sympathy towards the South, and his commitment to colonizing freed slaves to Africa after the Civil War. For Simmons, the biggest obstacle to embracing Lincoln’s legacy was Lincoln’s position in the states’ rights debate. Lincoln brought death and destruction to an entire region based on the belief that individual states had less power than the federal government. Simmons and other white Southern

48 Citizens’ Councils of America, “The Citizen: Official Journal of the Citizens’ Councils of America,” February 1964, SCR ID # 9-11-1-73-1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 77 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

conservatives held that Southern states had the constitutional right and were in a better position to decide on matters of race in society, independent of the president, Congress, or the Supreme Court. To use Lincoln most effectively, Simmons had to deal with this apparent disagreement between Lincoln and his movement. He tried to accomplish this by pushing the image of Lincoln as a defender of states’ rights. In his speech at the University of Hawaii, Simmons emphasized Lincoln’s work as an Illinois legislator and his opinion then that Illinois had the power to deny blacks citizenship. Furthermore, in the 1963 WCC newspaper mentioned above, Simmons highlighted Lincoln’s belief that he was “under Constitutional obligation” to let “states do as they please,” and his belief that the “people will stop being their own rulers” if the Supreme Court were allowed dictate policy. These arguments were part of a deliberate strategy to separate Lincoln from the popular belief that he was a proponent of a powerful federal government. Another prong of the WCC national advertising campaign focused on Lincoln was a 3-column by 12-inch advertisement titled “Lincoln’s Hopes For The Negro.” This appeared in several hundred daily newspapers across the nation in February 1964, including The New York Times. The advertisement included three quotes selected to show Lincoln’s belief in racial separation. At the bottom was a coupon that readers could use to sign up for more information about “Lincoln’s plans to settle the Negro Problem.”49 If readers sent the card back, they would receive the Abraham Lincoln special issue of the Citizen in the mail for free. The same advertisement would appear across the country in 1968 and 1972 as well. Publicly and privately, the leadership of the Citizens’ Councils was thrilled with the response. Louis Hollis, an official of the Council, told the New York Times that the organization had already received a “sackful” of responses a day after the advertisement appeared in newspapers. Hollis also credited the campaign to their members, who had urged them “to give this information for several years to the American public.”50 In its March Bulletin, the Citizens’ Councils claimed that the advertisement was the most productive project ever undertaken by the group, with over 20,000 requests for information received in a little over a month. The Council also had received thousands of clippings featuring news stories and letters

49 “Display Ad 32,” New York Times, February 11, 1964, 32. 50 “Ad on Lincoln Gets Big Mail Response,” New York Times, February 12, 1964, 24. 78 Lewis McCorkle to the editor about the advertisement. Hundreds of new subscriptions to the Citizen poured in, along with financial contributions from across the nation.51 The last prong of the advertising campaign was the inclusion of the same statements by Lincoln about racial separation in a May 1964 pamphlet titled “Racial Facts.” The Lincoln quotes were near the end of the pamphlet, right before similar ones from President Thomas Jefferson and Senator Theodore Bilbo.52

George Wallace Embraces Lincoln Over the next few years, the Citizens’ Councils’ popularity and membership dwindled. With the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many white Southerners resigned themselves to a new social system in the region. Conservative Southern politicians like George Wallace began denying their blatant racism, instead using code words like “forced busing,” “law and order,” “urban crime,” and “welfare” to appeal to those with racial prejudices. These politicians represented the last gasp of Southern racists embracing Lincoln for political advantage. Even as Southern businessmen and national conservatives backpedaled on the issue of segregation, many white Southerners still privately felt that the federal government had overstepped its boundaries in forcing integration, and were frustrated that an “inferior” race had been given full social and political equality. George Wallace, former governor of Alabama and a third party candidate for president in 1968, wanted his campaign to capitalize on that widespread frustration. Instead of basing his presidential platform on his famous “segregation now, segregation forever” speech, Wallace had adopted more nuanced views that still put racial issues at the heart of his campaign. His campaign brochure thus declared that “bureaucrats and theoreticians in Washington [should] let people … decide what type of school system they are going to have,” that the policemen “are the thin line between complete anarchy in the streets,” and that he was “against excessive

51 Citizens’ Councils of America, “Jackson Citizens’ Council,” March 10, 1964, SCR ID # 99-30-0-89-1-1-1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 52 Citizens’ Councils of America, “Racial Facts,” May 1964, SCR ID # 99-30-0-76-1-1 1, Series 2515: Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, 1994-2006, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 79 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

taxation and the takeover of personal rights by the ‘great society.’”53 In addition, even though Wallace stated in his rarely altered stump speech that he had “never in [his] life made a speech that reflected on anyone because of his color or background,” he consistently contradicted himself by proudly stating to his all-white audience that “there’s more of us than there is of them.” Wallace’s audience seemed to never change regardless of where he was in the country, and he knew how to appeal to it. When Wallace delivered a line against black anarchy or forced busing, his fervent supporters’ roars would easily drown out protestors’ accusations of bigotry. This man, who only stood 5’7”, and according to aBaltimore Sun reporter could “strut like a pouter pigeon one moment and act like a diffident job applicant the next,” had become the spokesperson for white discontentment over the racial and cultural changes of the 1950s and 1960s.54 Although visiting Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield had become a rite of passage for presidential candidates, it was a national story when Wallace arrived to lay a wreath on the tomb on September 12, 1968. Wallace seemed especially eager to tie himself to the former president. TheChicago Tribune reported that he “departed from normal custom by posing for photographs, making a brief speech, and signing autographs” while in the tomb. When taking questions at the Springfield airport, it became apparent that Wallace did not see a contradiction between his views and those of Lincoln. “Abraham Lincoln,” he announced, “belongs to all the people of our country just the same as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis belong to all the people because they are part of our political heritage.” He then continued, “I might say that if Lincoln said now some of the things he did say while President, he’d be picketed.”55 Wallace was obviously trying to score political points so he could win Illinois a couple months later in November. But he was also moderating his racial views by establishing an ideological connection between himself and Lincoln. Especially in Springfield, white industrial workers and farmers wanted to believe Wallace and Lincoln were ideologically similar. Wallace’s

53 “George Wallace for President 1968 Campaign Brochure: ‘Stand Up for America.’” 4President.com, http://www.4president.org/brochures/1968/wallace1968brochure.htm. 54 Charles Whiteford, “George Corley Wallace: ‘We’re Gonna Rattle Their Eyeballs on Election Day,’” The Baltimore Sun, September 22, 1968, K. 55 Robert Howard, “Wallace Assails School Busing,” The Chicago Tribune, September 13, 1968, 4. 80 Lewis McCorkle attacks against forced busing, urban crime, and poorly managed welfare programs were instances of race baiting. If people believed that the liberals of the 1960s would picket even Lincoln, then it was easier to believe that Wallace was just being truthful, pragmatic, and fair to the white race. He was also evoking Lincoln to turn himself into a national figure, hoping it would make him a more attractive candidate across the country. By embracing Lincoln, Wallace became a politician no longer solely focused on the South and segregation, but a statesman who wanted to return sovereignty to the states and establish law and order across the country. With the defection of white southern Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s to the Republican Party, Lincoln’s southern legacy became even more part of the mainstream of American politics. Senator Strom Thurmond, the 1948 Dixiecrat who later became a mainstay of the Southern Republican Party, used Lincoln to explain his decision to become a Republican. He told an interviewer in 1992 that Lincoln, the father of the Republican Party, would have hated Reconstruction, just as Tom Watson and Ben Tillman had argued close to one hundred years before. It was understandable, of course, that many politicians stayed in the Democratic Party because it took the South “a long time to get over Republican Rule in the Civil War.” Nevertheless, Thurmond was confident that “Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have wanted it.” In effect, Thurmond used Lincoln as a means to show other white Southerners that making the switch to the Republican Party was not rejecting the South and their ancestors.56

The Return of Southern Lincoln Hatred After the South lost the civil rights battle over integration, many Southern racists joined new groups that did not need to temper their beliefs to appear somewhat in the mainstream. Free of direct involvement with elective politics, these white Southerners abandoned their public displays of affection toward Lincoln and renewed their hatred for the man who destroyed the Confederacy more than one hundred years earlier. This shift was not completely unexpected, as the Confederate tradition had never truly left the white South. At Ole Miss, for example, students proudly initiated

56 “Interview with Strom Thurmond,” John C. Stennis Oral History Project, Mississippi State University, June 4, 1992, 5. 81 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

an annual Dixie Week in November 1950 that included a re-enactment of Lincoln’s assassination in the student grill.57 Officially organized in 1985, the Council of Conservative Citizens traces its roots directly back to the White Citizens’ Councils of William Simmons. The CCC head, Gordon Baum, was previously an active organizer for the WCC and built the CCC by using old WCC mailing lists. The founder of the WCC, Robert Patterson, still writes for the CCC newsletter.58 Yet while the members of the CCC were direct descendants of the WCC, their version of Lincoln’s legacy differed substantially. Unlike the WCC, the members of the CCC had no illusions of being a major influence in national political debates, and as a result were clearly not interested in trying to win over public opinion. A forced appreciation of President Lincoln was no longer necessary. Unapologetically proud of their Southern ancestors and still defenders of the Confederate cause, the members of the CCC could free themselves of uncomfortable hypocrisy and hate the man who oversaw the literal and figurative destruction of their region. In December of 1998, the CCC claimed on their website that Lincoln was “surely the most evil American in history.”59 The CCC also has featured an online “wanted” poster of Abraham Lincoln that labeled him as the “1st ruler and tyrant of the American Empire,” and that listed his criminal acts: “War crimes and treason, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and suspension of the U.S. Constitution, murder, false imprisonment, and numerous heinous crimes against the SOUTHern States and AMERICANS in general!”60 More recently, in 2007, writers on the CCC website have stated that Lincoln brought “socialism, tyranny, and villainy,”61 and that he “emancipated the monster of central power whose shackles weigh us down ever more,” along with more articles claiming that Lincoln created the National Academies of Science because he sought to “make the Federal

57 Charles Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 58. 58 “Council of Conservative Citizens,” Anti-Defamation League, 2005. 59 Steve Rendall, “A Sex-Free Scandal: When Racism Is the Issue, Media Is Slow to Dig,” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, March-April 1999. 60 “Council of Conservative Citizens,” Anti-Defamation League. 61 “Libs, NeoCons to GOP: Pander to minorities or else…,” Council of Conservative Citizens, September 22, 2007. 82 Lewis McCorkle

Government more powerful.”62 The CCC is not alone in expressing its hatred of Lincoln. Neo-Confederate groups like the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans have increased the frequency and intensity of their attacks on Lincoln. Edward Sebesta, one of the preeminent scholars on the neo- Confederate movement, noted the SCV’s recent anti-Lincoln trend, stating that The Council of Concerned Citizens has featured in its he doesn’t “remember seeing pictures like these in website a “Wanted” poster 63 accusing Lincoln of war earlier issues.” crimes and treason. The preeminent neo-Confederate journal,The (Photo courtesy of the CCC.) Southern Partisan, has consistently attacked Lincoln since its founding in 1979.64 An author in the spring of 1984 accused Lincoln of issuing the “sinister” Emancipation Proclamation to purposefully invite “slaves to rise against their masters.” Six years later, another Southern Partisan The pre-eminent writer argued that John Wilkes Booth’s behavior neo-Confederate journal The Southern Partisan was “not only sane, but sensible … his background, sold a T-shirt in 1997 that celebrated the anniversary loyalties, beliefs, and experiences had led him to that of Lincoln’s assassination. end.” In 1996, the magazine claimed that Lincoln (Photo courtesey of The Southern Partisan.) was a “consummate conniver, manipulator and a liar.”65 In 2006, Thomas Woods, an historian with libertarian and neo-Confederate ties, reviewed Thomas DiLorenzo’s book Lincoln Unmasked: What You Are Not Supposed to Know about Dishonest Abe for the Southern Partisan. Woods praised DiLorenzo’s work, and compared Lincoln’s efforts towards government centralization to Hitler’s

62 “For Sale, the United States of America … any takers?” Council of Conservative Citizens, August 22, 2007; “White House ‘Science’ Propaganda Arm Publishes Absurd Fantasy to Explain Why Blacks Have Lower IQs,” Council of Conservative Citizens, June 15, 2010. 63 Edward Sebesta, “Lincoln Re-Enactors Being Harrassed by the SCV,” Anti-Neo- Confederate, January 23, 2010. 64 Euan Hague, “The Neo-Confederate Movement,” Southern Poverty Law Center. 65 “Southern Partisan: ‘Setting the Record Straight,’” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, January 12, 2001. 83 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

in Nazi Germany.66 And finally, in 1997, theSouthern Partisan celebrated the anniversary of the murder of President Lincoln by selling T-shirts with Lincoln’s image over the words “sic semper tyrannis” (thus always to tyrants), Booth’s exclamation after killing Lincoln.67 Loy Mauch, a long-time member of the League of the South and of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, is different than most members of these neo-Confederate groups, in that he won a seat in the Arkansas state legislature in 2010. Mauch’s transition from a member of neo-Confederate groups to politician, however, illustrates the different role that these groups and politicians must play in today’s political landscape. Before he entered politics, Mauch’s antipathy for Lincoln was clear. Along with serving as chair of the League of the South’s Western Arkansas district, he was also head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans branch in his hometown. In 2004, Mauch hosted a conference titled “Seminar on Abraham Lincoln—Truth vs. Myth,” after the city of Hot Springs, Arkansas, refused to remove a statue of Lincoln. His keynote address to the conference was titled “An Homage to John Wilkes Booth.” As a candidate, however, Mauch toned down his opinion of Lincoln and distanced himself from these groups’ extreme views. When asked about his Lincoln conference as a political candidate, Mauch hesitantly said that he believed Lincoln did not follow the Constitution, but his disagreement with the statue was only because Lincoln “didn’t have anything to do with Arkansas. Nobody in Arkansas voted for him.” When asked about The League of the South, Mauch stated that he did not attend meetings and that his chair position was “just a title.” He also tried to tone down the group’s political ideology, arguing that it did not want to secede from the Union, which directly contradicted the group’s founding mission statement. Mauch stated that the group’s goal was for a “constitutional government” within the United States.68 It is unclear whether Mauch’s success is representative of a bigger shift in the South, where Southern Republicans can be open about their distaste for President Lincoln. At first glance, it seems as if the Republican Party

66 Thomas Woods, “Lincoln Unmasked,” Southern Partisan 26, no. 2, 20-21. 67 “Southern Partisan: ‘Setting the Record Straight,’” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, January 12, 2001. 68 David Koon, “The South Shall Rise Again,” Arkansas Times, November 11, 2010. 84 Lewis McCorkle

is not giving up its title as the “Party of Lincoln,” as evidenced by the fact that countless defenders of President George Bush equated his time in office with Lincoln’s, and leaders like Michael Steele fought Barack Obama over Lincoln’s legacy throughout his term as chairman of the Republican National Committee.69 Although pro-Lincoln sentiment is too strong today for politicians on a national stage to attack Lincoln’s legacy, there are some political advantages to it among white Southerners. It is clear that Lincoln’s beliefs do not fit well with the Tea Party movement that aided the Republican Party in the 2010 elections. Lincoln was the first president to institute an income tax and to issue paper currency, and regardless of his true beliefs, his legacy today is that of a proponent of federal power over state sovereignty. This might help explain why Thomas Woods, former head of the League of the South, writer for the Southern Partisan, and longtime Lincoln hater, was invited to the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference. It might also explain why the CPAC hosted a seminar titled “Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe of Liberty,” led by Thomas DiLorenzo, who openly advocates for Southern secession and declared that Lincoln’s presidency was a “despotic and dictatorial regime.”70 Members of groups like the League of the South or the Council of Conservative Citizens, which are considered fringe groups now, may re-enter politics in the South on principles of social and economic conservatism. They would need to choose, however, between continuing to promote their hatred of Abraham Lincoln or downplaying its importance.

69 Jon Perr, “Before Badgering Obama, Bret Baier Compared Bush to Lincoln,” Crooks and Liars, March 18, 2010. 70 Max Blumenthal, “Feeling the Hate at CPAC 2010,” Huffington Post, February 23, 2010; Thomas DiLorenzo, “The Most Cynical and Hypocritical Speech Ever Delivered,” LewRockwell.com, November 30, 2010. 85 John Muhs Hometown Hero?: The Detroit Reaction to Joe Louis

When heavyweight boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling squared off in Yankee Stadium on the evening of June 22, 1938, the stakes were high. New York had become a mecca for boxing enthusiasts, and 70,000 fans packed Yankee Stadium to make the fight the first million- dollar gate since Louis defeated Max Baer in 1935. In attendance were former boxing champs Jack Johnson, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, and James J. Braddock. Also in the stadium that night were celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Gary Cooper, Duke Ellington, Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, United States Attorney General Homertraces Cummings, and one of President Roosevelt’s sons. Despite the presence of the glitterati, the crowd was a smorgasbord of race and class. The lower classes, including most of the 20,000 blacks in attendance, occupied the bleachers and upper-level seats, while the big shots and well-to-do appeared closer in. Hundreds more who couldn’t get a ticket sat atop rooftops beyond centerfield. Across the country, an estimated seventy million listeners, almost as many as those who listened to President Roosevelt’s formal speeches, gathered around radios to listen to the broadcast. The rest of the world had its eyes and ears on Yankee 86 John Muhs

Stadium as well. Foreign press gathered to write newspaper reports and to announce radio broadcasts in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. At around 10:00 p.m., just before the final introductions and opening bell, Ed Thorgersen, radio announcer for NBC, simply said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The two principals in the greatest bout in a generation are in the ring.”1 The German Schmeling, considered by many to be the best heavyweight in the world after knocking out the “Brown Bomber” from Detroit in their initial bout two years prior, had his sights set on Louis’s title belt, while Louis was determined to avenge what was at the time his only professional defeat. The Louis-Schmeling personal rivalry was fierce and had deepened since their last encounter. The defeated Louis, not the victorious Schmeling, was controversially given the opportunity to fight an aging and arthritic James J. Braddock for the heavyweight title in 1937, mostly due to his greater star power and ticket-selling ability. Schmeling and the rest of Germany, including future Schmeling admirer and associate Adolf Hitler, cried foul and accused the United States of corruption and greed. Louis went on to defeat the “Cinderella Man” Braddock to become the first black champion since Jack Johnson lost his crown in 1915. However, he was not unanimously crowned the best prizefighter in the world, with his loss to Schmeling still fresh in people’s minds. Thus when Louis and Schmeling met in 1938, both fighters had something to prove. Yet the fight was far more than just a championship sporting event with palpable personal and racial drama. It was an international event with strong political overtones as well. Both prizefighters had become national standard-bearers. In the context of pre-World War II developments, it was a battle between fascism and democracy. On fight night, Schmeling was a lightning rod for anti-German sentiment in the United States. Walking out of the dugout to the ring, he was pelted by ashtrays, banana peels, and cigarette butts, despite an escort of twenty-five policemen.2 Boxing historians have studied in depth the phenomenon of Louis’s rise to superstardom. Lewis Erenberg’s The Greatest Fight of Our Generation

1 Lewis Erenberg, The Greatest Fight of Our Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136; David Margolick, Beyond Glory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 287-289. 2 Margolick, 293. 87 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

offers a vivid portrait of Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, their careers, and their two epic fights, shedding light on what these fighters represented to their nations and why their second bout took on such international importance. David Margolick also has written a comprehensive historical report of the Louis-Schmeling rivalry in Beyond Glory. Erenberg and Margolick both show how Louis went from being a hero of his race to being the first black champion embraced by all Americans, an important step in United States race relations. Boxing historian Jeffrey T. Sammonshas has given this phenomenon a regional flair in his essay “Boxing as a Reflection of Society: The Southern Reaction to Joe Louis.” But the extant research has paid little attention to Detroit citizens’ reaction to Louis at three key points in his career—the 1936 bout with Schmeling, the 1937 title fight against Braddock, and the 1938 Schmeling rematch. A city of immigrants with a complex racial history that keenly felt both the economic boom of the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s, Detroit is a bellwether city for historical events of early twentieth century America. With large mainstream newspapers and a black press of its own, the city where Louis spent his late childhood and got his start as a boxer is the focus of this essay. The Detroit area has been home to a large German-American population from the early nineteenth century to this day. The first immigrants came early in Michigan’s history when the state was promoted as an ideal home for farmers and settlers, in an attempt to promote population growth. Detroit was also one of the centers of the twentieth-century demographic shift that brought hundreds of thousands of poor Americans, black and white, north from the Jim Crow South. Racial tensions in Chicago during the twentieth century at times led to violence, with two notable riots in 1943 and 1967. With such a history, the city is a fitting place to study the competing pressures of patriotism, racial identity, and ethnic pride in the context of an international sporting spectacle. Joe Louis is an especially interesting case, as Louis was a participant in the so-called “Great Migration” and was in many ways an everyman of the generation, with his humble beginnings, down-to-earth persona, and desire to serve in combat in World War II. Despite this hometown appeal, the Detroit newspapers were unwilling to recognize Louis as the city’s first black national hero. Indeed, contemporary reporters did not trumpet his standard-bearing qualities, neither in the build-up nor the aftermath of his marquee bouts. The complex

88 John Muhs ethnographic dynamics of the Motor City inhibited the local media’s willingness to recognize the racial or political implications of Louis’s three most important fights. The tempered media response therefore provides insight into the political tensions and the ethnic sensitivities of the times, both local and international.

Joe Louis’s Early Life and Career Born on May 13, 1914, near Lafayette, Alabama, a small town in the Buckalew Mountains, Joseph Louis Barrow was the seventh of eight children of a sharecropper named Munroe Barrow and his wife, Lillie Reece Barrow. Joe Louis never knew his father. Barrow was placed into an institution for the mentally disabled when his son was only two years old. Left to raise the whole family and work the farm, Louis’s mother married Pat Brooks, who helped the family keep afloat. In Alabama, a young Louis was oblivious to racial tensions and inequalities. He even played marbles with the white landowner’s sons on their way to separate, segregated schools. However, Louis’s mother, stepfather, and older brothers had all known of the growing number of lynchings and heard rumors of better living north of the Mason- Dixon line, with promises of factories with good jobs, electricity, movies, automobiles, and streetcars.3 In 1926, when Louis was twelve years old, the entire family, including Pat Brooks and his eight children, Lillie Reece and eight of her own, packed up their meager possessions and joined millions of other southern blacks in their northward migration. The Brooks-Barrow family moved to Detroit, Michigan, the industrial home of the booming automobile industry, and settled into a house of their own on Catherine Street in the growing black neighborhood on the city’s eastside. Here Louis, just like many rural southerners who settled in big cities, saw his first trolley, flushed his first toilet, and turned on his first electric light. The family lived relatively well for a while. Their home was crowded, but Brooks worked as a street cleaner and Louis’s older brothers all made good money working in the Ford plant. Soon, though, the family fell on hard times when the Great Depression hit and his brothers and stepfather lost

3 Joe Louis with Edna and Art Rust, Jr., Joe Louis: My Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 4-9. 89 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

their jobs. Louis said of this time, “For the first time in my life I remember being hungry.” At the suggestion of one of his Duffield Elementary School instructors, who said, “This boy should be able to do something with his hands,” Louis entered an all-boys vocational school, where he helped his family by building tables, cabinets, and other furniture to be used in the house. Hoping to start her son on a path that would lead to a career in music, one of a few careers that could bring a black man relative prosperity at the time, Lillie Brooks bought Joe a cheap violin and paid for weekly lessons. This pursuit was short-lived, however, as Louis broke the violin over the head of a neighborhood boy who called him a “sissy” for playing the instrument.4 At the age of seventeen, Louis began skipping his lessons without telling his mother and instead accompanied his friend Thurston McKinney to Brewster’s East Side Gymnasium. Boxing provided an alternative to the life of crime he could have adopted by joining one of the street gangs where his natural fighting talents would have been valued. Describing an early sparring match during which he nearly knocked McKinney out, Louis said, “It was like power pumping through me. Maybe it’s something like people getting religion.” Louis began to gain notice for his punching power, and the manager of Brewster’s Gym found a black middleweight named Holman Williams, just a few years older than Louis, to train the young fighter.5 Joe Louis’s amateur debut came as a light heavyweight in 1932 against Johnny Miler, who would go on to represent the United States in the Los Angeles Olympics that year. It was here that Joe Louis Barrow became plain Joe Louis so that “if it got into the papers, Momma wouldn’t know the difference.” Louis was overmatched and lost handily, but he remained determined to get back in the ring and train more. He developed his non-existent left and honed his right, resulting in fourteen straight knockouts. His confidence was growing, the twenty-five dollar merchandise checks for amateur victories were pouring in, and Louis was making a name for himself in amateur circles. The DetroitFree Press then sponsored Louis to fight in the Golden Gloves, the premier amateur tournaments around the country. Louis was sent to cities such as Chicago, Boston, and Toronto where, he later recalled, “I met important people, and I wanted to be

4 Ibid., 13-19; Margolick, 60. 5 Louis, 20. 90 John Muhs important, too.”6 In December of 1933, Louis met John Roxborough in Detroit, who would help shape the rest of his career. Roxborough ran a big-time numbers racket and was influential in Detroit’s black community. Recognizing Louis’s potential, Roxborough took him under his wing, buying Louis new gear and giving him old dress clothes. Shortly after this meeting, in early 1934, Louis experienced a telling episode of racial profiling. In Chicago for a Golden Gloves fight, waiting in the locker room minutes before the match, Louis was arrested and taken to the police station and was held on the charge of murdering a woman who was believed to be his wife five years earlier in Gary, Indiana, when Louis was only 15 years old. Someone had seen his picture in the newspaper and mistook him for the real killer. This incident, besides forcing him to miss the tournament while the authorities sorted out the mix-up, was a chilling indication of the alacrity with which white northerners were willing to pass judgment on blacks.7 In many ways, the experience of Joe Louis Barrow and his family was archetypal in the broader context of the migration of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to many northern industrial cities. One feature of this experience was the discovery that their new home in the North was not the integrated, egalitarian utopia blacks had imagined. The falsified murder allegation was just one example of northern racial prejudice. As Louis noted in his autobiography, “Nobody white ever called me a ‘nigger’ until I got to Detroit.”8 Blacks in Detroit had always experienced prejudiced treatment by much of the white population, including both the established political upper-crust and white working-class immigrants. Before World War I, this racism manifested itself in increasing stratification and a decreasing black proportion of the population, as many blacks moved to other cities in Michigan or Ontario looking to escape racially prejudiced policies and attitudes. The legacy of racial violence in Detroit dates back to March 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, when a group of Irish laborers attacked black residents because of police protection given to a

6 Ibid., 25-29. 7 Ibid., 30-31; Erenberg, 28. 8 Louis, 9. 91 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

black innkeeper alleged to have molested a white girl.9 Most blacks endured the classist system of exploitation and segregation that affected housing, schools, public accommodations, and interracial marriages, but some were able to maneuver within it and better their condition through self-help. These exceptions formed a tiny minority of an already small, and shrinking, segment of the population, as blacks made up 3.1 percent of Detroit’s population of 45,619 in 1860, but only 1.2 percent of 465,766 in 1910.10 But the path of black history in Detroit took an interesting turn during the 1910s and beyond, thanks to Jim Crow, the automobile, civic reform, and World War I. The institutionalization of segregation and the spread of white supremacist violence in the South drove southern blacks northward in search of equality and opportunity in what was known as the “Great Migration.” Detroit’s black population increased from barely 5,000 in 1910 to over 40,000 a decade later. In this decade, Detroit also saw the birth of the automobile industry and with it a growing need for unskilled factory laborers. With the virtual disappearance of fresh European-born immigrants after the onset of World War I, Ford Motor Company gained a reputation for hiring blacks to unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled positions in its factories. B.J. Widick notes that “Henry Ford’s policy of hiring approximately ten per cent of his work force from among the Negroes was a rare and notable exception in American industrial practice.” In 1914, Ford announced that he would pay all workers a minimum of five dollars per day. This news spread around the country and both black and white workers flocked to assembly plants to apply for jobs. Pat Brooks was one of these workers hired by Ford, and he brought the Brooks-Barrow family to the Motor City in 1926.11 A black ghetto formed, consolidated, and expanded on the eastside of downtown in two contiguous neighborhoods that became known as “Black Bottom” and “Paradise Valley,” though residential segregation prevented homeownership and confined blacks to tenant status. The Brooks-Barrow family rented a house on Catherine Street in Black Bottom. Locked in slums where tuberculosis spread freely, young black adults suffered a low fertility rate, which further engendered social instability. The Detroit Urban League

9 Dominic Capeci, Race Relations in Wartime Detroit (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 3. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 B.J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 26; Louis, 26. 92 John Muhs was founded in 1916, during the prime decade of the ghetto’s growth, and emerged as a leading force in the formation of community institutions and in blacks’ transition from rural migrants to industrial workers. However, their efforts were largely undercut by institutionalized racism in housing opportunities and zoning policies.12 The influx of rural migrants seeking good jobs was not limited to African-Americans. Tens of thousands of poor southern whites flocked to the city as well. The good news that one could make a decent living in the northern factories had reached their ears too. The auto companies sent recruiters to many areas in the South in their search for cheap and compliant labor, a practice that continued until the 1960s. By 1948, almost a half-million Detroit citizens were transplanted southerners “who brought their prejudices and language with them.”13 This influx led to a tremendous augmentation of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Detroit, to the extent that in the mid-1920s they “mounted a campaign to dominate Detroit,” which at the time was the fourth largest city in the United States. In the 1924 mayoral election, a KKK candidate named Charles Bowles, running as a write-in, nearly defeated the two candidates on the ballot, John W. Smith and Joseph Martin. Technical rulings invalidated 17,000 votes for Bowles—many of the ballots displayed “Boles” or “Bowls”—which proved to be the difference in the race. The KKK frenzy became even more ominous after Bowles’s loss, especially as a smattering of blacks attempted to move into neighborhoods outside of the ghetto. The sight of burning crosses and hooded men marching in the streets was not uncommon in 1925 Detroit.14 Detroit’s real estate board had been determined since 1910 to limit opportunities for black Detroiters to “taint” the lily-white developing residential neighborhoods. In 1925, Dr. Ossian Sweet, a prominent African- American gynecologist, purchased a home three and a half miles west of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley and notified the police of his family’s plans, fully aware of previous incidents of racial violence. The two nights following the Sweets’ move-in, hundreds of whites gathered at the home to hurl projectiles and racial epithets at the family. When the mob chased

12 Capeci, 4-5. 13 Widick, 27. 14 Ibid., 3-27. 93 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Dr. Sweet’s brother and a friend into the house, the inhabitants fired into the crowd, killing one person. Police officers, who had been watching the events unfold idly until that point, arrested everyone in the home for murder. Within days, black attorneys and the NAACP mobilized to defend the Sweets. Recognizing the prominence of the case, the NAACP hired Clarence Darrow. In the subsequent trials, Dr. Sweet and his family were acquitted on the grounds that blacks possessed the right to protect their home. The all-white jury may not have reached this verdict had it not been for Darrow, the “most brilliant courtroom lawyer in the nation,” whose spectacular seven-hour summation ranks as one of his greatest speeches. The verdicts surely encouraged black Detroiters temporarily, but interracial enmity carried over into the 1930s.15 Although Detroit was a flourishing industrial center enjoying the boom of the 1920s as much as any place in the country, the Great Depression hit the city with a fury found only in cities like Pittsburgh and Gary, Indiana, which were dependent on heavy manufacturing. The working class was struck the hardest: in 1930 and 1931, 225,000 of metro Detroit’s 475,000 auto workers lost their jobs and had no regular source of income. Blacks were the last hired and the first fired even when the economy was booming, and they suffered most heavily when Detroit was wracked by the Depression. At one point perhaps up to eighty percent of Detroit’s black workers were unemployed. After Pat Brooks found himself out of work and Louis lost his debut to Miler, Louis worked a stint at Ford’s River Rouge factory pushing truck bodies to a conveyor belt. His stretch working for Ford didn’t last long, though, as he left after a few months to return to fighting.16 In 1934, Louis defeated another rising black fighter in Detroit named Stanley Evans to win the light heavyweight title for the Detroit Golden Gloves. Then, after Louis knocked out Joe Bauer in less than two minutes, Roxborough convinced his charge that it was time to turn professional at the age of twenty and move to Chicago so he could be trained and co-managed by Julian Black. Louis was eager to start making serious money and agreed immediately. Lillie Reece took more convincing, however. After some coaxing by her son and Mr. Roxborough, she gave Roxborough her consent only “if he would make sure that [Joe] lived well

15 Capeci, 6; Widick, 21. 16 Ibid., 44; Louis, 26-27. 94 John Muhs

Joe Louis and his management team prior to the Schmeling defeat, 1936. Left to right, assistant manager Julian Black, trainer Jack Blackburn, Louis, and manager John Roxborough. These three men had a tremendous effect on Louis’s transformation into a national hero by developing his wholesome public image. (Photo reprinted from My Life, by Joe Louis with Edna and Art Rust, Jr.) and led a decent Christian life.”17 In June 1934, Joe moved out of his family’s home in Detroit and made the journey to Chicago, where Roxborough introduced him to Julian Black, a Chicago numbers racketeer and nightclub owner. Black’s nightclub was a gathering spot for black sportsmen in Chicago, and he was able to enlist revered trainer Jack Blackburn, who began teaching Louis the finer points of the “sweet science.” With his all-black management and training team, who together were savvy in both the technical aspects of boxing and its underworld wheeling and dealing, Louis now had the resources and pugilistic acumen to take the boxing world by storm. In his first year after turning professional, Louis fought and won twenty-three times, twenty-one of them by knockout.18 Louis’s jump to professional bouts coincided with boxing’s lowest point in terms of popularity and respectability. Boxing was predominately a working-class sport, and the Depression left its fans with no money for food or bill payments, let alone tickets to a fight. The prosperous days of Jack Dempsey and his several million-dollar gates were long gone. Moreover,

17 Ibid., 31-33. 18 Erenberg, 30-38. 95 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

crooked managers, fixed fights, and “hollow” champions robbed the sport of its appeal to fans.19 The poor reputation of boxing and minimal fan interest would have been a deterrent for any rising heavyweight, but Louis had the additional hurdle of flagrant racial discrimination in the sport’s premier division. The last black champion, Jack Johnson, with his several white wives and lovers, fancy suits, fast cars, and braggadocio in the ring, had been white Americans’ worst nightmare. This nightmare fully came to fruition during his reign as heavyweight champion between 1908 and 1915, prompting a search for a “white hope” to knock Johnson off his throne, which Jess Willard eventually did. The color line was subsequently drawn, and no black heavyweights fought for the title in the 1920s. Even Louis’s handlers were skeptical of his chances to make it big, despite knowing better than anyone else how much talent and skill he possessed. Trainer Jack Blackburn summed the problem up when he said to Louis, “White man hasn’t forgotten that fool nigger with his white women, acting like he owned the world.”20 With white Americans still sore from the unwholesome reign of Jack Johnson, Louis had to carefully craft a public image that people would accept in order to break down the barrier keeping black boxers out of title contention. Louis fortunately had a brilliant management team that ensured that the mainstream media portrayed him as nothing but a sportsman and a “credit to his race.” Roxborough, Black, and Blackburn imposed a strict regimen on the twenty-year-old Louis, training him inside the ring and grooming him outside of it to be a champion prizefighter. Louis recalled in his autobiography one example of their efforts to climb out from under the shadow of Jack Johnson and break the “Sambo” trope in white America. “One time we were talking about these little black toy dolls they used to make of fighters,” Louis wrote in his autobiography. “Those dolls always had the wide grin with thick red lips. They looked foolish. I got the message—don’t look like a fool nigger doll. Look like a black man with dignity.” His handlers taught him to comb his hair and maintain proper hygiene, to eat with proper etiquette, and perhaps most importantly, never to have his picture taken with a white woman. To deal with the media, he

19 Ibid., 32. 20 Louis, 36. 96 John Muhs was also tutored in grammar, geography, history, and arithmetic.21 Paired with a rapid-fire string of victories, this image endeared Louis to the mainstream public. In particular, his 1935 defeats of Max Baer and the Italian Primo Carnera—the first fight in which Louis was held up by some as a symbol of democracy and freedom, on the eve of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, the last non-colonized African nation—helped thrust Louis into the media spotlight. Louis was now the top contender for the heavyweight title. There were always skeptics in the media, though, who reverted to racist tactics and portrayed Louis as a “Sambo” figure—simple, slow, and more suited for the cotton fields than the ring. In a nationally syndicated column, Davis J. Walsh wrote that “something sly and sinister and perhaps not quite-human came out of the African Jungle” to knock out Carnera, while Grantland Rice described Louis as “the bush-master of the North American continent.” While white Americans recognized his fighting ability, to some it was a reflection of his primal nature, not superior skill or courage.22

Joe Louis versus Max Schmeling The twenty-two-year-old Louis, with a record of 24-0 at the time, was favored heavily in his first bout with Schmeling and trained somewhat lazily. As he recalled, “Instead of boxing six rounds, I’d box three. Punch the bag one round instead of two.” Ranked as the number one heavyweight contender, Louis had the feeling he was on top of the world and developed the arrogance to go with it. He had also developed a passion for golf during 1935, and while training in New Jersey in the months leading up to the fight, he often quit training against the wishes of his handlers in favor of hitting the links. Marva, his new wife, was also at training camp with him and was another source of distraction.23 Detroit, like the rest of America, was expecting Louis to whip Schmeling in Yankee Stadium. On May 21, the Free Press ran a story promoting impresario Mike Jacobs, who was prematurely seeking the next “white hope.” This reflected not only the widespread anticipation of Louis victories over Schmeling and aging champion James J. Braddock, but also echoed

21 Ibid., 39. 22 Erenberg, 42. 23 Louis, 83. 97 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

the reign of Jack Johnson. Jacobs’s new search for a “white hope,” however, was motivated more by business interests than outrage at a possible black champion. Louis had proven that interracial bouts could be lucrative, and Mike Jacobs was not prejudiced. In another column, W.W. “Eddie” Edgar, who was a columnist for the Free Press from 1924 to 1948, drew attention to the New York Boxing Commission’s declaration that the winner of the June fight would be the top challenger to Braddock. Edgar claimed this could be a “jinx” on Louis, as a similar declaration had been made about Harry Wills, who won his bout and became the top contender but, by a twist of fate, never got the chance to fight then-champion Jack Dempsey. Joe Louis’s supporters were eagerly anticipating an opportunity for the Detroiter to break the long-standing color line and did not want him to suffer the same fate as Wills. Reporting later on Louis’s last workout before the fight, which was forced into a hotel ballroom due to rain, Edgar commented on the virtuosic quality of the fighter’s masterful movements. Clearly, the local media either were not aware of Louis’s lazy training habits or simply overlooked them because expectations were running so high. Before the fight even took place, white mainstream Detroit was proud of its own “master of the world of boxing.” To at least some extent, Louis’s hometown status gave the media reason to support him in his boxing endeavors. This support was a testament both to the power of sporting achievement to overcome racial prejudice and to Louis’s ability to maintain a completely inoffensive and genuinely likeable persona.24 The German community in Detroit provided a different perspective. The Detroiter Abend-Post, now named the Nordamerikanische Wochen-Post, was founded in 1854 and is still the longest-running German newspaper in the state of Michigan. The paper’s pre-fight coverage framed the underdog Schmeling as the protagonist, focusing on reporting how Schmeling’s, not Louis’s, training was going. “A surprise victory by Schmeling cannot be ruled out,” a columnist wrote in a June 17 article. “Max can not only claim greater experience, but he also has no fear of Louis at all—in contrast to other opponents.” The German’s mental acumen and durability were frequently cited as advantages over “the Negro.”25

24 “Jacobs Seeks a ‘White Hope’,” Detroit Free Press, May 21, 1936, 19; W.W. Edgar, “The Second Guess,” Detroit Free Press, May 21, 1936, 19; Ibid., 13. 25 “Schmeling Sieg durchaus möglich,” Detroiter Abend-Post, June 17, 1936. 98 John Muhs

The fight took place on June 19, 1936, in Yankee Stadium after rain postponed it one day. In the second round, against his trainer Jack Blackburn’s advice, Louis dropped his left hand to throw a left hook, and Schmeling slugged him in the jaw with a right cross that changed the fight. Louis said later of the punch, “I thought I’d swallowed my mouthpiece. I was dazed, everything clouded over.” Schmeling kept hitting Louis with his right until in the twelfth round he registered a shocking knock-out, Louis’s first professional loss. The defeat turned many American boxing fans against him. They viewed him as a broken man who had neither the head nor the heart to match his white superior. TheFree Press ran a story the day after the fight by Jack Miley, a Wisconsin native writing from New York, who wrote that, after the fourth-round knockdown, “Joe acted as if he knew he had met his master.” Whether Miley intended this use of language as a social commentary, framing Schmeling’s subjugation of Louis in the ring as a natural relationship between whites and blacks, was not obvious at first. The message became clearer when later Miley wrote, “As for Louis, he’s regusted.” The use of the word “regusted,” which is an amalgamation of “revolted” and “disgusted,” is a reference to the derogatory black-face minstrelsy of Amos ‘n’ Andy, which portrayed blacks as silly, lazy, stupid, and cowardly. Using a national media source to cover the fighter in this way allowed theFree Press to distance itself somewhat from the fight’s racial context. The newspaper that had sponsored Louis for the Golden Gloves less than three years prior must have recognized white Detroiters’ mixed reaction to Schmeling’s upset of Louis, and accordingly avoided taking a stance of its own on any issues of race by printing the New Yorker Miley’s column.26 Meanwhile, the unexpected result of the fight delighted German Detroiters who rooted for Schmeling to prove boxing experts wrong. On the day after the fight, theDetroiter Abend-Post wrote, “Before he crossed the German ‘beater’ yesterday night … the colored boy was simply ‘unbeatable’…. Nobody could stand up to him. Schmeling made all this laughable.” This told-you-so tone and derogation of the Detroit native is a reflection of a division among Detroiters over the issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, and origin. Those German Detroiters who still felt a close link

26 Louis, 87; Jack Miley, “Courage in Opening Round Decided Bout for Schmeling,” Detroit Free Press, June 20, 1936, 14. 99 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

with the fatherland were among those who identified more with Schmeling than with Louis. The sameAbend-Post article noted that Hitler sent Schmeling a congratulatory telegram. The German community clearly reveled in the glory Schmeling had brought to their “race”at the expense of a fellow Detroiter and American.27 Charles Ward of the Free Press, however, stood by the defeated “Detroit Bomber.” Defending Louis against his detractors, he wrote on June 29, referring to boxing experts, “Far too many of them are announcing with considerable certainty that the cuffing that Max Schmeling gave Louis will do Joe no good and perhaps may end his career as a fighter.” Ward concluded, however, “He’ll come back determined to vindicate those who said nice things about him before the Schmeling affair.” Of course, “those who said nice things” would have included many Detroiters such as Ward. But Ward avoided any recognition of the naysayers’ tendency to fall back on racial stereotypes when criticizing Louis. TheFree Press staff probably didn’t want to upset its readers or ignite a backlash by using charged language. Black Detroiters, who strongly supported Louis, had mixed reactions to the upsetting result of the fight. TheDetroit News, competition to the Free Press in the Detroit mainstream newspaper market, reported the day after the fight that Paradise Valley displayed very little dejection or violence in response to their hero’s fall. In fact, “Even the snake dances that followed Joe’s victories of the past year were not missing. They twined around streets filled with his fans, and the cry this time, even in defeat, was ‘Wait until next time.’” As the Joe Louis supporters who identified most with the fighter and had the most invested in the bout, blacks in Detroit would have been understandably devastated by the result of the fight. This optimism in the face of defeat is remarkable in many ways. The black community in Detroit did not have much positive history on which to reflect and would have been desperate to see one of its own reach new heights. Yet such constant misfortune might have steeled the resolve of these downtrodden residents of the city in a way that allowed them to take the 1936 upset in stride. Perhaps they could sense that Louis, still in the early stages of his professional career, was destined for greatness. However, not every black Detroiter was able to hold her chin so high. The same column in theNews

27 “Schmeling besiegte Louis durch K.O.,” Detroiter Abend-Post, June 20, 1936, 1. 100 John Muhs reported that an 18-year-old girl tried to commit suicide after the fight by drinking a bottle of strong disinfectant, before the drug store proprietor saw her and stopped her.28 Regardless of the nature of their reaction, blacks in Detroit demonstrated that Louis was their hero in victory or defeat.29 The number of skeptics grew, but with the remaining fan support Louis stayed determined in his pursuit. He soon began blazing a comeback trail with a new set of victories, beginning by defeating ex-champion Jack Sharkey. He easily dispatched Sharkey by knockout in the third round, and then produced six more equally impressive victories between the fall of 1936 and spring of 1937. Meanwhile, Schmeling had been received following his defeat of Louis by all Germans, including Adolf Hitler, as a national hero. By demonstrating his superior mental toughness, he became a symbol of the perfect Aryan man and a propaganda tool for the Nazi regime. Hitler ordered Schmeling to return as quickly as possible to the Reich, where a huge reception awaited him, including a three-hour tea party and photo-op at the Chancellery with Hitler, Goebbels, and other top Nazi officials. Schmeling’s victory and the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin served as similar symbolic expressions of the Nazis’ self-portrayal as the protectors of the highest ideals of western civilization. That they were competing against black Americans like Joe Louis and Jesse Owens “brought the question of American and German racism to the forefront of American consciousness.”30 This international rivalry between the United States and Germany politicized sport in a way that allowed Joe Louis a chance to break the color barrier in the heavyweight division that had existed since Jack Johnson. As a result of the growing anti-Nazi sentiment in America, the management teams of Louis and Braddock worked out a deal to avoid a Schmeling- Braddock title bout that was generating a lot of negative press and threats of boycott. Instead, Louis and Braddock would face off. The championship fight between the “Brown Bomber” and the “Cinderella Man” was set to be in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in June of 1937. Now many Detroiters, despite their continued support for their fallen hero, were more cautious in assuring a Louis victory over Braddock. In

28 There is no conclusive evidence cited by the News that the girl’s suicide attempt was directly related to the Schmeling upset of Louis, but the writer definitely implies it. 29 “Joe Louis Fans Celebrate, For It Was a Great Fight,” Detroit News, June 20, 1936, 5. 30 Erenberg, 92-106. 101 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

the Free Press on the day before the fight, Eddie Edgar wrote of how Joe “appeared to be anything but the sharp-shooting puncher he had been in the pre-Schmeling days” during his last sparring match before the fight. “There was a worried look on the faces of Joe’s handlers as they accompanied the Bomber back to his dressing quarters. And the experts who have picked the Bomber … left feeling that Joe after all wasn’t a 3-to-1 choice to whip Braddock.” On the day of the fight, Edgar wrote of how Louis’s loss of “superman” status meant being relegated by many Americans to the ranks of inferior Negroes. “It is said that Louis has become gun-shy—that is, that he becomes befuddled when a foe lets go with a right-hand punch—the type of blow with which Schmeling felled him,” wrote Edgar. “He no longer, they said is the bomber, but has become more of a defensive fighter who can’t think any too quick in hard going.” Of course, this was the common trope about black boxers, that they couldn’t take a punch and didn’t hold up well to pressure because they were weaker mentally than their white foes. This was an echo of a deeper belief that all blacks were instinctual beings who were not entitled to full citizenship. The fact that Detroiters like Edgar supported Louis while paying credence to these racial views demonstrated that the city still contained a relatively strong presence of such racial attitudes.31 This reversion to stereotypes and reservation of confidence was presumably attributable to the prospect of a black man becoming heavyweight champion for the first time since Jack Johnson, an unsettling thought for many whites. Johnson’s defeat of Jim Jeffries in 1910 set off dozens of race riots in American cities in the North and in the South. Not far removed from a KKK campaign and the Ossian Sweet affair, Detroit was particularly sensitive to the prospect of interracial violence. White Detroiters also may have been much more cautious about getting their hopes up for the Braddock fight because of their disappointment in his loss to Schmeling. Furthermore, Braddock had an inspiring story himself. After chronic hand injuries had forced him to work on the docks and collect relief checks for his family during the Depression, he turned his life and career around by beating Max Baer in 1935 to gain the heavyweight title. His story was encouraging for many Depression-era Americans who wanted to see

31 Edgar, “Battering by Separate Cuts Louis Drill Short,” Detroit Free Press, June 21, 1937, 13; Edgar, “Battle Eve Odds on Bomber Drop to 2½ to One,” Detroit Free Press, June 22, 1937, 15. 102 John Muhs him continue his boxing success. Though he was still many white fans’ sentimental favorite for the June 22, 1937, bout, Braddock was an aging champion and few expected him to actually defeat the powerful Louis. Sure enough, in the eighth round Louis landed a right to Braddock’s chin that literally took him off his feet and dropped him on his face for the count, setting off celebrations from Harlem to south-side Chicago to Paradise Valley in Detroit. Louis, who lived in Chicago at the time, recalled the throng of fans gathering outside his house after the fight and the black people yelling things like “Don’t be another Jack Johnson” and “We’re depending on you.” In Detroit, hundreds of people gathered outside Lillie Reece’s home until she came out to wave to them and be cheered. Remarkably, whites expressed little animosity toward Louis and made few cries for a “white hope” to stand up to the new champion.32 The next day Edgar triumphantly wrote in theFree Press, “Gone was the Louis who stumbled around … who didn’t know how to protect himself … who seemed gun-shy during his training days. In his place was Joe Louis— fighting man.” In another column, Edgar proudly noted that by dethroning the champ, Louis “became the first Detroiter ever to achieve that honor and thus completed a life saga that will outdo the rags-to-riches tales so popular in the days of Horatio Alger, Jr.” In his column, Edgar played up Louis’s ties with the whole city rather than isolating the black community. This is not entirely surprising coming from a mainstream newspaper, but the omission of racial implications from Edgar’s analysis speaks to Detroiters’ sensitivities to the threat of interracial violence and to the readiness with which some white Detroiters accepted Louis as one of their own after defeating Braddock.33

The Rematch: Louis versus Schmeling on the Eve of War Already, though, people turned to discussing the impending rematch with Schmeling. In the same issue of the Free Press, a story considered the possibility of a venue in the Motor City. “Detroit, it is figured, has an excellent chance to land a Louis-Schmeling match for several reasons,”

32 Louis, 118-119; Erenberg, 128. 33 Edgar, “World Championship Climaxes Louis’ Ring Career,” Detroit Free Press, June 23, 1937, 19; Edgar, “The Second Guess,” Detroit Free Press, June 23, 1937, 20. 103 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

read the article. “There is no deep-dyed anti-Schmeling sentiment here that would lead to a boycott.... It is also the home town of the new champion.” The comment reflects the complex racial tensions in Detroit. Because of the strong presence of black and white migrants from the South and the established community of descendants of German immigrants, both fighters had support in the city. Many Detroiters, including blacks, celebrated their champion, but at the same time, many Detroiters refrained from viewing Schmeling as the villain he was to New Yorkers, for example.34 Despite the celebrations in Detroit and statements such as Edgar’s, Louis knew his work was far from done. When initial negotiations between the two parties to schedule a rematch failed, the “Brown Bomber” bided his time by defending his title three times before spring 1938. Meanwhile, the fires of international tensions were stoked as Italy joined Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact to form the “Axis Powers” in November 1937, and Hitler rolled his troops into Austria in March of 1938. The threat of war in Europe was real, and Americans were growing nervous.35 In spite of these tensions, the boxing world wanted to see Schmeling and Louis fight again. Schmeling had defeated Louis and lost his chance to fight Braddock for the heavyweight championship, and now Louis had the title belt. Both men had legitimate claims to be the best. The natural solution was to let them fight it out in the ring. When the rematch was finally scheduled for June 22, Louis retreated to his camp and trained unremittingly. He understood the gravity of the fight’s context, later recalling, “White Americans—even while some of them still were lynching black people in the South—were depending on me to K.O. Germany.”36 Two years more mature and feeling the pressure to defend American values in the ring, Louis was not going to succumb to the recreational pleasures of golf and sex. He was in prime condition by the date of the fight and completely poised to exact revenge. Nevertheless, Detroiters still saw the fight as an even match in the days leading up to the fight. W.W. Edgar wrote on June 7, “Regardless of which side you are on, you can argue by the hour without coming to a satisfactory settlement,” referencing an actual argument he had heard between two local

34 “Kearns Makes Louis an Offer,” Detroit Free Press, June 23, 1937, 19; Erenberg, 110-112. 35 Ibid., 137. 36 Louis, 137. 104 John Muhs

fight fans over who would win. This report reflects real division in Detroit over the viability of the two fighters as possible champions, regardless of the two fans’ personal loyalties. The story demonstrates the lack of overt anti-Schmeling sentiment in the city and perhaps the presence of some pro-Schmeling sentiment, at least among the German community served by the Abend-Post. It was this relatively balanced atmosphere that had initially made Detroit a candidate city for hosting the fight. In full appreciation of the underdog German challenger in this monumental match, Edgar penned a column on June 19, writing that by coming back after losing the title once before, Schmeling had a chance to become one of the “most amazing champions the history of sports.” On the same day, the Free Press reported that Nazi officials raided Jewish residences in all of Germany and packed families into prison vans waiting in the street. This came just two days after reports that mobs had attacked Jewish Berliners following a decree that “was designed to assure a complete boycott of Jewish business.”37 Clearly, reconciling the German heritage of Detroiters and appreciation of the German Schmeling with the disdain for Nazi Germay’s increasingly hostile behavior toward Jews was a difficult task and a subject that theFree Press simply avoided. Turning from the front page to the sports page revealed a compartmentalization of the international political drama and the fight between Louis and Schmeling. The pre-fight sports coverage from Detroit treated the coming title bout as if it were to take place in a vacuum. No mention was made of the international or racial tensions that paralleled the Louis-Schmeling rivalry. Likewise, no mention was made of the coming heavyweight title bout in the reports of Nazi attacks against Jews. This came despite the daily presence of German-American Bundists at Louis’s camp, where reporters like Edgar and Ward spent time in covering the fight preparations, and despite Max Machon, Schmeling’s trainer, strutting around the German’s camp in a Nazi uniform.38 One plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that Detroiters did not need to be reminded of the stakes. Anxiety over a possible victory by the German also may have played

37 Edgar, “The Second Guess,” Detroit Free Press, June 7, 1938, 14; Ibid., 36; “War Extended by Jew Haters,” Detroit Free Press, June 19, 1938, 1; “Crowds Attack Jews in Berlin,” Detroit Free Press, June 17, 1938, 1. 38 Louis, 139-140. 105 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

a part in silencing Louis supporters in Detroit. By brushing the larger issues under the rug and focusing primarily on the pure sporting elements of the bout, and by refusing to tout Louis as the American standard-bearer in a politically and racially charged heavyweight fight, sportswriters allowed themselves a bit of leeway to minimize the implications of another possible Louis defeat. The drama built each day in anticipation. The day before the fight, the Free Press reported that the US government had indicted eighteen American citizens as suspected spies for Hitler, leading to the conclusion that “relations with Berlin are under the worst strain since war days.” Undoubtedly, because of the looming fight and events on both sides of the Atlantic, Americans, including Detroiters, were feeling a crescendo of tension. Another Free Press column from June 21 noted that “‘cleansing’ Berlin of its 140,000 Jews seemed more clearly than ever tonight to be the ultimate aim of continuing anti-Semitic persecution.” All the while, an increasingly emboldened Hitler increased international problems by stirring up Germans in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to demand reunification.39 On June 22, the day of the fight, Charles Ward of the Free Press picked the Bomber to take down Schmeling, but not with complete certainty, noting, “but the Schlager is a fair journeyman fighter and a match for Louis if Father Time remains neutral. If he sneaks that right hand over again, the Louis pickers may climb down The Brown Bomber’s attack was off their limbs and go slinking away just relentless in his rematch with Max Schmeling in Yankee Stadium on June as they did the last time.” The “Brown 22, 1938. He landed thirty-one punches in the two minute, four second-long Bomber” from Detroit had other plans, bout, while Schmeling failed to connect on a single punch. (Photo however. With the whole world watching, courtesy of the Bettman Archive.) he climbed into the Yankee Stadium ring on that Wednesday night with one thought: revenge.40

39 “U.S. Indicts 18 as Spies for Hitler, Including Two in Reich’s War Ministry,” Detroit Free Press, June 21, 1938, 1; “Nazis Clearing Berlin of Jews,” Detroit Free Press, June 21, 1938, 2. 40 Ward, “Ward to the Wise,” Detroit Free Press, June 22, 1938, 16. 106 John Muhs

The result of the fight was emphatic. Louis defeated Schmeling by knocking him out in the first two minutes and four seconds of the first round, making the bout the shortest heavyweight championship fight in history up to that point. Schmeling threw just two punches in the fight, a right cross that Louis blocked and a left hook that fell short of its mark. In the next day’s issue of the Free Press, there were reports from Paradise Valley that “cheering, shouting, singing and above all dancing, a crowd estimated at 10,000 gaily cavorted in the streets after the fight.” Black Detroiters could not contain their excitement. “Our Joe,” as he was familiarly known, had shown people everywhere that he, a black American, was the best boxer in the world.41 For all that was said about Louis’s superior punching speed and power, Detroiters were equally proud of the way he carried himself. Schmeling and his trainer made groundless claims that Louis cheated in both of their two bouts, which led to Charles Ward’s statement that “Louis, both in defeat and victory, seems a better sportsman than his opponent.” The carefully crafted public image of Louis made him a figure palatable to white Americans at the time. Detroiters could take additional pride in the fact that their city had produced a dignified champion. In a sign that Louis had reached the pinnacle and achieved national hero status, southerner Grantland Rice, the “Dean of American Sportswriters,” ironically compared the great (and black) Louis to the great (and white) Jim Jeffries, who retired as undefeated champion in 1904, in a June 27 article printed in the Free Press. Rice, who had previously called Louis the “bush-master of the North American continent” after his 1935 bout with Carnera, said that Louis and Jeffries were both “too good for the field” and had “no worlds left to conquer.” On June 28, Ward reflected the public’s feeling that the fight was more than just Louis vs. Schmeling. It was America vs. Germany. But Louis himself took an apolitical approach to the bout. According to Ward, “When somebody asked if [Louis] thought of old Max as the representative of Herr Hitler and the indomitable hosts of the ideological countries, he grinned and said no, he thought of him merely as old Maxie.” Now that Louis had beaten Schmeling, the Free Press was clearly less tentative about mixing the

41 “Paradise Valley Dances for Joy as Its Joe Wins,” Detroit Free Press, June 23, 1938, 1. 107 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

political context with sports coverage.42 Whatever Louis said, Detroiters, like most Americans, held onto their belief that his victory was one for their country. On July 11, Eddie Edgar wrote that Schmeling, had he beaten Louis, was to become even more closely linked with Hitler, and that Louis stopped the dangerous alliance from deepening. It should be noted that historians like Erenberg and Margolick argue convincingly that Schmeling was reluctant to become Hitler’s poster boy. Yet at the time, Edgar went so far as to say, “A victory would be the wedge by which Schmeling would pry his way into a high office in the Nazi government…. But Louis changed all this in little more than seconds.” Now that Louis had safely secured victory, Edgar was unafraid to recognize the international implications of the fight. Louis had become more than a boxer: he was a national hero serving to protect Americans from the threat of a fascist takeover. Then on July 15, Edgar gave his article the sub-headline, “Fighting for Uncle Sam,” based only on Louis’s statement, “I don’t care if the Government does take 75 per cent of my purse. I want to fight.” People like Edgar were so overjoyed by the victory that they construed even the simplest of Louis’s comments into reflections of his good American values of patriotism and humility.43 When Louis actually decided to fight “for Uncle Sam” by joining the army in January 1942, Detroiters’ pride in their hometown hero only grew. H.G. Salsinger of the Detroit News wrote on January 12, “Louis is the greatest sports figure of his time and one of the most inspiring of all time.” The first character trait of Louis’s praised by Salsinger was, of course, his humility. As a black man still trying to fully escape the shadow of Jack Johnson, Louis had to seem humble at all times, even at the apex of his career. Salsinger in fact contrasts Louis and Johnson, noting the lack of a serious search for a “white hope” to dethrone the Brown Bomber. This was a testament to the success Louis and his management team had in creating a public image of Louis as the “anti-Johnson” to dispel white fears. It is not unreasonable to suggest that had Louis cavorted with white women, had he worn flashy outfits and driven fast cars like Jack Johnson, it is unlikely he would have received the

42 Ward, “Ward to the Wise,”17; Grantland Rice, “The Sportlight,” Detroit Free Press, June 27, 1938, 14; Ward, “Ward to the Wise,” 15. 43 Erenberg, 58, 97-98, 115-116; Margolick, 127-128, 186-187; Edgar, “The Second Guess,” Detroit Free Press, July 11, 1938, 14; Ibid., 16. 108 John Muhs

The “Monument to Joe Louis,” dedicated in Detroit in 1986, generated controversy upon its unveiling due to its association with violence and the Black Power Movement. (Photo courtesy of Robert Graham.) same mainstream support in his hometown of Detroit, let alone the nation.44

Controversy over Detroit’s Memorialization of Louis The dedication of the “Monument to Joe Louis” at the intersection of Jefferson and Woodward Avenues in Detroit on October 16, 1986, five years after Louis’s death, is a testament to the city’s appraisal of Louis’s significance to the community. The memorial, commissioned bySports Illustrated and completed by Robert Graham, is a 24-foot-long bronze arm with a clenched fist suspended by a 24-foot-high pyramidal framework. Known simply as “The Fist,” the sculpture generated controversy upon its unveiling. Graham made no effort to duplicate Louis’s arm and instead worked from his imagination to come up with the ungloved fist. Critics preferred a replica of Louis in his fighting stance, “the whole man as he is always remembered in the ring.” TheFree Press reported that Detroit city councilman John Peoples asked if the council had the authority to move the piece from its high-profile location, saying that “Joe Louis was more than just a fist.”45

44 H.G. Salsinger, “Joe Louis Hailed as Greatest Sports Figure of His Time,” Detroit News, January 12, 1942, 21. 45 Marsha Miro, “Joe Louis sculpture already creating a stir,” Detroit Free Press, October 16, 1986, 1. 109 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Some black Detroiters not only felt that the monument failed to do Louis justice, but thought that it reflected negatively on the city’s image. During the 1980s, the city was known as the nation’s murder capital, and the damage from the 1967 race riots still seemed recent. TheMichigan Chronicle, Detroit’s African-American weekly newspaper, quoted Ms. Vera Wright as saying, “We have enough image problems and enough violence in Detroit without adding a clenched fist.” Certainly a less Black Power- inflected symbol would have ruffled fewer feathers in a city with a troubled racial history.46 Yet not all responses to the sculpture were negative. Some felt the work of art did the Brown Bomber justice. The son of Joe Louis, Joe Louis Barrow, said, “I am humbled and thrilled. It symbolizes the greatness of Joe Louis and the city that nourished him.” He was also quoted as saying, “The pyramid is symbolic of his impact on people at the top and bottom. Whether you were at the top or bottom, this man impacted everyone.” Others also perceived the fist as a testament to more than purely the punching power of Louis. Mayor Coleman A. Young, who was a childhood friend of Louis’s and Detroit’s first black mayor, serving from 1974 to 1993, responded to critics like Peoples by saying that he hoped “good sense” would triumph over the “know-nothings.” Young fought back tears when recalling how Louis grew up in Black Bottom and called the sculpture a “marvelous work of art.”47 In some ways, that the work of art generated controversy and discussion is a fitting tribute to Louis’s life. When Joe Louis defeated Braddock to become the first black heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson, and when he squared off against Hitler’s paragon of Aryan supremacy in Max Schmeling, he challenged Americans to rethink their own racial ideologies. He spurred further public discourse about racial issues by serving in the segregated army in World War II and later breaking the Professional Golfers’ Association color barrier in the January 1952 San Diego Open. It makes sense that even after his passing Louis and his achievements caused Detroiters to consider their city’s complex identity. Regardless of their varying reactions to the memorial, Detroiters on both sides of the debate made it clear that Joe

46 M.A. Goodin, “Family, peers split on Joe Louis monument,” Michigan Chronicle, October 25, 1986, 1D. 47 Ibid.; Bruce Alpert, “Is it a knockout?” Detroit News, October 17, 1986, 11A; Mark Kram, “Detroit monument salutes Joe Louis’ power,” Detroit Free Press, October 17, 1986, 16A. 110 John Muhs

Louis meant more to the city than a title belt he earned decades ago. Detroit remembered Louis in more ways than “The Fist.” In 1979, the city completed the construction of Joe Louis Arena, the venue where the Detroit Red Wings play their NHL games to this day. Adjacent to “The Joe,” as the hockey arena is known to locals, sits Cobo Center, host of the annual North American International Auto Show and former home of the Detroit Pistons, where a full statue of Louis stands in the concourse. Cobo Center also contains the Joe Louis Video Memorial Room, opened in 1991, which pays tribute to the Bomber with Ted Talbert’s video “And Still the Champ.” The Joe Louis Video Memorial Room commemorates the June 22 anniversary of Louis’s defeat over Schmeling by awarding each year several “Brown Bomber Jackets” to individuals who have made significant contributions to the community, particularly in outreach to youth. While it would seem that most Detroiters of the time viewed Louis as a reason to be proud, those who took issue with the black boxer’s battering of white foes forced the mainstream media to stifle any reflection on the value Louis’s victories had for race relations. Nevertheless, Louis’s match-ups against Schmeling and Braddock forced Detroiters to deal with the competing priorities of race, ethnicity, and nationality. It is clear, too, that any positive mainstream reaction to his accomplishments would not have been possible without the carefully crafted image of Joe Louis as Jack Johnson’s polar opposite. Louis emerged as a black hero in the pre-war Great Depression amidst a rocky racial climate, when Detroit needed him most, and will remain a legend in the Motor City for generations to come. The arc of Joe Louis’s career takes its place as part of a complex racial history in Detroit that continues to this day.

111 Hannah McMillan Challenging Jim Crow: Desegregation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“We’re back in Reconstruction,” UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Robert Burton House wrote to a colleague in August 1955. In his letter, House referred to the latest pressure to reexamine race relations in the South through the desegregation of public universities such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The process of ending segregation at the university had been a protracted struggle. In the early 1950s, the push to provide equal schooling for African Americans gained momentum with the desegregation of the university’s graduate programs in 1951 and the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Meanwhile, social progressives and civil rights activiststraces lambasted the University of North Carolina system for deliberately using its power to deny all North Carolinians equal rights for higher education. Due to UNC-Chapel Hill’s reputation for liberalism, many activists suggested the school as “the place to start” the desegregation

112 Hannah McMillan movement in southern public universities.1 Yet the case of desegregation in North Carolina evidences a notable contradiction. Here was a university with progressive students willing to challenge the status quo that was located in the racially polarized South. White supremacist opposition coupled with a conservative Board of Trustees led the university to approach the “new biracial responsibility” with what one journalist described as “the gingerly reluctance with which one lifts the lid on a teeming beehive.” Despite this reluctance, a few African American students “took on the establishment” through a judiciary battle that ended the policy of racial exclusion.2 This essay offers an account of the process of desegregating the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through a discussion of the genesis of the movement, the court cases that propelled the process, and the social changes that occurred through its implementation.

The Forces of Progress Meet Resistance As early as the 1930s and 1940s, educational desegregation emerged as a priority for civil rights activists in North Carolina. In February 1939, both white and African American citizens of Chapel Hill organized on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill to discuss the prospect of desegregation in higher education. Various individuals, including university professors and community civil rights activists, gathered in Graham Memorial Hall to work out a preliminary course of action. Although the meeting produced no policy changes, it accelerated the spread of desegregation discourse and cemented many biracial relationships among those calling for social change. After participating in the meeting, Charles Jones began corresponding with NAACP activists, strengthening his crusade for racial equality in Chapel Hill. The meeting provoked Jones to publicly condemn segregation in schooling, as he argued that “the law says separate but equal and we never have really done that.” Jones compared southern race relations to the institution of

1 Letter from Robert Burton House to Charles Raper, August 25, 1955, Folder 96, in the Robert Burton House Papers (03581), Southern Historical Collection of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter, “House Papers); “Spalding Views UNC Issue,” The News and Observer, April 19, 1948, in Negroes in North Carolina (hereafter referred to as NINC), vol. 4, 1223. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will also be referred to as “UNC-Chapel Hill” or just “UNC” in this essay. 2 Cabell Phillips, “Another Trial of Integration,” March 4, 1956, in NINC, vol. 4, 1295; Wallenstein, “Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: Desegregating the University of North Carolina,” Along the Color Line, 16. 113 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

marriage, saying that a husband and wife could not do everything separately and still “care for each other.” This echoed the arguments of activists at the meeting who pointed to a similarly failed relationship between whites and African Americans to argue for the need for equality in schooling and improvement of race relations.3 While a few individuals actively challenged southern standards of discrimination, most North Carolina leaders hesitated to advocate immediate changes to the social order. Journalist Marion Wright and other critics condemned the reluctance of both the governor and university officials who seemingly pursued “a policy of ‘wait and see’ that might better be described as ‘look the other way.’” Wright’s critique, published in The New South, expressed the views of the socially progressive Southern Regional Council, which criticized North Carolina leaders for waiting until court decisions forced the university into legal submission. According to the Council, white leaders had forfeited an opportunity to actively initiate biracial communication and cooperation. Additionally, the Council blamed this reluctance for promoting “paralysis of public thought” and preventing “discussion and planning” to provide a peaceful transition to desegregated schooling.4 By the mid-twentieth century, public sentiment in North Carolina varied from staunchly segregationist to radically egalitarian. Most white North Carolinians held beliefs reflected by the statement of UNC-Chapel Hill professor Edward Woodhouse, who claimed, “Negroes are just better off in colleges exclusively their own.” While white supremacists presented inherent “Negro inferiority” as unchallengeable dogma, other whites and African Americans called on the University of North Carolina system to open its gates to students of all races to provide opportunities for well-qualified individuals. Activism for desegregation increased with the social and political changes of the time, particularly the service of African Americans in World War II. In the 1940s and 1950s, liberals used changing social standards to argue that the right to attend a school based on merit

3 “The Episode of Interracial Meeting,” Chapel Hill Weekly, February 24, 1939 in NINC, vol. 4, 1222; Oral History Interview with Charles M. Jones, November 8, 1976, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter “Southern Oral History Program Collection”). 4 M.A Wright, How to Implement the Supreme Court Decision, March 1955, in the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, 8-9. 114 Hannah McMillan and not on skin color was “as sacred as any other right,” and that separate facilities harmed southern society. Those advocating for desegregation, like the Southern Regional Council, pointed to the “financial drain” and “irritation and friction” caused by the intentional separation of whites and African Americans. African American leaders, such as John Wheeler of Durham, argued that the ability to desegregate North Carolina’s public universities would “determine whether North Carolina’s Negro population will become a great reservoir of productive capacity and purchasing power or whether it will continue to be the number one problem in our economic life.” Segregation, Wheeler insisted, stunted North Carolina’s potential to promote peaceful race relations. Many other activists echoed Wheeler’s sentiments, calling for an end to discriminatory practices within an institution meant to provide equally for all North Carolinians.5 The desegregation of graduate programs at the university constituted an initial step towards eliminating discriminatory admission practices. As pressure for desegregation of the university intensified, law experts and civil rights activists discovered the fragile underbelly of Jim Crow: the inability of white institutions to deny African Americans entrance into professional schools that lacked equal counterparts in the state. In the 1950 case Sweatt v Painter, the Supreme Court ruled that the long-standing doctrine of “separate but equal” schooling was not applicable to the professional graduate programs of higher institutions. TheSweatt decision, which allowed an African American to enter law school at the University of Texas, challenged the legitimacy of segregation throughout the South. The justices declared that under-funded, unaccredited institutions created for African Americans provided inferior preparation compared to state-supported white institutions. While segregationists believed that North Carolina had led the way in creating truly “separate but equal” institutions, the Sweatt decision rendered separate professional schooling unconstitutional. North Carolina College, which became North Carolina Central University, provided a law school for African American students, but it lacked accreditation, preventing graduating students from taking the bar examination. The inequality between segregated law schools provided the basis for lawsuits by African American students seeking enrollment at the UNC-Chapel Hill

5 “The Episode of Interracial Meeting,” Chapel Hill Weekly; Wright, 6, 8, 9; Phillips, “Another Trial.” 115 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

School of Law.6 Targeting the “separate but equal” clause championed by segregationists, lawyers in the court case for Harvey Beech, J. Kenneth Lee, Floyd McKissick, and James Robert Walker, Jr., argued that the rejection of African Americans applying to the UNC-Chapel Hill law school denied the students’ constitutional rights, as they could not receive an equal education elsewhere. In 1951, the United States Federal Court ruled in favor of the students. In a letter to University of North Carolina system president Gordon Gray, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Chancellor House described this process as “an exact illustration of the tail trying to wag the dog,” expressing his concern that the process to desegregate graduate programs would force the university to make far-reaching changes. Despite officials’ reluctance to social change within the institution, students appeared indifferent to African American matriculation in their graduate schools. Henry Brandis, Jr., the dean of the law school, reported that white students took “the presence of Negroes completely in stride” and did not “object to their presence,” which was shocking by southern standards in the 1950s.7 In May 1954, Brown v Board of Education jolted white southerners into the panicked realization that US courts would no longer uphold segregation in schools. C.P. Spruill, dean of the General College, gathered statements from university leaders predicting the likely effects of the court decision, which he subsequently compiled into a memorandum sent to Chancellor House. While the memorandum did not take a definitive stance on desegregation, Spruill and other leaders commented on the anticipated social and structural adjustments that would accompany an attempt to desegregate the undergraduate program. Within the report, Spruill suggested that one possible “unfavorable” result of desegregation would be a widening range of student preparedness. Additionally, Spruill conjectured that forced integration would repel white students and create a “less open and more fragmented” community. Within the memorandum,

6 “Segregation at the University,” Asheville Citizen, March 24, 1951, in NINC, vol. 4, 1240; L.J. Toler, Carolina to celebrate 50 years of African-American students, November 2001, UNC News Services. 7 Letter from Chancellor House to President Gray, January 22, 1952, in the Gordon Gray Files, Box 13, Southern Historical Collection of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter, “Gray Files”); Letter from Henry Brandis, Jr., to Chancellor House, October 11, 1954, in Gray Files, Box 13. 116 Hannah McMillan

Roy Armstrong, the Director of Admission, predicted immediate changes regarding the cost of university attendance, as whites would inevitably demand private housing. Furthermore, Armstrong argued that enrollment of a significant number of African Americans would considerably decrease the number of white women applying to the university. North Carolinian B.C. Bartlett echoed this concern in a letter to House, surmising that the only officials who would support desegregation must “enjoy seeing their wives in the arms of Negro men.”8 While the memorandum contained many wary sentiments, some leaders contributed optimistic expectations. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the dean of the School of Journalism, and the dean of the School of Business Administration all suggested that desegregation could be accomplished without “any serious disturbance.” Norval Luxon, of the School of Journalism, supported this statement with a student poll, which suggested “that none would object in any way to the presence of Negroes in classes.” Fred Weaver, the dean of Student Affairs, reiterated Luxon’s belief, and said that the main objection to the entrance of African Americans would not come from students, as the campus seemed widely “sympathetic” to desegregation. Weaver suggested that while many progressive students would “welcome” desegregation, others would simply “accept it as an established fact” of inevitable change. Officials predicted statewide objections among students’ parents and the General Assembly.9 Within the state government, concern over Brown v Board prompted Governor Luther Hodges to create a Special Advisory Committee on Education in 1954. The Committee studied theBrown decision and produced a report that presented recommendations for future desegregation strategies, commenting specifically on higher education. In Committee reports, officials declared that “no other judicial decision … has ever affected the lives of all the people of North Carolina so directly and drastically.” Gordon Gray, President of the Consolidated University System, was a member of the Committee along with other higher education officials who were deeply

8 Memorandum to Chancellor House, October 12, 1954, in Box 13, Gray Files; Letter from B.C. Bartlett, January 1952, in Box 2, Robert Burton House Records, Southern Historical Collection of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter “Robert B. House Records”); Memorandum to Chancellor House, October 12, 1954, in Box 13, Gray Files. 9 Memorandum to Chancellor House, October 12, 1954, in Box 13, Gray Files. 117 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

invested in the desegregation process. Gray and other officials hesitated to draft a plan for future desegregation of the university system for fear of threatening “the social order and peace of the state.” Progressive North Carolinians, like Reverend Isaac Northup, who hoped that UNC-Chapel Hill would “furnish moral leadership” in the South, criticized this reluctance. By failing to make concrete recommendations for peaceful desegregation, the Committee lost an opportunity to implement plans for integration before the judicial system interceded.10 In May 1955, the Board of Trustees of the Consolidated University System confirmed its policy on desegregation following a vote to reject African American applicants. The resolution passed after various African American high school students applied for undergraduate admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. Responding to political pressure and racial prejudices, the board passed a resolution stating that applications from African Americans would not be accepted, as the state of North Carolina had “spent millions in providing adequate and equal educational facilities” for both races. The Trustees advised that allowing minorities into white schools was unnecessary and imprudent. While the resolution expressed the attitude of the board’s majority, discordant opinions emerged among a few members. John J. Parker and J. Spencer Love publicly dissented to express “shame” in the decision and to praise the student generation for its willingness to challenge the status quo. Parker and Love contended that the resolution prevented Chapel Hill from “helping to solve world problems” through “local sacrifices.” But among North Carolinians wishing to continue segregation, these dissents provoked indignation and prompted requests for the resignation of Parker and Love. Eugene Hood, the editor of the “Public Pulse” portion of the Greensboro Daily News, remonstrated that no one “should be a trustee of a state institution who is not willing to go along with ... the overwhelming

10 Report from the Special Advisory Committee on Education, 1954, in Box 15, Gray Files; “University Should Furnish Moral Leadership To South, Accept Negro Students: Northup,” Asheville Citizen, in NINC, vol. 4, 1285. 118 Hannah McMillan majority of its citizenship.”11

Students Challenge the Status Quo While most officials avoided advocating for equal educational rights for African Americans, the younger generation coordinated multiple campaigns for desegregation at UNC-Chapel Hill. Anne Queen, Director of the YWCA, described the Campus Y at UNC-Chapel Hill as “very much involved” in the process of desegregation. Queen suggested that support for desegregation matched the Campus Y belief that everyone, regardless of race, deserved a “well-rounded life at the university.” In the spring semester of 1954, the YMCA held a Human Relations Institute conference, with extended seminars on race relations and integration in North Carolina. A workshop on “The Student and Segregation” offered participants the opportunity to learn about the history of Jim Crow in North Carolina, as well as the future of desegregation under recent court decisions. This seminar, along with the integration of graduate school programs, led YMCA Vice President Bill Lofquist and other leaders to pose the question: “If graduate school is integrated, why shouldn’t the undergraduate school be?” In the fall of 1954 and early winter of 1955, Lofquist and other Campus Y members actively encouraged African American high school seniors to apply to UNC-Chapel Hill as undergraduates. Lofquist maintained an extensive correspondence with LeRoy Frasier, Sr., and encouraged Frasier to seek applicants from Hillside High School in Durham. Desegregationist supporters praised the efforts of the Campus Y to end segregation, prompting one UNC Board of Trustees member to write to President Gray that he felt “very much impressed with the broad attitude of the younger generation.”12 Shortly after the Campus Y voiced support for racial equality in schooling, desegregation fervor spread quickly to religious organizations

11 Board of Trustees Resolution on Policy of Admitting Blacks, May 1955, in Box 2, Robert B. House Records; Letter from J. Spencer Love to Gray, May 22, 1955, in Box 13, Gray Files; Letter from Eugene Hood, April 29, 1955, W.C. George Papers, Folder 14, Southern Historical Collection of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter “W.C. George Papers”). 12 Oral History Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection; YMCA Minutes on the Human Relations Institute, March 24, 1954, in Box 35, Robert B. House Records; Oral History Interview with Bill Lofquist, January 21, 2010, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection; Letter from J. Spencer Love, May 22, 1955, in Box 13, Gray Files. 119 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

on campus. In January 1955 the Wesley Foundation, a campus Methodist organization, passed a resolution denouncing segregation as a “denial of true Christian brotherhood” and opened membership to persons of any race. By March, the Wesley Foundation organized a lecture series titled “Race and Segregation,” led by Dr. Maurice Whittinghill, a University of Michigan geneticist. The Foundation organized the series to combat beliefs suggesting “Negroes were biologically inferior,” and the organization invited “all interested in desegregation” to attend. Subsequently, in May 1955, the Baptist Student Union passed a resolution supporting the admission of African Americans as undergraduates, declaring the Union “concerned as Christians that the University of North Carolina discriminates against fellow citizens.” The Baptist Student Union, like the Wesley Foundation, championed the “Christian principles of equality and brotherhood” and urged university officials to consider admitting black students. While religious organizations provided vocal support for desegregation attempts, many white churchgoers critiqued these sentiments and ridiculed white activists for “eating with niggers.” Charles Jones, a Presbyterian minister who was active in organizing students, suggested this chastisement came largely from Chapel Hill citizens who disapproved of the radicalism of the student activists.13 Excluding religious organizations, student reaction to the prospect of desegregation seemed mixed. TheDaily Tar Heel reported that a psychology course polled students and found that while “integration was slightly favored,” most students remained “generally indifferent.” Other students voiced strong opinions on the issue. In May 1955, more than a dozen student leaders, including the YMCA and YWCA presidents, the editor of the Daily Tar Heel, the President of Graham Memorial Activities Board, the chairman of the Student Party, and the Student Body vice president, gathered to petition for the integration of the university. This group insisted that “the ideal of human equality and freedom of association is one that can no longer be relegated to some future time,” and referenced the university’s duty

13 Edens, Pioneers: The Daily Tar Heel and the Integration of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1990, in the North Carolina Collection, 20; news item from the Daily Tar Heel, March 19, 1955, in Folder 14, W. C. George Papers; Baptist Student Union Resolution Concerning the Admission of Negro Students, May 1955 in Box 35, Gray Files; Oral History Interview with Charles M. Jones, November 8, 1976, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection. 120 Hannah McMillan

as a “great liberal institution” to “set a precedent for the rest of the state and the South as a whole.” In addition, student leaders pledged “support for ‘educational implementation’” of court decisions to desegregate the Consolidated University.14 In response to this support for desegregation, the president of Student Government, Donald Fowler, wrote to the Board of Trustees to “clarify” that the gathering of student leaders in support of desegregation did “not necessarily” reflect “the majority viewpoint.” TheDaily Tar Heel suggested that “extreme opposition” to desegregation existed “in those areas where the individual is greatly affected,” referring to those who would live in close proximity to African Americans on campus. Additionally, on-campus living arrangements prompted parents to voice concern. Clinton West, from Kinston, expressed to President Gray the notion that the only students willing to live with African Americans would be “the lovers of mixers,” and he advised the university to build a separate dormitory for this group. West assured Gray that “95% of taxpayers” were “willing to pay to stay white.”15 In April 1955, five African American high school students applied to the university seeking admission as undergraduate students. Of these five students, three of the men met academic qualifications, but Admissions rejected the applicants—LeRoy Frasier, Jr., Ralph Kennedy Frasier, and John Lewis Brandon—solely because of race. Each of the three men resided in Durham and achieved high class rankings upon graduation from Hillside High School. During the application process, Frasier explained to Lofquist that they would wait and “see what the reaction of the Administration will be.” After review of the applications, Director of Admissions Roy Armstrong wrote to Chancellor House to announce the applications were “of such quality” that the boys would be “eligible for admission to the university.” President Gray, Chancellor House, and Dean of Admissions Armstrong then drafted and sent a letter of rejection to each of the young men, explaining, “The Trustees of the University have not yet changed the policy of admission of Negro students to the University. Negroes are eligible

14 “Psychology Students’ Poll Slightly Favors Integration,” The Daily Tar Heel, March 4, 1956, in NINC, vol. 4, 1289; Fred Powledge, “Over a dozen student leaders ...,” May 14, 1955, The Daily Tar Heel, in NINC, vol. 4, 1278; “Seen,” The Daily Tar Heel, October 22, 1955, in NINC, vol. 4, 1290. 15 Letter from President of Student Government Donald Fowler to the Board of Trustees, June 1, 1955, in the Gray Files; “Psychology Students’ Poll Slightly Favors Integration,” The Daily Tar Heel; Letter from Clifton West, June 3, 1955, in Box 13, Gray Files. 121 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

to make application to come to the University for Graduate and Professional Study not offered at a Negro College in North Carolina.” They concluded, “Negroes are not eligible at the time to make application for admission to the Undergraduate divisions of the University.16 The father of the Frasier brothers decided to take legal action against the university’s discriminatory policies. Frasier felt that the three boys were “entitled” to “the best education the state had to offer.” He maintained that segregation highlighted obvious discrimination and was “just plain wrong.”17 Frasier, Frasier, and Brandon filed a suit against the university on the Federal District Court level, arguing that the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v Board applied to all public education, including higher education, with “equal force.” Conrad Pearson, a prominent NAACP leader, Floyd McKissick, the first African American law student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and William Marsh, another African American graduate of the law school, represented the three African American students. The plaintiffs argued that based on the Brown and Sweatt decisions, the university “must admit Negroes to institutions by determining their qualifications for admission on the same basis as that of other persons.” In defense, the Board of Trustees maintained that the state of North Carolina provided equal undergraduate services for all races. Furthermore, the defense argued that African American students were “‘in no way injured” by segregation policies and that to admit African American applicants would be “doing them a ‘disservice.’” However, the court ruled unanimously in favor of the plaintiffs, generating the “second vital breach in the segregation barrier.”18 The court decision inflamed many board members wishing to preserve the system of segregation. In a split vote, the Board of Trustees decided to appeal the case to the US Supreme Court. Still, some trustees and university leaders were willing to admit these students to avoid the use of Supreme Court force. For instance, North Carolina Attorney General William

16 Letter from Roy Armstrong, September 14, 1955, Chancellor RB House Papers, Box 2; Letter from Admissions to John Lewis Brandon, April 28, 1955, in Folder 1, Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers, Southern Historical Collection of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill (hereafter “Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers”). 17 Interview with L.B. Frasier, June 27, 1995, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection. 18 Frasier et al. v. Board of Trustees court case docket, in the Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers, Folder 3; “State Answers UNC Suit,” News and Observer, July 29, 1955, in NINC, vol. 4, 1279; Phillips, “Another Trial.” 122 Hannah McMillan

Rodman anticipated that the Supreme Court would inevitably compel the university to cooperate, so he advised Chancellor House to admit the students proactively. This contradicted Rodman’s personal beliefs that integration remained “not only wrong legally but socially, as well.” Within the board, there was a movement to refrain from an appeal among trustees who believed that the university should accept the decision and actively pursue peaceful integration. Judge John Parker advised Governor Hodges that “the Board of Trustees of a state university cannot afford to put itself in the position of defying the law,” and it was the duty of the board to take the lead in matters of desegregation in North Carolina. Additionally, Parker went on record to argue that “the words ‘university’ and ‘universal’ come from the same stem,” meaning a state-sponsored institution should be open to all people. The Campus YMCA also recommended that the trustees save “the University’s money” from “being spent in a futile court battle.”19 In March 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the federal court decision, declaring equal opportunity in higher education a “right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” In the decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren proclaimed education “the most important function of the state,” thereby obligating the university to fulfill its duty to educate all qualified North Carolinians. Furthermore, Warren argued that separate school facilities, even at the undergraduate level, provided unequal opportunities for African Americans, rendering separate institutions unconstitutional. Consequently, the court ruled that race could not be used as a criterion of admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the university “must not refuse to admit a qualified person merely because he is a Negro.” The elimination of racial discrimination in the admission of undergraduate students applied to the entire University of North Carolina system, leading to the admission of a few black students to other North Carolina institutions as well.20

19 “State Answers UNC Suit,” News and Observer; Letter from Judge John Parker to Governor L. Hodges, June 1955, in Box 13, Gray Files; “Time But Little Else,” Chapel Hill News Leader, September 15, 1955, in NINC, vol. 4, 1288. 20 Frasier et al. v. Board of Trustees court case docket; Wallenstein, 16. 123 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Reaction to the Courts’ Decision For many white North Carolinians, the decisions of the district and Supreme Court to desegregate UNC-Chapel Hill signified an attempt to undermine southern traditions of racial hierarchy. While some journalists insisted that the general public hailed the decision as a “timely expression of moral principle,” white supremacist opposition provided fiery deprecations of the courts. In an article for the New York Times, journalist Phillip Cabell condemned white supremacists as “steeped in traditions” of “prejudices and habits.” Yet, for those accustomed to the Jim Crow South, the court decisions infringed on the southern “way of life.” Many opponents argued that this initial step could lead to “mass infiltration” and race-mixing, resulting in suffering for both races.21 Anatomy professor Dr. Wesley Critz George conducted a nationwide campaign to promote opposition to desegregation. An original founder and the president of “Patriots of North Carolina,” George worked with his “militant white supremacy group to combat the ‘usurpation’” of the state legislature and “mongrelization” of the white race through integration, as described in the pamphlets and editorials he produced. The UNC-Chapel Hill professor denounced integration as a “device of a communist-clerical conspiracy to promote miscegenation and thereby the ultimate downfall of American civilization.” In November 1954, George circulated a petition against the integration of the university, which he later delivered to Governor Hodges, Chancellor House, and President Gray. In an effort to buttress his campaign to prevent black undergraduate students from being admitted, the professor wrote an incendiary letter to the Daily Tar Heel claiming that integration violated natural law, for “when you cross up different breeds of animals, including man, you soil the breed.” Throughout the early 1950s, George published multiple scientific works to combat the “big lie” spread by “liberals” that desegregation would be beneficial, through an explanation of ways that “race-mixing” would “lower the quality” of the white race and “destroy our civilization.”22 George’s petition to combat desegregation of the university provoked

21 Wright, 6, 8; Phillips, “Another Trial”; “The Sky Will Not Fall,” Greensboro Daily News, September 17, 1955, in NINC, vol. 4, 1290. 22 Phillips, “Another Trial”; Edens; Letter to John Clark, April 21, 1955, Folder 14, W.C. George Papers. 124 Hannah McMillan a variety of responses from within the student body. By February 1955, George had gathered 5,900 signatures for his petition to halt integration of the university. Many students, however, discredited George’s attempts, noting that he had circulated the petition in greater Orange County, which they claimed made it unrepresentative of university-wide sentiment. Students argued that “experiences undoubtedly would have been different” within Chapel Hill and the student body. Yet his petition garnered support from within the university. Students supporting the anti-integration cause created a supplemental petition with 1,000 signatures, threatening that students would resist any change to “the present social order.” This student petition also surmised that integration would surely “hurt the Negro race” as well as whites. Despite this petition, most analyses of the UNC-Chapel Hill student body during the 1950s depict anti-integration students as “a vociferous but ineffectual minority.” Meanwhile, the Campus Y circulated another petition in support of integration, claiming that “the other petition had presented a false and incomplete picture” of the student body’s general sentiment.23 Additional white resistance to integration of the university came from North Carolinians determined to prevent race-mixing and the allocation of limited resources to blacks. In the early spring of 1955, the Daily Tar Heel printed an article praising the state’s “intelligence and calm.” The following day, the paper published a letter to the editor from a Smithfield native, David Grimes. Referencing UNC-Chapel Hill Trustee member John Clark’s campaign of white supremacy and intimidation, Grimes, a 1954 alumnus, offered to explain “a few facts to you, your nigger-loving friends, the University and the State of North Carolina”:

You are getting much too loud. The people of the state do not like it and they are the University’s pocketbook. You WILL cease! That is a fact. Those who put the future of the University ahead of the propagation of socialism and the destruction of the Germanic races in the South are going to cut you off. John Clark is the voice of this group. You had better listen to Clark because if he takes too long to eradicate your school of thought, you may go the unfortunate way of all niggers and Reds who

23 Edens, 17; Phillips, “Another Trial”; Edens 17, 22. 125 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

have stepped out of line in the South. Go north, young man.

Despite some student body support for continued segregation, most found this letter appalling, including ten anti-integration students who wrote to the Daily Tar Heel to express their embarrassment at Grimes’ extremism. While many UNC-Chapel Hill students and officials were willing to delay desegregation, they found Grimes’ letter to be far too intemperate.24 Notwithstanding passionate opposition to desegregation, the arrival of Brandon and the Frasier brothers caused only “a mild ripple of interest” on the campus, bringing “no more violent reaction than raised eyebrows,” according to contemporary news reports. While other southern states experienced heightened threats of violence requiring police assistance, North Carolina remained calm. In September 1955, reports of campus life as the trio arrived suggested that the majority of students were indifferent to integration. The consensus was that the process would not affect individuals’ lives. It seemed that most students shared a Greensboro journalist’s sentiment that the school would “survive the admission of three Negro youths to its undergraduate school just as it has survived other crises, real and imagined.” Still, onlookers who had anticipated fierce protest to the presence of African American students in Chapel Hill were shocked by what Chancellor House described as the “matter-of-fact” calmness on campus. LeRoy Frasier, Sr., gave “major credit to the student body and the boys” for securing a peaceful transition. One student attributed the lack of social upheaval to the size of the university, remarking, “Carolina is so big, you hardly realize they are here.”25

24 Edens, 22. 25 Phillips; “North Carolina Shows the Way,” Christian Science Monitor, February 1956, from Box 2, Robert B. House Records; Neal Cheek, An Historical Study of the Administrative Actions in the Racial Desegregation of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1930-1955, from the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC- Chapel Hill; “Psychology Students’ Poll Slightly Favors Integration,” The Daily Tar Heel; “The Sky Will Not Fall,” Greensboro Daily News; Letter from Chancellor House to Thomas Pearsall, Sept. 24, 1955, in Folder 96, the Robert B. House Papers; Interview with L.B. Frasier, June 27, 1995, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection; “Frasier Blames Alabama U. Officials for Disturbances,” Durham Morning Herald, February 9, 1956, in Folder 2, Leroy Benjamin Frasier papers. 126 Hannah McMillan

Pursuing a “Quiet Approach” to Desegregation While North Carolina newspapers had widely covered the court actions leading to the trio’s admission, the media generated only moderate coverage documenting the students’ first steps on campus. This was partially a result of Chancellor House and other university leaders pursuing a “quieter” approach to desegregation. House believed that the “less said and the more normally everything proceeds, the better.” Additionally, following the contentious court case, NAACP leader Conrad Pearson sought to prove that the struggle to integrate the university had not been secured for the sake of publicity. Rather, Pearson argued that action to end segregation aimed to ensure African Americans “the right to go to school wherever they want.” According to Pearson, the only picture taken of the three young men had been captured at the request of one white reporter. The lack of media attention pleased the three new students. Brandon hoped that “now that the novelty and publicity is about over, maybe I can really settle down and take my place as another Carolina student.”26 In reality, the three African Americans were not just any other students, and their transition into the university reflected the trustees’ plan to accept the students “but do nothing to make them welcome.” A few white students echoed this sentiment, contending that although “barriers had been broken down … the Negro won’t be welcome in the social picture.” Notably, university officials did not acknowledge the arrival of the trio with any formal greeting. Although UNC-Chapel Hill remained violence-free during desegregation, the three African American students still sensed enmity from the trustees, the administration, and even some faculty. One white student suggested that although the administration would follow through with the court decision, desegregation could not “legislate or enjoin a society” nor remove resentment toward African Americans. For this reason, the trio put forth “very little effort” to befriend whites, sensing the concern among white students that they would be criticized for socializing with African Americans.27

26 Letter from Chancellor House to Thomas Pearsall, September 24, 1955, in Folder 96, Robert B. House Papers; Oral History Interview with Conrad Odell Pearson, April 18, 1976, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection; Edens, 27. 27 Phillips; “Students Not Worried Over Question of Admitting Negroes,” Asheville Citizen Times, April 8, 1951, in NINC, vol. 4, 1254; David Brown, “A Grudging Acceptance,” Alumni Review, May/June 2002. 127 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Despite the prediction of total hostility, there were a few campus organizations that attempted to welcome the African American students. The Campus Y, theDaily Tar Heel, and the student government all provided a “friendly face” in an inimical environment, according to LeRoy Fraiser, Jr. Upon the students’ admission, the YMCA sent an official letter of congratulations, expressing the Y’s “pleasure” at the students’ admission and offering to tour the trio around campus. Some parts of campus life allowed for a greater degree of integration, notably athletics. All three played intramural sports with white students. LeRoy Frasier, Jr., found that although “very, very few activities … welcomed us,” athletics provided a common outlet for socialization across racial divisions. Frasier recounted spending time in the pool and gym with white students, as well as being allowed to play on UNC-Chapel Hill’s Finley golf course.28 Reflecting similar “fringe problems” experienced by the first African American graduate students in 1951, these undergraduate pioneers dealt primarily with discrimination in social activities. While the Frasiers commuted from Durham during their freshman year, John Lewis Brandon lived on the segregated floor of Steele Dormitory along with African American graduate students. Continued segregation in Chapel Hill facilities challenged the ability of the African American students to integrate into campus life, as they were unwelcome in local restaurants and movie theaters and at the Carolina Inn. Additionally, segregated facilities in the Chapel Hill area provided an obstacle to the trio’s involvement in campus organizations. In 1957, at a Cosmopolitan Club picnic, an Umstead Park ranger asked LeRoy Frasier, Jr., to leave the premises because of his race. Ironically, the club, which Frasier had joined in 1956, sought to “create a deeper and closer understanding between individuals of different … colors.” The act of discrimination towards a member prompted the club to pass a resolution declaring the “responsibility to guarantee equal rights to all members in participating in its activities.” The group sent copies of its resolution to the governor, state park administration, state legislature, student legislature,

28 Letter from YMCA President Graham Rights to Frasier Brothers, Folder 1, Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill; Brown; Phillips; Brown, 9-11. 128 Hannah McMillan and the student body president.29 Although the Frasier brothers and Brandon breached the race barrier, they were not the first African American undergraduates to receive degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill. After spending three years at the school, each of the three young men withdrew to pursue other options. During their time as students, they struggled academically, despite strong scholastic performances in advanced high school courses. LeRoy Frasier, Jr., attributed his poor grades to the stressful environment on campus. Frasier, Sr., suggested that they endured so much alienation and social tension that it was nearly impossible for them to excel in the classroom or enjoy their experience. After the three students left the school,The Durham Herald published an editorial reproving them for “failing out.” In response, Frasier, Sr., wrote a piece in The Carolina Times defending the need for the young men to concentrate the majority of their efforts on making “academic adjustments and social adjustments” compared to other students’ normal college experiences.30 Although Frasier, Jr., denied leaving because of “racist pressure,” all three eventually transferred to the all-black North Carolina College to finish their degrees. LeRoy Frasier, Jr., Ralph Frasier, and John Lewis Brandon became a teacher, a banker, and a chemist, respectively. Ralph Frasier suggested in a 2002 interview that his experience at UNC-Chapel Hill deserves neither “credit nor blame for where I am today.”31

UNC-Chapel Hill as Reluctant Model Despite apparent problems in UNC-Chapel Hill’s journey to desegregation, the university seemed “unquestionably successful” compared to other southern institutions facing the same issue. The school represented an anomaly in the South, as it avoided major protests or violence. In 1956, the University of Florida sent its student body president, Fletcher Fleming, to visit Chapel Hill to observe its social climate. Fleming conjectured that

29 Letter from Henry Brandis to Chancellor House, October 11, 1954, in Box 13, Gray Files; Phillips; Cosmopolitan Club Resolution, May 1957, in Folder 1, Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers. 30 Transcripts from Hillside High School, Spring 1955, in Folder 3, Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers; Letter to L. Austin, June 3, 1959, in Folder 1, Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers; Brown, “A Grudging Acceptance,” Alumni Review, May/June 2002, 10. 31 Brown, 8. 129 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

UNC-Chapel Hill managed a peaceful transition primarily because of the small number of African American students on campus. Fleming felt that it seemed unlikely that other southern schools could follow the same path unless these campuses mirrored this gradualism. UNC-Chapel Hill would become an example for other southern universities. Because the Frasier court decision forced the UNC system to change its policies regarding the admission of African American undergraduates, North Carolina State University and North Carolina Woman’s College in Greensboro began desegregation after the fall of 1955.32 The desegregation of the undergraduate program at UNC-Chapel Hill provided African Americans with newfound equality under the law. One Durham resident hoped this judicial victory “demonstrated to both the selfish bully and weary underdog that law and order” is the “supreme bulwark against men’s inhumanity to men.” Chapel Hill was commonly perceived as a liberal mecca full of progressives advocating for social change. However, examination of the struggle for desegregation of the university complicates this picture, which must include bitter, reluctant leaders squirming to resist institutional transformation. As Conrad Pearson said of university officials, “Every change they made … well, they were forced to do it.” Despite being the leading liberal institution in the South, with “a reputation for enlightenment,” the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill approached desegregation at an unhurried pace due to “a social reality that was reactionary.”33 The university’s reluctance to open its doors to large numbers of African Americans prevented it from becoming a “real University of the people” for North Carolina. In the fall of 1956, only ten African Americans enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs at the school. Historians such as William Chafe argue that the complacency of university officials to fully integrate prevented UNC-Chapel Hill from attracting numbers of African Americans proportional to North Carolina’s population. Chafe believes the smug “civility” of university officials regarding desegregation limited the potential for true integration and only “provided a veneer for more

32 Edens, 31-32; Wallenstein, 16. 33 Oral History Interview with Conrad Odell Pearson, April 18, 1976, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection; Letter from Frank Walter, February 13, 1956, in Folder 1, Leroy Benjamin Frasier Papers; William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford UP, 1981), 9. 130 Hannah McMillan oppression.” While these criticisms highlight the recrudescence of racial prejudices under Jim Crow, the success of three students in challenging discriminatory policies marked a major triumph in the battle for racial equality.34

34 Interview with Bill Lofquist, January 21, 2010, Southern Oral History Program Collection; Phillips; Chafe, 249; Wallenstein, 16. 131 Luke Wander Red Books and Smoking Guns: Using Mao to Rationalize Violence in the American New Left

traces

The scope of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was not limited to Chinese society and culture. This 1968 poster, one of a series of fifteen, depicts a squad of young Red Guards leading the oppressed people of the Third World in rebellion against the enemies of global communism, celebrating the global nature of the revolution. (Image courtesy of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.)

132 Luke Wander

“But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow…”1

When the Beatles released their August 1968 single “Revolution,” many Americans praised the pacifist tone of the song, which called for an end to unplanned, chaotic revolution. However, there were those among the American New Left who felt differently.2 Both the New Left Review and Ramparts, two leading left-of-center magazines, published caustic reviews of the song, labeling it a “betrayal” and a “lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear” for its criticism of violent protests against the establishment. Some compared “Revolution” with the Rolling Stones’ single “Street Fighting Man,” released just months earlier, and claimed that the Stones’ interpretation of the mass protests of 1968 favored the radicals while the Beatles’ song was an attempt to suppress revolutionary thought.3 Regardless of their political intent, John Lennon and Paul McCartney used Mao Zedong’s name to conjure up the image of violent demonstrations breaking out around the world. Why did these songwriters single out this Chinese communist, when he was hardly the only revolutionary leader active in world politics in mid-1968? Lennon and McCartney had a long list of names to choose from, among them Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Malcolm X. They also might have chosen to sing about other movements, using the image of a bloody fist to evoke the chaos that had occurred a few months earlier in Paris, or the image of teargas to conjure up the student riots on college campuses in Berkeley, Madison, and New York City. Instead, they chose an image that addressed the more violent reaches of the New Left. An attentive listener would have noted that the lyrics do not refer directly to Mao. The Beatles were not castigating Mao but the protester who was holding Mao’s picture, using it as a tool to advocate bloody revolution. Although Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not the only radical movement that influenced the American New Left, this Beatles song reflects the fact that it was one of the most significant.

1 John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Revolution,” The Beatles (1968, Apple Records), 45 rpm. 2 The New Left represented a current of revolutionary thought that approached activism with the mindset of a vanguard party during the 1960s and 1970s. 3 Jon Weiner, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1984), 60. 133 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

At the bottom of a poster promoting the Cultural Revolution (see p. 132), a bold exclamation reads, “我国无产阶级文化大革命震撼全世界, or “Our nation’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is shaking the whole world.”4 At its center, a strong young man stands firmly with a spear-sized pen in one hand to symbolize the re-education of Chinese youth and a book of quotations from Chairman Mao in the other to symbolize his commitment to Mao Zedong Thought.5 Forming a cordon of support around him is a group of seven Red Guards, both boys and girls, one of whom holds a flag declaring, “Long Live the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!” In the path of the troupe of Red Guards stand five lesser figures, an Imperialist (帝), a Revisionist (修), a Capitalist (资), a Feudalist (封), and a Reactionary (反), all cowering at the robust ranks of Chinese. Behind the Red Guards stand an Arab, an African, a Native American, and a Latin American, all soldiers of the Third World, all holding guns and Little Red Books. In the background a giant, red sun rises over the globe. The poster claims that China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shook the whole world. This essay examines whether there is any truth to this propaganda. The Cultural Revolution was arguably the most turbulent period in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the forty years since its conclusion, scholars have attempted to understand it in Manichean terms that portray its participants as either villains or innocents. Furthermore, though the Cultural Revolution was a distinctly Chinese event, scholars have not considered its impact beyond China. This essay begins to fill that

4 In 2011, the staff of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan was sorting through an old storage room when they discovered a rare set of Chinese propaganda paper cuts from the Cultural Revolution era. In all, the collection contained fifteen pieces, each of which tell a different part of the story of the Cultural Revolution in the ancient art form in which the artist crafts a detailed, complex image from a single sheet of red paper. To see the complete set, visit http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/ccs1ic. 5 Most Western scholars use some variant of the term “Maoism” to describe the ideology of Mao Zedong. However, this word has only appeared on rare occasions in China since 1949. Mao made it clear that his philosophy was a set of ideas as opposed to an –ism, or philosophical system. This was more than likely some form of forced humility, as it would be pretentious to refer to one’s own theories as a zhuyi. In Chinese, the word 主义 (zhuyi) is a suffix that denotes a certain type of doctrine, whereas the word 思想 (sixiang) is indicative of an ideology. The difference between the two is almost too subtle to notice, but it is significant all the same. The doctrine of Karl Marx is known as 马克思主义 (makesi zhuyi), or Marxism, and the doctrine of Lenin is similarly known as 列宁主义 (liening zhuyi), or Leninism. Mao did not want his followers to think of his ideology within the same framework as Marx and Lenin. Therefore 毛泽东思想 (Mao Zedong sixiang), or Mao Zedong Thought, became the official term for Mao’s ideology. For these reasons, in this paper I will use the term Mao Zedong Thought to refer to the ideology of Mao Zedong. 134 Luke Wander gap by examining the effect of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on the American New Left, arguing that it produced a current of revolutionary theory that emphasized the notion that everyday violence had the potential to alter the consciousness of the entire world.

A Brief History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution The decade between 1966 and 1976 saw violence and factionalism shake China’s domestic political, social, and economic structures to the brink of collapse. The primary instigator of the tumult was Mao Zedong, the founder of the PRC and leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao’s theoretical, political, and social perceptions, his unrivaled status among China’s elite, and his intense personality were essential to the Cultural Revolution. It would not be a leap to suggest that had anyone other than Mao Zedong been at China’s helm, the Cultural Revolution would not have occurred.6 In carrying out this massive campaign, Mao demonstrated his ability to mobilize China’s oppressed against their oppressors, his commitment to the concept of a Marxist-Leninist revolution, and his willingness to affect millions of lives in order to accomplish his aims. Mao’s most basic goal was to revitalize the nation’s revolutionary spirit and alter the consciousness of the Chinese people. His second goal was to eradicate the influence of the bureaucratic class that had come to power since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. In his theoretical framework, government officials had a predisposition for displaying pretentious, selfish, and elitist behavior. Therefore he called for the masses to criticize and humiliate influential members of the CCP at the local, provincial, and even national levels. The third of Mao’s goals was to inspire China’s youth to embrace his revolutionary spirit. To this end he called on students from high schools and universities to put down their books and rise up against any elements of society that could be understood as anti- revolutionary or revisionist, in the certainty that such a movement would

6 In other words, the CCP did not contain any elements that were inherently capable of instigating the Cultural Revolution other than Mao. Though this sentiment is present in nearly all literature on the Cultural Revolution, the work of Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen explicitly centers itself on this premise. See Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, Ten Years of Turbulence: The Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1993), viii; Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), ix. 135 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

produce a generation of worthy successors to the revolution. His fourth goal was to change the policies of the CCP to reflect his desire to see the Chinese masses embrace collectivism. He reformed the examination system, eradicated pay raises and bonuses for urban employees, simplified the military’s ranking system, and reassigned urban doctors to serve in the countryside.7 Mao expected the masses to follow his directives to create a new, more revolutionary and collectivized China. However, Mao massively underestimated the chaos his call to revolution would create. The first three years of the revolution were its most tumultuous. On May 16, 1966, the CCP issued a notice to the party’s leadership officially declaring the beginning of a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Nine days later students at Beijing University put up the firstdazi bao, or big character poster, disparaging the school’s leadership and committing the students’ loyalties to Mao. After a summer of rising tensions in which students across the country began to roam the streets wearing red armbands and criticizing their elders, on August 5 Mao created a dazi bao of his own, titled “Bombard the Headquarters,” that cast Liu Shaoqi, his number two, and any of his followers as enemies of the party.8 Less than two weeks later, a crowd of an estimated one million students gathered in Tiananmen Square to receive their Chairman in the first of many public rallies to unite the Red Guards.9 Following Mao’s commands, groups of Red Guards in most big cities moved swiftly to launch vicious campaigns against perceived revisionists. Their mission was to destroy the “four olds” of Chinese society: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.10 It was not long before Mao’s followers exceeded his expectations for revolutionary fervor. When Mao spoke of destroying the “four olds” in his writings and speeches, he intended this process to be slow and gradual, but the Red Guards saw no reason to delay, raiding family homes, destroying antiques, and beating anyone who stood in their way while the military and police stood by. In 1976, a troop of Red Guards occupied a local government

7 Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 112. 8 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 90. 9 Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 126. 10 Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi, Wenhuadageming Shinianshi (Turbulent Decade: a History of the Cultural Revolution) (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press, 1986), 56. 136 Luke Wander

office in Shanghai, seized the seals of office, and established a revolutionary committee to temporarily oversee government proceedings.11 This power grab soon became a model for Red Guard groups throughout China. Despite backlash from older leaders, the violence of the Cultural Revolution only gained momentum in late 1967 and early 1968. In this atmosphere, friends indicted friends, sons accused fathers, and spouses turned on each other in order to demonstrate one’s own innocence. The violence on display was rudimentary, in contrast to the sophisticated, strategized violence that defined the earlier Chinese Revolution. Most beatings occurred when a troop of Red Guards singled out individuals to ridicule.12 Though the physical nature of this treatment did not always lead to death, the psychological torment often drove victims of the revolution to attempt suicide. Reports indicated the violence reached such a level that some Red Guards practiced cannibalism as a way to both punish counter- revolutionaries and test the loyalty of their own members.13 In the spring of 1968, some Red Guard factions obtained firearms and began to compete amongst themselves, and China became the scene of what looked like civil war. In Mao’s eyes, the Red Guards had lost the ability to work together for the benefit of the revolution, so he ordered the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to intervene. He then sent almost eighteen million Red Guards to rural areas to learn lessons of the proletariat from the peasantry.14 By 1969, the Red Guard phase of the Cultural Revolution, and with it the worst of the violence, was over. The chaos of the late 1960s brought China’s government and economy to a crippling halt. The country’s youth had beaten and humiliated leaders at all levels of the CCP and had weakened China’s infrastructure, making transportation unpredictable. The period between 1969 and 1976 was primarily a time in which China’s masses recovered from the disruption while the political elite vied for Mao’s favor as the Chairman’s health gradually decayed. The suspicious circumstances of Lin Biao’s death

11 Lieberthal, 114. 12 For a detailed look at the “collective violence” of the Cultural Revolution, see Gong Xiaoxia, “The Logic of Repressive Collective Action: A Case Study of Violence in the Cultural Revolution,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered, ed. Kam-Yee Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 113-132. 13 “A Tale of Red Guards and Cannibals,” The New York Times, January 6, 1993, A8. 14 Lieberthal, 115. 137 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

in 1971 disillusioned many who had so fervently backed him during the initial phase of the Cultural Revolution.15 As Mao’s health deteriorated, competition surged between Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and head of the more radical faction, and Zhou Enlai, the symbolic head of the PRC who headed the more moderate faction. By the time of Mao’s death in September 1976, the moderates had come to prominence despite the death of Zhou Enlai in January of the same year. This created an atmosphere in which Hua Guofeng, Mao’s immediate successor, oversaw the arrest of the radical Gang of Four and proclaimed an end to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

A New Perspective on the Cultural Revolution Countless scholars, both in China and the West, have attempted to understand the phenomenon of the Cultural Revolution since its conclusion in 1976. In general, Chinese scholars have produced a body of work that leans heavily on official policy, while Western coverage of the Cultural Revolution is largely theoretical due to the distance, both physical and relational, between China and the West.16 Both Chinese- and English- language scholarship tends to be marked by an undertone of judgment, either defending the Cultural Revolution as an honest attempt to revive China’s spirit or attacking it as a rash, poorly planned power grab on the part of a megalomaniacal dictator. With only a few exceptions, these scholars have disregarded how the Cultural Revolution tapped into global trends and

15 According to the CCP, Lin Biao had hatched a scheme to kill Mao and succeed him as head of the party. Mao discovered this and managed to escape danger. Subsequently, Lin attempted to flee to the Soviet Union in an airplane, but it crashed over Mongolia, killing Lin and everyone else aboard. Barnouin and Yu, Ten Years of Turbulence, 237-242. 16 Resolution on CPC History (1949-1981) (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1981); Gao Gao and Yan Jiaqi, Wénhuàdàgémìng Shíniánshǐ (Turbulent Decade: a History of the Cultural Revolution); Wang Nianyi, Dàdòngluànde Niándài (Years of Turmoil) (Henan: Henan People’s Publishing House, 1988); Cai Yingshen, “Kaifang shehui de diren: Mao Zedong yu Qin Shihuang, Nacui faxisi zhuyi yu Wenhua dageming bijiao (The Enemies of Open Society: Mao Zedong and Qin Shihuang, a Comparison of the Cultural Revolution and Nazi Fascism),” Xin Shiji (2002), accessed 20 March, 2013, www.caixin.com; Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (New York: Touchstone, 2003); Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution; Ma Jisen, The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004); Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Gao Mobo, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008). 138 Luke Wander

had a meaningful impact all over the world.17 Over the years, less scholarly writing on the Cultural Revolution has produced a burgeoning genre of victim literature in which disillusionment with Mao Zedong Thought has emerged as a prominent theme. This study neither condemns nor defends Mao and the Cultural Revolution and seeks to avoid the Sino-centric narrative found in many extant sources, instead initiating a discussion of the role of the Cultural Revolution in the evolution of global communism. Specifically, this essay focuses on the effects of the Cultural Revolution on the American New Left, examining the manifold ways in which Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), used Mao Zedong Thought to cultivate and adapt the idea of “justified violence” in the civil rights movement on the United States West Coast in the 1960s. This essay also considers other contemporary fringe groups that used Mao Zedong Thought to justify violence outside of the African American narrative. These currents demonstrate the appeal of Mao in the lives of revolutionary figures far from China. On the surface, China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a massive effort to force the Chinese people to revive the fading spirit of collectivism, but as an unintended result, people from all over the world heard Mao’s rallying cry and adapted it to their own situations.

Using Mao to Rationalize Violence in the American New Left During the 1950s, the American Left drifted slowly toward the middle of the political spectrum, becoming bureaucratized as it aged. By the late 1960s, the “New Left” emerged as a movement radical enough to wholeheartedly embrace the teachings of Mao Zedong. What occurred in the interim? On January 1, 1960, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), founded in 1905 by American socialists Upton Sinclair and Jack London, morphed into Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Due to what younger members viewed as a stagnating, bureaucratic structure, the group took on a much more radicalized stance, upsetting senior members and creating a divide that resulted in what eventually became known as the “New Left,” in which SDS played a large role. In the early 1960s, groups within the New

17 Though Barnouin and Yu’s 1998 work and Ma Jisen’s 2004 work both break ground on China’s international goals during the Cultural Revolution, they both focus chiefly on China’s diplomatic relationships and disregard the tangible effects of the Cultural Revolution across the globe. 139 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Left, freed from their ties to the previous generation, began to put effort into reforming American society. At first, most participants were young, college-educated, middle-class Americans. These students, having grown up in post-World War II America, felt vexed by issues like racism and the Vietnam War. Despite having been warned of the evils of Mao’s Red China, young students of this generation learned about a different version of Mao. One such student was Anita Hoffman, the wife of Abbie Hoffman, the founder of the Youth International Party. Hoffman later claimed to have discovered that Mao was not the brute tyrant she had read about, but rather that he “wrote poetry and eliminated poverty in his country.”18 Revelations such as this inspired a new enthusiasm for activism from the left, which had grown dissatisfied with the performances of President John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The optimism accompanying the initial months of the Kennedy presidency waned as the policies and initiatives of both Democratic presidents contradicted their campaign goals. Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis, his ambivalence toward the civil rights movement, and Johnson’s decision to allow the slow but steady buildup of military personnel in Vietnam made the New Left feel that the liberal leadership had abandoned them.19 This rift gave the leaders of the New Left no choice but to take an alternative route to accomplishing fundamental change. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) urged the party to supplant long-time Democratic incumbents who had been elected under a system that repressed the voting rights of African Americans. Party leaders said no. In September 1964, a student strike on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley protested the university’s decision to ban political writings amongst student groups. The spirit of the Berkeley strike, the first of many such protests, would eventually spread to college campuses across the United States in the following years. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began to radicalize as the idea of black separatism became more and more popular within its ranks. As the promise

18 Interview with Anita Hoffman in Ron Chepesiuk, Sixties Radicals, Then and Now: Candid Conversations with Those Who Shaped the Era (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1995), 173-175. 19 R. David Myers, Toward a History of the New Left : Essays from Within the Movement (Brooklyn: Carlson Pub., 1989), 4-5. 140 Luke Wander of peaceful integration between whites and blacks began to disintegrate, violence became the mode by which the movement would either operate or be operated upon.20 It was on these grounds, in late 1966, and only months after Mao proclaimed the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California.21 The role that Mao and the Cultural Revolution played in the formation of New Left ideology in the United States can only be understood within the tradition of communism as a whole. By 1966, a long line of revolutionaries had analyzed and reanalyzed the Communist Manifesto. Vladimir Lenin’s interpretations of Engels and Marx helped him to found the Soviet Union, while Joseph Stalin reinvented Lenin’s ideas to consolidate his position as Soviet premier and lead the USSR through the Second World War. Mao Zedong in turn used Stalin’s theories to create a brand of Marxism that catered to the specifics of his People’s Republic of China. Along the way, different voices added their perspectives, but in the 1960s era of post-de-Stalinization, Mao arguably had become the flag bearer for the Marxist cause. In the United States—where communism and its variants, while occasionally enjoying minor fits of popular support, had never been a serious political contender—the leaders of any groups wanting to call themselves communist in the 1960s necessarily held Mao in high regard. His position at the top of the CCP, his role in the Chinese Revolution, and his outspoken critique of US imperialism all worked together to make his ideology attractive to young American communist leaders during the 1960s. It was within this context that Mao’s Cultural Revolution had a meaningful impact on the American New Left, specifically within the groups defined by racial goals. Due to the combination of a desperate need for a radical, relevant example and a frustrating history of repression, several groups within the New Left movement used the imagery and ideology of the Cultural Revolution to conceive of a new brand of Third World Marxism within the United States that supported violence and working-class action to achieve a successful people’s revolution. The New Left was an umbrella

20 Myers, 6. 21 On May 16, 1966, the CCP put out six notifications, one of which Mao wrote personally, that proclaimed the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Most scholars mark this as the official beginning of the Cultural Revolution. For more see MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 38-40. 141 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

organization that included numerous groups with varying worldviews revolving around a socialist center, including groups like the Young Lords, the Red Guard Party, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, the New Communist Movement, and the Weather Underground Organization.22 However, the actions of the most radically violent group, the BPP, merit the closest inspection. Members of the BPP, under the influence of SDS, looked to China for guidance and inspiration as well as a sense of continuity within the international communist movement. They saw the Cultural Revolution as Mao’s commitment to the concept of continual revolution, or the notion that a truly successful revolution was one that never stopped. From a racial perspective, they heard Mao’s call to rise up against the bourgeoisie as a reinvigorating push toward the use of violence in the campaign for racial equality. The African American community had experimented with radicalism before, but the BPP represented a tipping point. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the BPP, along with several organizations under its influence, would come to use the rhetoric of Mao’s Cultural Revolution primarily to justify violent action and even to raise capital. Mao Zedong himself offered his support to revolutionary violence in the United States in

22 For an overview of the multifaceted American New Left, see Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). For a detailed narrative of the Young Lords’ transformation from a Chicago street gang into a solidified, Marxist, Puerto Rican revolutionary group, see Judson Jeffries, “From Gang- bangers to Urban Revolutionaries: The Young Lords of Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 96, no. 3 (Autumn, 2003): 288-304. For a discussion of the intricacies of the Afro-Asian American relationship, see Daryl Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972,” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 1079-1103; and for an interview with Alex Hing, the former Minister of Information for the Red Guard Party and founding member of I Wor Kuen, see Carolyn Antonio and Fred Ho, Legacy to Liberation: Politics & Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America (San Francisco: AK, 2000), 279-296. For an account of the role of the Brown Berets in the context of the Chicano movement, see David Montejano, Sancho’s Journal: Exploring the Political Edge with the Brown Berets (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). For a comparative analysis of the FBI’s treatment of the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End, 2002); and for a look into the life of Dennis Banks, the most influential leader in the American Indian Movement, see Dennis Banks, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004). For a critique of the New Communist Movement and its commitment to Mao Zedong Thought, see Rod Bush, “When the Revolution Came,” Radical History Review 90 (Fall 2004): 102-111. For a comprehensive history of the Weather Underground organization, see Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006). 142 Luke Wander

a 1968 statement.23 However, after the violence of the late 1960s died down, one BPP leader began to see the same writings of Mao that had roused him to violence as evidence that violence should not have had such a prominent role in BPP operations. In this case the effect of Mao Zedong Thought was to restrict violence. This multifaceted use of Mao Zedong Thought helps to explain both the rapid rise in popularity and the subsequent failure of violent action in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Role of Mao Zedong Thought in the Formation of the Black Panther Party The Black Panthers were hardly the first African Americans to look to China for inspiration. In the 1930s, Langston Hughes, the great American poet and social activist, wrote the poem “Roar China!” in which he extolled the tenacity of China’s revolutionary spirit in the face of foreign oppression.24 Paul Robeson, the African American singer, actor, and athlete who rose to fame as a Broadway star in the 1920s and became a civil rights activist in the 1940s, learned Qi Lai, the national anthem of the PRC, and made it part of his repertoire.25 In 1959, the African American intellectual W.E.B. Dubois travelled with his wife to the Soviet Union and China, where he met with Mao Zedong in person and later praised the conditions of the proletariat in both communist nations.26 In 1965, Robert Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP and an influential supporter of armed self-defense, left Cuba, where he had been in exile for four years, and made his way to China, where he raised his two sons and Chinese leaders treated

23 Officially, the statement made clear Mao’s support of the African American struggle against violent repression as opposed to support of violence as a means to an end. However, it contained statements such as, “Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule of the US monopoly class and destroying the colonialist and imperialist systems can the Black people in the United States win complete emancipation.” Words like “overthrow” and “destroy” indicated Mao’s support for violence in this struggle. See Mao Zedong, Statement by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Support of the African American Struggle Against Violent Repression (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1968), 3. 24 Langston Hughes, “Roar China!” The New Masses (February 22, 1938): 20. 25 Fred Ho, “The Inspiration of Mao and the Chinese Revolution on the Black Liberation Movement and the Asian Movement on the East Coast,” in Afro Asia: Revolutionary political and cultural connections between African Americans and Asian Americans, ed. Fred Ho and Bill Mullen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 157. 26 Daniel Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), 705-706. 143 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

his family as respected guests. It was Williams who urged Mao to put out the 1968 “Statement in Support of the African American struggle against violent repression.”27 Throughout the twentieth century, there was tension between the men whose more radical views often resulted in controversy and the more conventional thinkers who argued for peaceful methods of attaining racial parity under the law. The Black Panthers continued on the path of Hughes, Robeson, Du Bois, and Williams. Early in its existence, the BPP was based more on intellectual interests than violent activities. The party evolved out of study groups that drew on the appeal of the Marxist perspective for understanding their sociological condition. The BPP’s education programs were designed to examine the United States from a Marxist perspective and to reveal the greedy, materialistic nature of American capitalism, thus forming a basis for revolution in the minds of their pupils. In addition to these more didactic classes, the party also implemented programs aimed at the less educated that were intended to teach the lumpenproletariat its role in the revolution.28 In order to supply these classes with instructors, the party first had to educate its members. While taking these political education classes, which were mandatory starting in 1966, party members studied the written works of Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Robert Williams.29 These names revealed the party’s dependence on anti-colonial, Marxist literature in its ideological activities. The party emphasized the application of Marxist revolutionary thought while letting the traditional rhetorical voices of African American history fall by the wayside. This emphasis frustrated those in the African American community who did not find these foreign influences helpful to the struggle. Some of the more educated students, such as JoAnne Chesimard, the brash

27 Ho, 158. 28 In Marxist nomenclature, the term lumpenproleteriat refers to the lowest, most subjugated classes in society. Though they lacked political consciousness, Fanon saw this group of social outcasts as the largest potential source of spontaneous and radical revolutionary will. For more, see Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998) and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Publishers Group West, 2004), 81-88. 29 Ryan Kirkby, “‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Community Activism and the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971,” Canadian Review of American Studies 41, no. 1 (March 2011): 44-45; Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 38-39. 144 Luke Wander young activist who would in 1970 change her name to Assata Shakur and earn herself a reputation for violence among Black Liberation activists, were concerned about the BPP’s failure to connect the lessons of Mao Zedong Thought to the specific history of African American communities. From her perspective, the party leaders teaching political education classes focused too much on Mao’s Little Red Book and not enough on figures who were essential to African American history, like Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Nat Turner.30 She feared that the party was attracting too many members who expected to be handed a gun and orders to go out and shoot policemen, and not enough members who wanted to be a part of the class struggle. She related to Mao’s ideas, but was convinced that they would be of better use if contextualized within the situation of the African American community of the late 1960s. In an attempt to become involved at the grassroots level, the BPP eventually set up the Liberation School for the sole purpose of inculcating a Marxist education to children aged two to thirteen. According to Bobby Seale, a co-founder of the BPP, teachers at the Liberation School showed children that skin color was unimportant and that the primary struggle going on was “a class struggle against the avaricious businessmen and the small ruling class” who wanted to exploit racism.31 This sort of teaching appealed to mainstream black leaders such as Roy Wilkin of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the National Urban League. Whereas others had urged African Americans to work hard and gradually assimilate into the middle class, or to peacefully protest their way to equal rights, the Panthers used Marxism to create a new narrative wherein African Americans were not regular members of society but instead a group of colonized subjects who, unlike the Chinese, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, and the North Koreans, could fight United States imperialism from within. These party members viewed Mao as the leader of the struggle to upend the power

30 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: L. Hill Books, 2001), 221-22. During the 1960s historian Herbert Aptheker rejected the widely accepted notion that the response of the average African American to his or her suppression at the hands of white elites was that of passivity and docility. In one of his more well-known works, Aptheker offered several accounts of slave revolts in order to prove that the treatment of slaves was inhumane, as many slavery apologists thought otherwise. His analysis placed these slave revolts in a Marxist context. See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1963). 31 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1991), 417. 145 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

structure that placed whites at the top. Mao had led a successful people’s revolution and had opposed the United States along the way. The vast majority of Americans viewed Mao as a threat to the country. However, it was members of the New Left movement, specifically in the Black Panther Party, who viewed this threat as a moment of opportunity and hope. In this way, the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, though often portrayed by western media as a chaotic power grab, came to be viewed as the front line of a struggle that the Black Panthers wanted to be a part of in order to take down the machine of American imperialism from within. While cofounder Huey Newton’s vision for the party contained these broad ideological elements, the distinguishing trait of the Black Panther Party during its heyday was its willingness to use violence as a means to an end. With the party’s founding in the autumn of 1966, Newton and Seale put out the Ten-Point Program outlining the basic principles and demands of the party. Violence, though originally referred to as “self-defense,” was one of the basic tenets of the original Black Panther Party, and could be found in the party’s founding document. The seventh point stated that, in order to “defend our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality,” the party would invoke its Second Amendment rights to say that “all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.”32 Shortly after the official launch of the BPP on October 15, 1966, Newton and Seale obtained their first weapons from Richard Aoki, a self-proclaimed revolutionary of Japanese descent. Aoki gave the pair two guns—one M-1 rifle and a 9-mm pistol—free of charge after they persuaded him that it was what a “real revolutionary” would do. Soon afterward, they brought their weapons in plain sight to a community gathering, where they told partygoers that they were forming a new revolutionary organization. This first outing had the effect that Newton and Seale had been hoping for. In January of the next year the two co-founders, along with their first recruit, an eighteen-year-old drop-out named Bobby Hutton, used funds from their antipoverty paychecks to open an office in a vacant building in North Oakland, where they offered young black men political education classes and weapons training. Soon the party had a fair number of members and, thanks to Aoki’s donation of a .357 magnum and two more pistols, a growing

32 Huey Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), 4-5. 146 Luke Wander

arsenal.33 Guns were not the only tools of revolution that the Panthers carried. When patrolling the streets of West Oakland, they frequently carried law books, tape recorders, and cameras, hoping to capture evidence of the racist brutality they wanted to end. The notion of a group of African Americans wielding firearms in public was extremely worrying to the Oakland police. On one occasion, an officer stopped Huey Newton outside of the BPP office and asked for his driver’s license. There ensued the following exchange:

“Is this your true name, Huey P. Newton?” the officer asked. Newton nodded. “Is this your true address?” the officer asked. Newton nodded again. “What are you doing with the guns?” the officer asked once more. “What are you doing with your gun?” Huey answered.34

Thus began the street war between the armed Black Panther Party and the Oakland police. The Panthers continued to carry their weapons openly, thinking of themselves as the guardians of the African American community against a racist police force, while the police became increasingly anxious about the spread of weapons on the streets. Party members became known for displaying their guns in public and threatening police officers with chants like “the Revolution has co-ome, it’s time to pick up the gu-un.”35 The Panthers’ gun toting was, on the surface, a fundamentally American phenomenon. As long as they followed local gun laws, they could not be prosecuted. Symbolically speaking, however, the Panthers’ dedication to the image of the gun was a result of Mao’s influence. The gun allowed the BPP to turn rhetoric to action, and in doing so fueled a brand of violence that claimed several lives. The party relied on Mao not just for ideas, but for capital as well. As the party grew, the demand for new additions to its arsenal increased. In a

33 Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Reading: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1994), 112. 34 Ibid., 114. 35 David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 207. 147 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

This 1968 poster, one of many made by Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party’s resident artist, is emblematic of the pugnacious self-image that the Panthers worked so hard to promote in the late 1960s. Its representations of (left to right) Africans, African Americans, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, and American Indians demonstrate that the Panthers felt they were part of a movement that was both violent and global in nature. The placement of the quotation from Chairman Mao, as well as its content, provides evidence of the central role of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Black Panther ideology. (Image reprinted from Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas.)

shrewd manipulation of the capitalist system, Newton recalled having come into contact with a potential market that he could exploit. When hordes of UC-Berkeley students bused en masse into Santa Rita prison during the Free Speech Movement, Newton pounced. To Newton, these students gave the Panthers the opportunity to both spread Mao Zedong Thought and turn a profit. Newton, Seale, and Hutton made a habit of going to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where they would purchase Mao’s Little Red Book in bulk. The three BPP members would then stand in the busiest part of the UC-Berkeley campus selling Little Red Books for one dollar apiece, sometimes accompanying each sale with an the exhortation to “read the

148 Luke Wander

Red Book and do it like the Red Guards did it!”36 The scheme was successful, resulting in the acquisition of even more guns and ammunition. In this way, the BPP marketed Mao’s ideas to other leftists so that they could put those ideas to work in the streets. On the night of April 6, 1968, fourteen members of the BPP crowded into a couple of vans stocked with guns and rode into the streets of Oakland. What followed were some of the bloodiest and most catastrophic hours in Black Panther history. The BPP Chief of Staff, twenty-five-year-old David Hilliard, was among those fourteen. Under Eldridge Cleaver’s leadership, he had agreed to go along on this ride, despite knowing that blood would be spilled and arrests made.37 Hilliard was not the kind to back down from a fight, but the circumstances made the idea of a raid appear ludicrous. Two days earlier, James Earl Ray had gunned down Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee. Across the United States, racial tensions surged to the point of national emergency. Nowhere was the tension between activists and the police higher than in Oakland, the home of the BPP. Hilliard knew that each side was looking for any excuse to pull the trigger and inflict maximum damage. He was certain that the night would end in disaster, but still he got in the van. What could have given Hilliard such conviction in the face of guaranteed arrest, or worse, death? By early 1967, the Black Panther Party had been active for only a few months. Hilliard, who would eventually become a prominent member of the BPP, spent those first months on the sidelines of the movement. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, fresh from the action, would stop by Hilliard’s place and share stories over drinks. Though they were contemporaries, Hilliard considered himself every part Newton’s student, sensing something different about Newton and the BPP. “[The party] isn’t fronting,” he wrote in his memoir, “they’re for real. They put on guns, load their ammunition, and don’t back down when they find trouble.” Yet for all the admiration Hilliard expressed toward Newton’s tenacity, it was the founder’s intellect, his “brilliant, mischievous, fascinating ideas” that really drew Hilliard in. When he asked Newton how and why he knew so much about revolutionary thought, he got a simple answer: “Reading. You can do

36 Pearson, 113. 37 David Hilliard, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 184-86. 149 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

it. I’ll teach you. I’ll tell you what to read. You can do it.”38 Hilliard’s Panther education was informal. As a teacher, Newton stayed away from lecture halls and podiums, opting for the interior of his girlfriend’s Volkswagen to serve as the setting for Hilliard’s education. With Newton driving and Hilliard gazing out the window, the two would cruise the streets discussing the Cuban Revolution, Crowley’s The Greatest Beast, China, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Initially, Hilliard was doubtful about the relevance of an Algerian psychiatrist’s writings on revolution to the situation of African Americans in the 1960s. To counter this doubt, Newton applied the lessons of worldwide revolution to the situation of African Americans, equating the revolutionaries behind the new socialist society of Algeria to the “lumpen field niggers, the oppressed, the implacables” of the United States.39 As Newton spoke, Hilliard listened and watched the pavement of San Pablo Avenue roll by. It was during these conversations that Hilliard began to see things differently. Where he once saw the familiar streets and people of Oakland, he now saw “battlegrounds and revolutionaries.”40 David Hilliard’s life as a revolutionary had begun. In February of 1967, the Black Panther Party of Northern California (BPPNC) invited Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcom X, to speak at an event that would commemorate her husband’s legacy and the anniversary of his assassination. The Los Angeles Police Department had forced Shabazz’s security team, the US Organization, to stay away, leaving Shabazz without protection at a time when it was desperately needed. This security vacuum prompted the leaders of the BPPNC to recruit the up-and-coming Oakland Panthers to serve as Shabazz’s protection.41 True to the beliefs of the Party, the Panthers, supported by the Oakland contingent, arrived at the airport carrying shotguns, displaying them openly. They boarded Shabazz’s plane and escorted her out of the terminal, risking the wrath of the police and a bloody shootout in the process. Days later, it was revealed that Jon George, the lawyer for the BPPNC, had advised the Oakland Panthers not to load

38 Hilliard, 119. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 118-120. 41 Though they went by this name, the Oakland Panthers were not officially connected to the BPP. 150 Luke Wander

their guns.42 Huey Newton was livid. If a shoot-out had occurred, the presence of the Oakland Panthers would have been useless. At this moment of intra-party struggle in which violence and “the gun” was central, it was Hilliard the student, not Newton the teacher, who drew from Mao and the Little Red Book in order to provide an analysis of the situation. “They’re not panthers,” said Hilliard, “they’re paper panthers.”43 Hilliard was directly quoting Mao’s statement made in 1956 about US imperialism, when he declared that the United States was “in appearance very powerful but in reality … nothing to be afraid of … nothing but a paper tiger.”44 Hilliard’s use of Mao Zedong Thought to critique another segment of the revolutionary body marked a turning point in his development as a member of the party. It was just one step in his journey from intellectual and moral contemplation to the real world of revolution on the streets. Hilliard summed it up best when, after receiving Newton’s praise for his revelation, he concluded, “Maybe I have a gift for revolution after all.”45 The writings of Mao continued to have a significant influence on Hilliard’s life as he rose to become the BPP’s Chief of Staff. If not for his devotion to the study of Mao Zedong Thought, he might not have taken part in the violence of April 6, 1968. At 4:00 p.m. that day, the BPP held a meeting at Hilliard’s home where they debated what action should be taken in light of the recent events in Memphis. The room was divided. On one side was Eldridge Cleaver, who had become the BPP’s de facto leader due to Huey Newton’s prison sentence on charges of killing a police officer. Cleaver hoped a raid on the police swarming the streets of West Oakland would provide a spark that might ignite the whole city, the whole state, even the

42 Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 142-143. See also Pearson, 120-26. 43 Hilliard, 119. 44 Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1966), 141. 45 Hilliard, 119. 151 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

whole country into a revolutionary fury.46 Hilliard made efforts to counter Cleaver’s more extreme ideas by claiming that the Black Panthers were a disciplined party with an ideology rather than a gang of “crazies going around shooting up the town like a bunch of drunken cowboys.”47 He even went so far as to remind the entire group that Newton had expressed his disapproval from jail. Despite Hilliard’s protests for a more reserved plan of action, Cleaver’s bid for violence spoke louder to the group whose hunger for action outweighed its capacity for caution. So why did Hilliard, who opposed the attack, get into the van? In the hours between the meeting and the violent events later that evening, Hilliard pointed to Mao Zedong Thought to resolve the dilemma, recalling the influence of Mao’s idea that “the guerrilla should lose himself in the sea of the people.”48 This was a rough paraphrasing of a well-known line from Mao’s 1937 work, Mao Zedong on Guerrilla Warfare, which stated that the relationship between the people and the troops should be like that between water and “the fish who inhabit it.” Concluded Mao, “How may it be said that these two cannot exist together?”49 Finding himself at a crossroads, Hilliard used the words of Mao to decide that nothing could justify turning his back on the party. He had faith that the people, in this case the community of West Oakland, sympathized with the party. Though he was in the minority, he had to support the party’s decision. He wanted to say no and stand down, but he couldn’t do that to his party or to his family.

46 Though Hilliard’s account doesn’t include a direct quotation of Mao, references to the notion of a “revolutionary spark” are scattered throughout. This is almost surely a nod to a 1930 letter written by Mao in criticism of certain pessimistic views that existed within the Chinese Communist Party. The title of the letter comes from a Chinese proverb, 星星之火,可以燎原, which translates as “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” Mao used this saying to cast aside doubt from within the party as to whether or not the people were capable of rising up in numbers great enough to overthrow the Nationalists. Whether intentional or not, that Cleaver used a quotation of Mao in an attempt to create a revolutionary moment speaks to the prominence of Mao Zedong Thought in the inner sanctum of the BPP. For more see Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Zedong v. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 117-128. 47 Hilliard, 184. 48 Ibid., 185. 49 That this quotation comes from a source outside of the Little Red Book speaks volumes about the study habits of the Black Panther Party. Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare was not even part of Beijing’s Foreign Press’s five-part Collected Works of Mao Tse-tung. This demonstrates the great effort made by party members to examine Mao Zedong Thought inside and out. For the full quotation, see Mao Zedong, Mao Tse-tung on Guerrilla Warfare (Baltimore: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, 1992), 83. 152 Luke Wander

When the shooting was over, two police officers were heavily wounded, David Hilliard and Eldridge Cleaver were in jail, and Bobby Hutton, a junior member of the BPP, was dead.50 Though there was backlash from civil rights groups over police brutality, the spark that Bobby Hutton’s death ignited on the night of April 6, 1968, eventually fizzled out over the contradictory claims of the Panthers and the police. Each group framed the other as the instigator of the violence. Despite knowing that the raid would provoke a hard-hitting response from the police and despite his doubt over whether or not the moment was right for an attack, Hilliard’s commitment to the BPP, which he owed to Mao’s views on party-people relationships, guided his actions. In this instance, he used his commitment to the party and the desire to create a revolutionary spark to justify the use of violence. Without the writings of Mao buried in the ideology of the BPP, both Cleaver’s arguments supporting violence and Hilliard’s commitment to the party would have been significantly weaker. The writings of Mao amounted to more than abstract ideas in the minds of BPP members. Hilliard was not the only member of the BPP to struggle with the role violence played in the party’s operations. Huey Newton, BPP founder, was very clear in his initial support of violent activism, yet later came to admit that the party’s use of violence should never have been as cavalier as it was, most notably under the temporary leadership of Eldridge Cleaver. This ideological transformation can be traced by examining two instances, one in 1967 and one in 1971, in which Newton used Mao quotes to discuss violence. In these two cases, Newton used a deeper interpretation of Mao’s rhetoric to signal a softening in the BPP’s advocacy of violence. In June of 1967, Newton put out a two-part essay titled In Defense of Self- Defense, in which he rationalized the reputation that the BPP had earned in the year since its founding. By way of a campaign to lawfully challenge what they viewed as a racist police force, the Panthers had become synonymous with guns, confrontation, and violence. Aside from a certain set of obvious critics, there were some within the African American community, most notably the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), who were not pleased with the BPP’s willingness to carry firearms openly. Leaders of the RAM rejected the Ten-Point Program of the BPP and called the policies of armed

50 Hilliard, 186-194. 153 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

self-defense and patrolling the police “suicidal.”51 It was in this context that Newton released In Defense of Self-Defense. In part one of this essay, he compared the situation of African Americans in the 1960s to the American colonies under British rule. He recognized that the people who once rebelled against an oppressive ruler had created their own form of oppression. But most importantly, he argued that:

The Black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the yoke of colonialism and destroy the war machine. As long as the wheels of the imperialistic war machine are turning there is no country that can defeat this monster of the West. But Black people can make a malfunction of this machine from within. Black people can destroy the machinery that’s enslaving the world. America cannot stand to fight every Black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time. It is militarily impossible to do both of these things at once.52

Newton was confident that the role of African Americans in the global struggle between communism and capitalism was to antagonize the most dominant capitalist power from within. With this belief, he spelled out the contradiction between a large African American population and its lack of real power. In Marxist theory, the only road to eliminating contradictions was class struggle. And the only way to carry out class struggle, or in the case of the BPP, race struggle, was through violence. Finally, in his conclusion, Newton claimed that the revolutionary masses were in need of the proper tool, and that the gun was the tool needed to do the job. Without the gun, he asserted, the world would never experience a transformation into the “earthly paradise dreamed of by the people from time immemorial.” In the very next sentence, Newton described “Brother” Mao Zedong as a “successful practitioner of the art and science of national liberation and self-defense,” before quoting Mao’s famous line about the gun: “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it

51 Huey Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 48. 52 Huey Newton, In Defense of Self Defense (Oakland: Black Panther Party Ministry of Culture, 1967), 3. 154 Luke Wander

The juxtaposition of the upward-facing Black Power Salute, a symbol used by the Black Panther Party during the 1960s, with the 1968 downward-facing fist of the Third World offers a fascinating comparison in imagery between Cultural Revolution propaganda and Black Panther symbolism. The Chinese reads “中国人民不可辱,世界人民不可欺,” or, “The People of China will not be humiliated, the People of the World will not be insulted.” The fist bears the title of “Third World (第三世界)” and those on the receiving end of its force are “United States imperialism (美帝)” and “Soviet revisionism (苏修).”

is necessary to take up the gun.”53 Thus, Newton had essentially called for a unique kind of street war on the political structures of the United States. Yet Newton remained vague about whether or not the African American masses should wait for police instigation to act or if they should act preemptively. Newton celebrated the use of the gun without offering a clearer purpose for what the gun meant in the hands of BPP members. He employed the brand name of Mao Zedong as a way to advertise violence. This was evidence of the pervasiveness of Mao Zedong Thought in the ideology and practices of the BPP. First, Newton applied Mao Zedong Thought to make sense of the African American dilemma. Once he came to understand the struggle in this way, he turned the words of Mao into rhetoric as a means to incite a

53 This logic was similar to that of the US and USSR regarding nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Both superpowers justified building up massive nuclear arsenals by claiming that such proliferation was actually a gesture toward mobilizing for peace. For Newton’s essay, see Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader, 134-141. For Mao’s views on war, see Mao Zedong, Selected Works v.2, 219-225. 155 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

revolution. Though in his essay he referred to the party by its early name, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Newton’s message to the people did not contain any sense of caution, but sought instead to change the consciousness of the African American community and bid the oppressed to attack the oppressor. Using the words of Mao, he let slip the dogs of war. In the years following the publication of In Defense of Self-Defense, the streets of Oakland became the site of several instances of violence between police officers and BPP members. In 1971, after being released from prison and acquitted of the murder of Officer John Frey on grounds of self-defense, Huey Newton made a speech explaining the party’s stance on the defection of Eldridge Cleaver. According to Newton, the original intent of the party was to serve the people by defending them from oppression, in order to develop a relationship of support between the party and the people. However, he admitted that under the influence of Cleaver, the party had lost its vision and “defected from the community.” By this time, Cleaver had escaped the United States and fled, first to Cuba and then to Algeria, after his role in the raid that left Bobby Hutton dead. All personal feuds aside, Newton did not like what the BPP had become since his imprisonment. In his view the BPP’s willingness to participate in violence had distanced the party from the very people it sought to protect and liberate. “The only time an action is revolutionary,” he said in his speech, “is when the people relate to it in a revolutionary way.”54 Because the violence of the BPP had done more to harm than good for local communities, people on the ground felt neither protected nor liberated. Instead they felt more vulnerable and oppressed. With the benefit of hindsight, Newton recognized that the lumpenproletariat could not use the BPP’s violence as an example, so he discounted the use of the gun. This time, he regretfully admitted that various “so-called” revolutionaries had failed to understand Mao’s viewpoint. He was adamant that when Mao said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” these “so-called” revolutionaries had mistakenly thought that the Chairman meant that “political power is the gun.”55 Newton was quick to point out that the entire meaning of the sentence emanated from the word “grows.” At that point in the speech, Newton referenced the same quotation from Mao on war as he did in his 1967 essays.

54 Newton, 48. 55 Ibid., 48-49. 156 Luke Wander

In 1971, however, Newton made clear his belief that Mao’s ultimate goal was to rid the world of guns. In a nod to his earlier essays, he again described the gun as a tool of the party, but instead of glorifying it as the only possible method of revolution, he de-emphasized its role, citing the party’s Ten-Point Program and reminding his audience that the gun was not mentioned until the seventh point for a reason. Seale and Newton founded the BPP as a vehicle to help the people end oppression. However, under Cleaver’s temporary leadership, the BPP had become a cult group and had alienated the people in the process. Newton denounced Cleaver and enunciated an altered interpretation of Mao Zedong Thought. In doing so, he discontinued the BPP’s support of reckless violence with the hope that the party could create a community structure that could more accurately represent the voice of the people. The Little Red Book was not Mao’s only contribution to the African American struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. In the spring of 1968, two years after Mao had urged Chinese youth to bombard the headquarters of the CCP, the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution still dominated political, social, and cultural life in the People’s Republic of China. The Red Guards were still in power, comrades regularly carried out struggle sessions on one another, and Mao remained at the helm. Five years earlier, the Chinese leader had issued his “Statement Supporting the African Americans in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism,” in which he vaguely addressed the situation of millions of African Americans and bid them to join the revolution.56 In April 1968, Mao issued another statement that was markedly different, both in content and context. Mao’s second statement came at a time when the United States was experiencing a nationwide racial crisis. Twelve days earlier, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., had sent the nation into a frenzy that led to the death of Bobby Hutton. Mao recognized this moment as one filled with revolutionary potential and sought to use his influence to push the lumpenproletariat of the United States closer to revolution. “At present,” Mao claimed, “the world has entered a great new era” in which the African American struggle for emancipation would play an important role in what he envisioned as the coming “world revolution.”57 He went on to note that

56 Ho and Mullen, 91-93. 57 Mao Zedong, Statement in Support, 1-5. 157 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

the violent death of Dr. King, a man who preached non-violence, had woken up the masses and exposed the power they possessed. Without using the word “violence,” Mao voiced his support for all types of reactions to King’s death, both violent and non-violent. While Mao had ended his 1963 statement by confidently declaring that the capitalist system would fall once the emancipation of African Americans came to pass, the conclusion to his 1968 statement went a step further.58 The final lines of the second statement came with a sense of expectancy that those of the first statement lacked. “It can be said with certainty,” Mao insisted, “that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed people and nations of the world are not far off.”59 By giving his prediction a sense of imminence, Mao demonstrated his increased desire to use his influence to promote revolution abroad. This statement was translated and printed in Beijing’s Foreign Language Press and sent across the world as a five-page pamphlet that could be inserted into any Little Red Book, serving as a kind of “live transmission” of Mao Zedong Thought. This demonstrates that Mao actively supported violence in the African American struggle for civil rights. However, African Americans were not the only leftist group to be influenced by Mao to form a coalition with violence at its core.

The Red Guard Party, I Wor Kuen, and the Weather Underground The Chinese-American community of the 1960s was sharply polarized, with supporters of the old Nationalist Party and those faithful to the ruling Communist Party both extremely vocal in their mutual disdain. For the youth within this community, the Cultural Revolution came at a time in which the influence of active communist movements in Asia coincided with the formation of a new Chinese-American identity that sympathized with those speaking out against war and racism.60 As a result, many Chinese- American youths were pushed leftward and eventually embraced Marxism- Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The first two groups of real significance,

58 Ho and Mullen, 93. 59 Mao Zedong, Statement in Support of the African American Struggle (1968), 5. 60 Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (New York: Verso, 2002), 77-78. 158 Luke Wander the Red Guard Party of San Francisco and I Wor Kuen (IWK) of New York City, both formed out of the more peaceful Asian American Movement (AAM) in 1969 and began to look directly to the PRC as an example of a successful revolution. In terms of organization, however, the primary example they looked to was the BPP, a fact highlighted by the groups’ acceptance of violence. The BPP held a significant amount of sway over the Red Guard Party. This influence extended to the naming of the group. The founders wanted a name that was inherently Chinese, so they came up with the Red Dragons. The Panthers thought this was absurd. They wanted to use the group’s name to establish a more politically provocative reputation, so Bobby Seale convinced the founders to draw the name of their organization from the brigades of youth patrolling China’s cities and countryside—Mao’s famous Red Guards.61 In later writings, members of the Red Guard Party would admit to making many errors during the early development of the party. A failure to fully grasp the meaning of Mao Zedong Thought resulted in the members of the party viewing themselves as a military group with weak political and ideological convictions.62 The resulting violence was met with equal and sometimes greater force from the San Francisco police. There are a few possible reasons for the Red Guard Party’s overtly militaristic position. The first lies in the role of Mao in the lives of the party’s members. Dolly Veale, whose parents fled Shanghai for San Francisco in 1955, was not supposed to look favorably on Mao. Her antipathy toward Mao was based on family history alone. It was due to this acquired aversion that she didn’t read any of Mao’s works for the first few months of her party membership. Then she heard a Red Guard quote from the Red Book on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, and afterwards felt disturbed by the mere mention of Mao’s name.63 Once students like Veale became more educated on the version of Mao that they had never heard about from their parents and from the anti-communist US press corps, they read Mao on a deeper level. It was only after this kind of reconciliation that a more Mao-centric doctrine became the norm within the party. Yet this transformation only partly explains the violence and chaos of the

61 Antonio and Ho, 284. 62 “A History of the Red Guard Party,” IWK Journal 2 (May 1975), 81-83. 63 Antonio and Ho, 185. 159 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

organization’s founding period. More important was the influence of the BPP, a group whose popularity within the Asian-American community was enormous due to the Panthers’ defiance of the US political structure. Much like the Oakland-based group, the Red Guard Party’s violence emanated from its claim to promote self-defense. The fifth point of the Red Guard’s founding document stated the party’s belief that “all Yellow people should arm themselves for self-defense,” while rule number seven succinctly forbade party members from “using, pointing, or firing a weapon of any kind at any one except the Enemy.”64 To support the organization’s army- like status, a shooting range was set up in the basement of a member’s home in which trainees would hold target practice, though the police eventually raided and destroyed the range.65 The Red Guard Party fed off the BPP’s vitriol and came to be recognized for the same brand of violence that had marred both the Panthers’ image and its relationship with the people. In a way, these radical Chinese Americans, by replicating the violent rhetoric, insistence on self-preservation and determination, and even the visual symbolism of their African American colleagues, were performing their own version of Black Nationalism.66 This “mirroring” of ideology and violence in which ethnically Chinese people used a Mao-inspired African American group as a model was perhaps the most complex instance of the use of Mao Zedong Thought to promote violence. A group of Chinese Americans with links to China came to Mao through the influence of an outside group of African Americans. First, the Cultural Revolution prompted the BPP to join in the struggle against oppression. Then, such was the strength of the nexus between Mao Zedong Thought and BPP ideology that the BPP passed on its ideology to Chinese Americans. IWK also took a page out of the BPP’s book when its leaders used a “Twelve-Point Platform and Program” to signify the official creation of their party. Much like the Panthers’ founding document, the IWK’s version set out a list of demands its members wanted to see met, among them “self-determination for all Asian Americans,” “liberation of all third world

64 Ibid., 404. 65 It was not a rarity for the Red Guard Party to directly quote the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party. For the full list of Red Guard Party Rules, see Antonio and Ho, 401-404. 66 Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen,” 1080. 160 Luke Wander

peoples and other oppressed peoples,” and an “end to racism.”67 This list suggested a set of goals based not on the protection of one group but on the cooperation of all Third World peoples, reflecting the same dedication to self-preservation found in the seventh of the BPP’s own Ten-Point Program. IWK maintained its right to defend the Chinese-American community, but went further than the Panthers by stating its members’ preparation for “revolutionary armed war against the gangsters, businessmen, politicians, and police.”68 Despite the strongly worded statement in support of revolutionary violence, IWK never became a symbol for violence in the way the BPP had, however. Instead, the group campaigned for bilingual service at hospitals, provided health care services to all Asian-Americans free of charge, and helped to fight for Asian New Yorkers’ right to affordable housing.69 Unlike their West coast counterparts, IWK created the potential for violence without ever actually carrying it out. The final radical leftist organization that merits consideration in this discussion differed from the three previous groups in that it lacked any racial motivations for carrying out violence. The Weather Underground Organization (WUO) was born in 1969 at a meeting of SDS when a group of separatists from the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) produced a document titled “You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.” This manifesto of sorts signaled the formation of a new underground movement dedicated to using violence, primarily in the form of homemade bomb strikes, to promote a revolution on behalf of the “oppressed peoples of the world.”70 Though this group represented yet another faction within SDS, its leaders claimed to have the most revolutionary principles. The only surprising aspect of the WUO was the makeup of its members. These revolutionaries were well-off, college-educated sons and daughters of white middle-class America. Why did these privileged young people go to such extremes to end racism and imperialism? After witnessing the rise of such ethnicity-based groups as the BPP, they had come to recognize the

67 Amy Tachiki, Roots: An Asian American Reader (Los Angeles: Continental Graphics, 1971), 251. 68 Ibid., 251. 69 Michael Liu, Kim Geron, and Tracy Lai, The Snake Dance of Asian American Activism: Community, Vision, and Power (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 81-84. 70 William Ayers et. al., “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” Weatherman (1969): 1. 161 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

role white America could play in revolutionary change and began four years of underground operations that resulted in some of the most damaging domestic bombings in the history of the United States.71 In rationalizing this violence, the founders of the WUO made a critical error in judgment. They saw the events of the 1960s, including race riots and war protests across the United States, student riots in Paris and Mexico City, the Cuban Revolution, colonial wars of independence in Africa, and perhaps most significantly, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, as a sign that the world was united in a common struggle against what they viewed as US imperialism. In the organization’s manifesto, there was a clear lack of empathy for the group’s former colleagues in SDS and RYM, whose positions were criticized as those of a “traditional revisionist mass base of sympathizers.” In other words, the WUO was not interested in merely raising awareness of Marxist contradictions, but wanted to end them. They wanted a movement “akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.”72 The system that the New Left had set out to change became the system that the WUO aimed to destroy by “bringing the war home.”73 Their key misstep was a misinterpretation of world events that grossly overestimated the strength of unity among the “oppressed” people of the world. Instead of making the organization the symbol of mass revolution as they had hoped, the WUO’s acts of violence alienated its members from SDS and RYM, who were once the WUO’s closest allies. The WUO used the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong Thought to carry out a campaign that would bring down US imperialism from within. In the end, however, the spark that Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn wanted to ignite never

71 Berger, Outlaws of America, 272. 72 Ayers et al., “You Don’t Need,” 28. 73 The WUO used this phrase often as a way to justify its violence. By framing its violent style as a domestic version of the Vietnam War, it sought to connect with the masses of Americans who opposed the war. 162 Luke Wander became a prairie fire.74

Conclusion In the final lines of his introduction toTo Die for the People, a collection of Huey Newton’s writings published in 1972, Franz Schurmann claims that the Black Panther Party had “come through its own Long March” and was ready for a “period of building, survival, and protracted struggle.”75 That Schurmann, then a professor of sociology and history at the University of California, Berkeley, would allude to the formative years of the Chinese Communist Party in an introduction to a text concerning the writings of Huey Newton is no coincidence. His ten-page introduction quickly traced the origin of revolution from America, Britain, and France, to theories developed by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. He then devoted space to a more drawn-out history of China under the Communist Party, detailing the destruction of “oppressor classes” and “alien empires” within China, before citing the Cultural Revolution as a manifestation of Mao’s realization that “revolution is a process and not a conclusion.”76 Of all the nods to Mao’s China, this was the most significant. Though Schurmann acknowledged the importance of the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949 as an essential part of the evolution of communist thought, he also recognized the significance ofcontinuing revolution among Mao’s contributions. While Schurmann never directly weighed in on whether the Communist Revolution (1946-49) or the Cultural Revolution (1966-7) was more central to Mao Zedong Thought, he referred to Mao as a party leader who “carried on the revolution.” In doing so Schurmann seemed to glorify the continuing nature of Mao’s vision and thus highlighted the significance of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution to the cause of the Black Panther Party.77 The men who formed the BPP were fed up with the cards they had

74 In 1974 the WUO leaders published an official manuscript that laid out their goals in greater detail. Its title came from Mao Zedong’s oft-quoted line, “A single spark can start a prairie fire,” thus proving the symbolic rather than profound impact Mao had on the WUO. For more see William Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism (Brooklyn: Communications Co., 1974). 75 Newton, xxii. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., xiii-xiv. 163 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

been dealt. In Mao, they saw a hero who had bested US imperialism. Following his example seemed a possible avenue for racial liberation and equality. The Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York City, the men and women across the country who sided with the WUO, and even Mao himself wanted to see a violent people’s revolution in the streets of America. However, both in his ideology and his political influence, Mao proved to be too distant to have the effect desired. The groups discussed above all used his words and his image to rally for a revolution that was too extreme to connect with mainstream American society. Viewed in this way, the Cultural Revolution was more than just a domestic affair that altered the fabric of Chinese society. It created the potential for great change in the United States just as it did in China. In both cases, however, the potential for progress was lost when violence entered the equation. The fervor emanating from Beijing during the Cultural Revolution changed the world. While the Red Guard invasion of the Foreign Ministry changed the international landscape, the ideological currents of the Cultural Revolution also reached an audience on the ground level of the global communist movement. Huey Newton devoted his life to translating the Cultural Revolution from its Chinese roots to the specific needs of his communities. He appreciated Mao Zedong’s vision for permanent revolution and concluded that it centered on an everyday sort of violence, the role of which was to end the oppression of the lower classes and emphasize the value of the people as a collective body. Newton, the founder and leader of the Black Panther Party, observed the ability of violence to affect change in the Cultural Revolution and subsequently molded the Panthers into a revolutionary group willing to use violence as a means to secure protection and, if possible, liberation. The leaders of the Black Panther Party looked at the Cultural Revolution and saw an opportunity to better the lot of oppressed Americans from Oakland to Memphis, from San Francisco to New York. On this evidence, Mao’s words were far from empty rhetoric. Mao demanded an uprising in his own nation and attempted to show the rest of the world how to effectively complete a revolution in the true fashion of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought. Mao’s visions encountered many obstacles such as corruption, greed, odium, excess, and impulsiveness. In the final analysis, the Cultural Revolution failed to accomplish Mao’s initial goals. For those Chinese who experienced it, the revolution was either

164 Luke Wander gravely traumatizing or temporarily liberating. For those scholars who have studied it, it was either a sinister power grab or a genuine attempt at political and ideological reform. There is a certain degree of truth in each of these interpretations. However, scholars should consider the global nature of the Cultural Revolution. Any conversation that attempts to analyze the event in a balanced manner should at some point determine the degree to which the Cultural Revolution affected the world at large. Some might argue that the ultimate failures of the revolutionary groups mentioned in this article serve as evidence that Mao Zedong Thought created nothing of value for the global proletariat outside of China. But a failed movement is a movement nonetheless. Though the Black Panthers were unable to use the violence of Mao Zedong Thought to achieve their goals, their members on the ground had a significant impact on the communities in which they worked. Returning to the piece of propaganda that began this essay, one might ask whether the Third World actually united behind the Red Guards. Did they work together to crush imperialists, capitalists, revisionists, feudalists, and reactionaries? Did a red sun rise over a liberated globe? The short answer is no. In China, the Red Guards were only successful in bullying their parents and their teachers. The reeducation of youths constituted no education at all, setting back an entire generation. Furthermore, the use of Mao Zedong Thought did more to divide than it did to unite. Finally, though the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution failed to eliminate imperialism, capitalism, and revisionism, it led China to question the Soviet Union’s authority, to engage the United States in peaceful negotiations, and to shake up a racially divided American society. On the ground, the spirit of the Cultural Revolution inspired the leaders of the Black Panther Party to adapt Mao Zedong Thought to the cause of racial equality in the United States. Along with the Red Guard Party and the Weather Underground Organization, they justified the use of violence in the face of oppression and discovered the inherent difficulty of this task.

165 Kaitlyn Warren Manliness on the Gridiron: Walter Camp and the Popularization of Football at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In 1905, after nineteen football players nationwide died from injuries sustained on the field, public outcry against the brutality of the game forced President Roosevelt to hold a conference with representatives from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to discuss ways to reform and preserve the emerging sport. Despite the president’s urging, Walter Camp, the representative from Yale University, continued to resist any rule changes that might weaken what he called the manly spirit of football.1 For the remainder of his life, Camp would fight to mold the game of football into one thattraces would develop college-age men into leaders and gentlemen. For Camp, measures directed toward limiting the brutality of the sport impeded this goal.2 American football became popular across college campuses, particularly in the Northeast, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the “American way of life” was facing pervasive changes.

1 John S. Watterson, “Political Football: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the Gridiron Reform Movement,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 25 (1995): 560. 2 Elliott Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 156. 166 Kaitlyn Warren

Women, immigrants, and minorities were fighting to improve their political and economic circumstances. As a result, upper-class white males faced a crisis of manhood as outsiders threatened to dismantle their privileged place in society. Many felt a need to prove themselves through displays of rugged strength and manly superiority.3 The sport of football became an important means for furthering this goal. Players and fans alike believed that football prepared young men for the future by teaching them leadership, courage, and discipline.4 But football was more than that: it was also a way for men to demonstrate their masculinity through glory and toughness on the field.

Football Addresses the Crisis of Masculinity During the Progressive Era, the United States was increasingly separated into various competing factions. Divisions were prominent between North and South, black and white, immigrant and native-born, and progressives and traditionalists, but minority groups in particular became a focal point for these divisions. Immigrants coming to the United States arrived to find better work and better salaries. Former slaves tried to find ways to assimilate and thrive in post-Civil War America, fighting to obtain rights and equality and to delegitimize the myth of white supremacy. Women also organized to demand the right to vote. Many joined the workforce, taking jobs in industry and retail. The face of America changed as these groups found ways to assert influence over the social structure and economy of the country.5 These historical shifts posed a problem for white male patriarchy, as many men perceived these new developments as a threat to their control. As the public sphere became less dominated by white males, they began to see the improved job prospects of racial and ethnic minorities as a challenge to their manhood. The traditional Victorian idea of manhood became more difficult to maintain as the structure of society changed. Success in business, the mark of a proper man, no longer came so easily. At one time, becoming a businessman meant a man had achieved independence, leadership, and

3 Daniel A. Clark, Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 7-9. 4 Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 23. 5 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4-7. 167 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

sufficient means to provide for his family, but by the end of the nineteenth century it was associated with being a subordinate employee.6 Men growing up between the Civil War and World War I could not demonstrate their manhood by fighting in a national or global military conflict. Their ancestors had proven their manhood on the battlefield in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War. Many young men had fathers who fought in the Civil War and had received heroic homecomings at the war’s end. These men felt the burden of living up to the accomplishments of their fathers, and the short-lived Spanish American War in 1898 was not an adequate venue for demonstrating manliness through military service.7 Many white American men searched for an alternative way to demonstrate masculine strength. They felt compelled to show that they were intelligent, capable, and understanding leaders but also that they were tough, rugged, and in tune with their primal instincts. The importance of education also was growing rapidly during this time and college attendance was higher than it had ever been, growing from 1.6 percent of college-age men in 1870 to 5.1 percent by 1910.8 Education became a means to getting ahead in business, as companies recruited employees from the predominantly white college campuses, and magazines began featuring articles singing the praises of a college education. But while college helped to inculcate the gentlemanly demeanor that young men sought, many still wanted an avenue for displaying strength and power.9 Participation in sports allowed young men to develop and showcase their physical superiority. Sports began to enter mainstream American culture as a leisure activity in the mid-nineteenth century. Boxing, which was a largely underground sport popular among working-class men, had become a litmus test of manliness. The faces and bodies of famous boxers such as John L. Sullivan and James Corbett were featured in newspapers across the country, creating exposure and admiration of the male body that had not been seen before in popular media. Baseball players also attracted fans who idolized strength and agility. But football ultimately proved to be

6 Clark, 7-9. 7 Ibid., 1-4. 8 Ibid., 191. 9 Ibid., 9-11. 168 Kaitlyn Warren

the sport through which men could demonstrate courage and strength.10 The sport developed slowly and under unique circumstances, incorporating along the way traits that were expected to reflect positively upon the well- rounded man. Early football was a European import, combining elements of soccer and rugby. By the mid- to late-nineteenth century, most colleges in the Northeast favored a style of football more closely resembling soccer. The notable exception was Harvard, which preferred a rugby style of game that allowed for tackling and running with the ball. The first intercollegiate game modeled on modern football was played in 1874, when Harvard defeated the Canadian McGill University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played two games, one under Yale’s preferred soccer style rules and one under Harvard’s favored rugby style rules. The rugby style prevailed and, in 1876, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met to establish uniform rules and form the Intercollegiate Football Association.11 Because so few games had actually been played at this point, the original designers of the game had no way of knowing which rules would be successful when applied during real play. During the evolution of the game, new rules often were introduced in an effort to correct problems of the game, but they usually had unintended consequences that created other difficulties. The constant reinterpretation of the rules by players and coaches caused football to develop “as much by accident as by design.”12 For this reason, the rules of football changed often until 1912, when the sport began to take the form of the game as it exists today.

Walter Camp’s Role in Shaping Football While football was still in this period of trial and error, many of the early rules were proposed by Walter Camp, a man who came to be known as the “Father of Football” for his role in influencing the game’s development.13 Born in 1859, Camp was coming of age just as colleges were establishing a uniform concept of football. Although best known for his contribution to

10 Gorn and Goldstein, 120. 11 Diana Star Helmer, The History of Football (New York: PowerKids Press, 2000), 4. 12 Oriard, 33. 13 Gorn and Goldstein, 155, 160. 169 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

football, Camp excelled at a variety of athletics at Yale, playing tennis, track, baseball, and crew, in addition to football. He served as captain of the freshmen baseball and football teams in his first year and captain of the varsity football team during his junior and senior years. Camp also coached the Yale football team from 1888 to 1912 and served as chairman of the Intercollegiate Football Committee and the American Football Rules Committee. Ultimately, his passion for sports translated into a career as a writer, and he penned books about the proper technique and structure of football, Walter Camp during his senior year fitness tips, and athletics more generally. He at Yale. “Walter Camp, Captain of the Yale Football Team,” 1880. also wrote articles in several newspapers and (Photo courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.) magazines, including a regular sports column for Collier’s Weekly. Camp’s contribution to football was great. He created new rules, designed plays, advised coaches and captains, and increased public interest in the game from his first year at Yale until the end of his life. Camp began playing football in 1876 as a freshman at Yale University, and first represented Yale at the annual intercollegiate rules convention in 1878, where he proposed his first rule change, a reduction of the number of players on each team from fifteen to eleven.14 From its beginning, football was recognized as a sport involving brute physicality, but the original rules allowed for tackling only above the waist. In 1888, Camp helped implement a new rule that permitted tackling below the waist, making it easier to catch runners carrying the ball. This resulted in a shift in the ideal player body type, from small and slender to large and muscular. A focus on agility and speed gave way to brute strength and muscle. Several rules were established that were meant to protect the players from serious injury, but enforcement proved problematic. Even when rules were enforced, players were encouraged to find ways around them. Camp realized that there was no historical context in football within

14 Ibid., 157. 170 Kaitlyn Warren

which to interpret what was allowed, as there was in rugby and soccer. The only means of controlling the game was the written rules.15 As mass play replaced open field running, injuries proliferated. Players began to require armor and padding. Long hair became a characteristic trait of football players because it could be used in lieu of headgear to protect Players with long hair, such as the player on the far right, were not required to the head during games. Allowing the wear a helmet. (Photo courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.) offense to block defenders in 1889 was intended to make the game safer, but many teams capitalized on the rule by creating new and dangerous plays, such as the flying wedge, in which blockers would charge toward stationary defenders with the ball carrier protected behind them. Players would frequently leave the game with broken collarbones, sprained knees, and twisted ankles.16 The Flying Wedge Formation, pictured As football grew in popularity, above, was devised to circumvent rules that so did criticisms that the game was were designed to make the game safer. Patch Brothers, “Unidentified Football too dangerous. Beginning in 1893, Game,” ca. 1890. (Photo courtesy of Yale headlines in newspapers across the University Manuscripts and Archives.) country denounced the sport for its violence.17 Many university professors and school administrators complained that the sport encouraged well-behaved young men to become unruly. They believed football undermined positive traits and behaviors that college was supposed to instill in its students. College students, they reasoned, should be honest, gentlemanly, and dignified in their actions and comportment.

15 Oriard, 30, 33. 16 Ibid., 32. 17 Watterson, 556. 171 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

The physicality of the sport seemed to represent the antithesis of this ideal.18 Indeed, many believed football contradicted the character of American society. An article in Life magazine in 1905 discussed an ex-football player who was sued for attacking a man during a fight, noting, “The fable seems to teach that the conditions of action in real life are so different from those in football that the whole system of football education is misleading.” The article concluded, “Real enforcement of the football rules against assault might do much to prevent misconceptions as to the privileges of muscle in real life.19 Several college administrators and many members of the general public also opposed teams’ recruiting practices, which they believed to be corrupt. In 1905, Henry Beach Needham wrote a series of articles for McClure’s Magazine detailing the bribery that Ivy League schools used to attract the most talented players, including compensating students with perks from the athletic association or donations from wealthy alumni.20 These detractors thought college football was simply becoming too commercialized. Indeed, although football was not originally intended to be a spectator sport, people across the country soon began regularly attending football games. The Thanksgiving Day game between the two top schools in the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rivalry, a tradition that began in 1876, attracted crowds of ten to fifteen thousand spectators in the mid-1880s and thirty to forty thousand by the early 1890s.21 In 1905, Harvard began construction on a state-of-the-art football stadium using alumni donations.22 The president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, was adamantly opposed to the new stadium and the sport itself. He strongly disliked the design of the game, noting, “Coaching from the side-lines, offside play, holding, and disabling opponents by kneeing and kicking, and by heavy blows on the head, and particularly about eyes, nose and jaw, are unquestionably profitable toward victory.” He lamented the fact, however, that “no means have been found of preventing these violations of rules by

18 Henry Beach Needham, “The College Athlete: How Commercialism is Making Him a Professional,” McClure’s Magazine, July, 1905. 19 “Football Ethics in Real Life,” Life, March 30, 1905. 20 Needham, “The College Athlete.” 21 Oriard, 34. 22 Thomas H. Pauly, Game Faces: Five Early American Champions and the Sports They Changed (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 172 Kaitlyn Warren

both coaches and players.23 Eliot and administrators from several other Ivy League schools began discussing the prospect of outlawing football on college campuses. In the midst of this discussion and publication of critical articles by Needham and other journalists, football’s propensity for violence reached an all-time high. In 1905, a record nineteen players lost their lives playing football, and the media gradually began to view the sport more critically. The public attention forced President Theodore Roosevelt himself to become involved. Although Roosevelt wrote to Walter Camp in 1895 declaring his support for the game as it was then played, he had come to realize that if the game were to continue, it would need to be modified. Roosevelt was especially concerned about the strategy of intentionally injuring key players on the opposing team, which had become common practice in collegiate games.24 Needham detailed one such instance during a match between Dartmouth and Princeton. During the first play of the game, Princeton players charged towards the only black player on the Dartmouth team, breaking his collarbone and taking him out of the game. When confronted with charges of racism, the Princeton quarterback countered, “We didn’t put him out because he is a black man. We’re coached to pick out the most dangerous man on the opposing team and put him out in the first five minutes of play.”25 On October 9, 1905, two representatives each from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton met with President Roosevelt in the White House to discuss what should be done to amend and preserve the sport. The representatives drafted a statement pledging to abide by the rules of the game, but few tangible changes were made because Camp had no desire to soften the sport, as Roosevelt was well aware. The other schools followed his lead and implemented new rules that pleased the public, but had little effect on the game. Later, Roosevelt would lament that mediating the football conflict proved more difficult than mediating the Russo-Japanese War.26

23 Needham, “The College Athlete.” 24 Watterson, 54-55. 25 Needham, “The College Athlete.” 26 Watterson, 55-56. 173 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Manliness on the Gridiron While Camp was slow to encourage changes to the sport, he was quick to come to football’s defense when it was attacked. In response to early criticisms, Camp compiled Football Facts and Figures in 1894, a book containing statistics from the game as well as the opinions of school faculty and former players. Players and captains from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton expressed their love and dedication for football in this volume. It was clear that football was more than a sport to them. Alexander Moffat, once captain of the Princeton team, praised football’s ability to teach young men self-control. “He must learn to keep his temper, to control any propensity he may have for indulging in luxuries or dissipation of any kind,” Moffat wrote. “He must be able to submit himself to the severe discipline which the captain puts him under, and do so without a murmur. He must learn how to so train his mind as to make himself a part of a unified team working for the attainment of the one object.27 Camp and others were passionate in their defense of the sport. As they saw it, eliminating the game or altering it beyond recognition would be removing a valuable and necessary means of cultivating young men into gentlemen and leaders. Football allowed players to develop two of the most important aspects of their manhood: rugged, primitive instincts and civilized honor. Even President Woodrow Wilson later stated that football developed “more moral qualities than any other game of athletics.”28 Support from prominent public figures and the growing popularity of the game led Camp to feel justified in his opposition to rule changes.29 He believed that the public desired a game “that may make the boys, when they become men of the world, good citizens.”30 Camp believed in the morality of the game and what it did for its players. He described his proudest moment as a Yale student as a time when, as captain of the football team, he had to make the difficult decision to make a player sit out a game for violating team rules. His decision, which initially met with protests from other players, was later commended by his teammates as the right and just action under

27 Walter Camp, Football Facts and Figures (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1894), 141. 28 Watterson, 556. 29 Pauly, 71. 30 Oriard, 31. 174 Kaitlyn Warren the circumstances. He wanted other players to gain this same sort of moral compass that he believed was the natural product of football.31 Moreover, Camp believed that football instilled a form of character that could not be replicated in any other popular sport. Baseball, for example, had become a hugely popular American sport shortly before football. Both sports were considered by most to be an appropriate and effective conduit for expressing manliness. But baseball’s popularity in the early 1900s had created problems that were not nearly as evident in football at the time. Baseball was one of the most commercialized sports of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first professional baseball league formed in 1869 and the sport quickly became profitable for team owners and players alike. The development of the professional league caused attendance to grow and revenues to increase, resulting in heated battles between players and owners, conflicts similar to contemporary disagreements between industrial laborers and robber barons. People questioned the character of the sport as it became more pervasive in poor, urban, immigrant, and black communities.32 On the college level, many baseball players were seduced by the allure of money that the professional league offered. Although it was against NCAA rules, players would play baseball professionally during the college offseason and, if caught, received a slap on the wrist. The debate over professionalism and its effect on college baseball, as well as the element of class conflict, damaged the respectability of the sport.33 Football, on the other hand, avoided the stigma of class conflict by remaining for so long a game of the upper classes. When the Intercollegiate Football Association formed in 1876, the only members were four elite universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. Until 1894, the only other teams admitted were Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania.34 The game was under the full control of America’s most privileged institutions. Its isolation from the rest of society allowed football to develop in a way that would most benefit the players who created it. Most college football players did not have the opportunity to earn

31 “Personal Glimpses: The Strength and Tenderness of Walter Camp,” The Literary Digest, January 15, 1927, 60. 32 Gorn and Goldstein, 126-128. 33 Needham, “The College Athlete.” 34 Oriard, 30. 175 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

money from play except in the form of benefits from alumni.35 Indeed, the first official professional football league did not form until 1920.36 Because football remained an amateur sport for so long, and because most of the players were white men from elite universities, the game was thought to be more respectable than baseball. Supporters of football argued that the sport cultivated an honest, upright form of masculinity in its players, almost all of whom happened to be white, male undergraduates.37 Beyond baseball, boxing was another sport that created and sustained concepts of manliness. Following the American Civil War, boxing migrated from poor, urban communities into the realm of middle-class sports, proving to be the most effective way for white male athletes to display strength. Battling one another in front of a crowd of onlookers while wearing tight pants and, frequently, no shirt, boxers conveyed their strength while creating a provocative image that tested the contemporary boundaries of decency. While football was a physical and violent sport, even its harshest critics conceded that football served a better purpose than boxing. For example, one of the virtues of football that was absent from boxing was the element of teamwork. In boxing, athletes looked out only for themselves. Boxers had no teammates to support, and critics argued that boxers thus attacked at all costs in order to preserve their self-interest. In football, athletes could not afford this kind of selfish behavior and had to work with others to achieve success.38 As football grew in popularity on college campuses, membership in fraternities and college clubs increased. Fraternities conveyed perceptions of manhood by forming a community of those who were considered the most gifted, dedicated, and successful men within a college.39 By organizing together, these men created a network that helped perpetuate their ideals of masculinity. Walter Camp was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity and the Skull and Bones Society at Yale. But as Camp realized over the course of his time at Yale, it was not his participation in these

35 Needham, “The College Athlete.” 36 Gorn and Goldstein, 168. 37 Ibid., 131. 38 Ibid., 119-120. 39 Clark, 83. 176 Kaitlyn Warren

organizations that gained him the most praise.40 As beneficial as participation in a fraternity was to a young man’s image, fraternal associations lacked qualities that sports, particularly football, embodied. Camp argued that football created for its players a brotherhood, a community of men united by their Walter Camp argued that football created a community of men who love of sport. Players connected with respected one another for sacrificing their bodies for the sake of the team. one another, relied on one another, “Football Game,” ca. 1900. (Photo courtesy of and respected one another for Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.) sacrificing their bodies for the sake of the team. Until the 1890s, football was entirely run by students. The team captains coached and disciplined their teams, while other students helped raise the funds necessary for the team to operate. Participating in football, whether as an athlete or an organizer, became a fixture of the social life in many Northeastern colleges.41 But being on the field surrounded by one’s teammates was a unique experience that bonded men as few other experiences could. One player, responding to football’s growing criticism, remarked, “I regret the question has arisen that the game needs vindication. It can only arise with those who do not know it practically.” He concluded, “I am confident that every old player, almost without exception, is ready to maintain that it is, of all the athletic sports, the most vigorous, manly, and beneficial.”42 Indeed, many players believed that their participation in the sport made them superior to their classmates. Football players were considered more resilient, courageous, perseverant, and disciplined. A former captain at Princeton noted that out in the real world, when the football player had “to battle with the stern realities of life,” football training would have taught him “not be dejected or discouraged by any misfortune that he may meet with, but, true to his early instructions upon the gridiron, he will look

40 “Obituary Records of Yale Graduates, 1924-1925,” Bulletin of Yale University, August 1, 1925. 41 Gorn and Goldstein, 131. 42 Camp, Football Facts and Figures, 150-151. 177 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

hopefully to the future, expecting better results from better work.43 Football players respected one another. If a man had survived four years on the football field, enduring tackles, injuries, and the elements, he had proven that he had a toughness and grit that few others could claim. The design of football was such that only the mentally and physical strong could survive, and struggling through the pain and agony that often came with the sport showed teammates that they could rely on each other in life just as they did in the game.44 Football’s structure and organization was often compared to the workings of industry. One of the first to make this connection was Walter Camp, who noted the similarities between his clock manufacturing business and coaching football. As an admirer of Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the first to apply science to industry and methods of production, Camp modeled his approach to the game after the popular approach to industry. Taylor believed that companies should employ each worker in the job that he performed most effectively and efficiently in order to optimize production.45 Camp, too, tried to ensure that each position on the field was filled by the player who would be most productive there. American industry at the turn of the century was moving increasingly towards the assembly-line model, in which workers specialized in one area of production rather than assembling an entire product from start to finish.46 In much the same way, football players specialized in their positions. The effort of each player culminated in a team working as one unit towards the finished product, victory. Manliness was strongly correlated with economic success during Camp’s time. Claiming that football had “come to be recognized as the best school for instilling into the young man those attributes which business desires and demands,” Camp placed great emphasis on preparing men with the mental and physical strength required in the fast-changing business world of the early twentieth century.47 With the era of the self-made man behind them, men had to find new ways to succeed. The football fields of colleges across the Northeast provided a logical place to search for the

43 Ibid., 156. 44 Oriard, 38. 45 Gorn and Goldstein, 161. 46 Clark, 7. 47 Gorn and Goldstein, 160. 178 Kaitlyn Warren

future business leaders of the country. The players were college-educated, most coming from a respectable middle- or upper-class background and, most importantly, though usually not explicitly stated, they were white. Coaches, fathers, and concerned men across the country realized it was becoming increasingly difficult to succeed in business, and they viewed football as a means of giving young men an advantage by teaching them the skills necessary to navigate the business world.48 Many former players attributed their career success to their time spent on the football field. Albert Holden, captain of the Harvard team in 1887, said that football “teaches cool action in a crisis and concentration of purpose, both of which, even in my short business career, I have found to be valuable traits in practical life.” Another player, Irving Ziegler, said, “I consider football a manly game, and in my profession energy and vitality are required, both of which in my estimation I acquired in the game.”49 Camp himself was a highly successful businessman. In 1883, a year after dropping out of Yale Medical School because he could not stand the sight of blood, he began working for the New Haven Clock Company, starting as a member of the sales staff and eventually working his way up to president of the company in 1903. He retired in 1923 and became chairman of the board of directors. He did all of this even as he dedicated himself to Yale football as a coach. When opponents of football complained that football was harmful to the development of men’s characters, Camp’s own success and dedication to his work served as an example of the good that could come from the sport.50 Players were preparing themselves for the harsh realities of the business world and developing the determination and perseverance that men required to succeed. Camp also argued that football was a suitable substitute for warfare, giving young men the courage and strength previous generations had accrued from battlefield experience. Young men wanted an arena where they could demonstrate that their strength of mind and body was equal to that of veterans of war. Since the three-month-long Spanish-American War failed to provide that opportunity, men coming of age at the turn of the twentieth century found that they could escape the shadows of their heroic

48 Clark, 23-24. 49 Camp, Football Facts and Figures, 144-145, 172-173. 50 “Obituary Records of Yale Graduates, 1924-1925.” 179 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Civil War fathers by becoming heroes of sport.51 And there were many parallels between football and warfare. Camp structured his training and coaching of the Yale team around military practices. In his book American Football, he outlined proper training techniques for captains and coaches Camp structured his training around military practices. to use to develop good players. These “Walter Camp and W.F. Knox,” 1906. techniques included a daily exercise (Photo courtesy of Yale University Manuscripts and Archives.) regimen and recommended diet. His practices emphasized structure and discipline, as did military training.52 Camp would eventually create his own fitness program called the Daily Dozen, designed to increase men’s strength and agility and condition men for strenuous activity, which the Navy adopted during World War I.53 Many football players believed that the game prepared them for life in the same way that the military did. One man remarked, “We know that we can take any of our well-trained football men, and order them to do anything on earth, and they will do it, without thinking twice, to the best of their ability.”54 Players believed that football set them apart from their contemporaries by giving them the skillset of their war-fighting ancestors.

Football Today: Still Violent and Dangerous In recent years, football has overtaken baseball to become the most popular sport in the country. In the last decade the sport also has come under close scrutiny. Recent controversies are not much different from the early disputes over the game, and many of the problems still result from the violent culture of football. Despite years of research and rule changes to make the game safer, players continue to sustain significant and sometimes life-threatening

51 Clark, 7. 52 Walter Camp, American Football (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 140-142. 53 “Brief Reviews,” review of Walter Camp: The Father of American Football, by Harford Powel, New York Times, January 30, 1927. 54 Camp, Football Facts and Figures, 144. 180 Kaitlyn Warren

injuries on the field. The regulators of the game continue to struggle to balance safety and aggressive play. In 2011, after the National Football League outlawed helmet-to-helmet tackles, fans and players alike spoke out in opposition to the new rule, complaining that it weakened the game. Concussions are a common outcome of football, but many players feel pressure to play through concussive injuries for fear that they may be derided by coaches or teammates if they ask to be removed from the game. Meanwhile, aggression is still encouraged.55 Coaches in both the NFL and youth football leagues have been accused of paying players to injure opponents on the field.56 Also, women continue to be absent from the game. While women have been accepted in every other sport once dominated by men, football remains a “man’s sport.” Football will likely continue to draw both positive and negative attention, praised on the one hand as a sport where men can display their talent and toughness and, on the other hand, criticized as a game that creates lasting injuries and causes an unhealthy atmosphere that discourages players from seeking help or displaying emotions. Understanding the development of football, the ideals of men like Walter Camp who played and supported it, and the mentality of the male sports tradition in the early twentieth century gives us a better framework for interpreting and critiquing the current dialogue between masculinity and sport in America. Indeed, the direction in which the present-day culture of manhood leads the country is still being decided, in business, in education, and on the football field.

55 Michael David Smith, “NFL Attempts to Clarify the Defenseless Player Rules,” NBC Sports, accessed December 2, 2012, http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/12/27/ nfl-attempts-to-clarify-the-defenseless-player-rules. 56 “Appeal Seeks Roger Goodell Recusal,” ESPN, accessed December 2, 2012, http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/8493998/bounty-scandal-jonathan-vilma-others- appeal-seeks-roger-goodell-recusal-sources-say; “Bounties in Pop Warner Football,” ESPN, accessed December 2, 2012, http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=8694645. 181 Amelia Kennedy Bodies in Pain: Narratives of Demonic Possession in Merovingian Gaul

“I shall make socks out of it!” According to Gregory of Tours, so spoke an irreverent deacon about the cloak he received after its former owner, St. Nicetius, died in 573. Cutting up the cloak’s voluminous hood, he fashioned socks from it and pulled them onto his feet. Immediately, divine retribution struck. Seized by a demon, the deacon crumpled to the floor and his mouth foamed blood. Helpless and alone, he found no comfort within the empty house, no companion to answer whatever gurgling cries he could produce. Flames raged in the fireplace as “the fire devoured his feet and the socks as well.”1 traces Roughly a century earlier, other bodies were burning. Faced with crowds of people possessed by demons, St. Genovefa needed no armor or weapons besides those provided by her faith. Like candles igniting one by one, her fingers glowed with “celestial fire.” Her blazing hands scorched the demons, which

1 Gregory of Tours, VP VIII.5, ed. Wilhelm Arndt and Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 1.2 (Hanover, 1885), 246. “…tegument pedum aptabo.” “…pedes cum pedulibus ignis partier devoravit.” Translations of this work are adapted from Gregory of Tours, Life of the Fathers, trans. Edward James (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1985). 182 Amelia Kennedy shrieked in agony before leaving the human bodies.2 These two narratives offer vastly different representations of bodies and the pain they suffered or inflicted. The sinful deacon struggled feebly, while the saint radiated divine power. One fell victim to demonic possession, while the other drove multiple demons from human bodies. Though the deacon suffered as his feet burned, Genovefa felt no pain from her fiery fingers. Rather, her flames tormented the demons. In each case, however, pain was as much a spiritual experience as a physical one. Medieval authors wove miracles, demons, and divine retribution into their accounts of pain and physical damage. This essay examines the role of pain in the development of Christian identity in Merovingian Gaul, c. 481-751. During this time, Christian bishops rose in status as they filled the power void left by the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. Through their ministry to the laity and their promotion of saints’ cults, these religious authorities shaped attitudes toward the relationship between the body and the supernatural. Bishops and other educated Christians authored the sources analyzed in this essay. Many of their texts are hagiographical, though works of history, sermons, and epitaphs have been consulted as well. In particular, this essay explores narratives of disease, demonic possession, and self-mortification. It argues that representations of pain crafted a view of the body as something that interacted constantly with supernatural forces and that was remarkably susceptible to influence from those forces. Two major implications of this viewpoint are the diminishment of individual identity and the recognition of the body, which was inseparable from religious experience, as a source of both positive and negative potential. Bodily mutability meant that, for better or worse, the individual could be completely remodeled and assimilated into a new, collective role.

Bodies in Pain Writhing and contorting, hands clawing and teeth gnashing, possessed

2 Vita Genovefae virginis Parisiensis Ch. 46, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 3 (Hanover, 1896), 234. “…caelesti igne…” Translations of this work are adapted from Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg, eds. and trans., with E. Gordon Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 19-37. Genovefa lived c. 423-502. 183 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

bodies retained scarcely any vestiges of humanity. Demoniacs leapt from windows and rattled entire buildings with their earsplitting screams. Some shredded their own skin with their teeth. Others mauled anyone within reach. Where demonic possession occurred, noise, violence, and unearthly sights usually followed.3 Possession and exorcism have a long history in the Christian tradition. In the gospels, Jesus casts seven demons from Mary Magdalene, delivers another woman from the spirit that has plagued her for many years, and drives numerous demons from a man into a nearby herd of pigs. He thereby establishes his authority over evil and, by granting powers of healing and exorcism to his apostles, sets the stage for future generations of Christian exorcists, including the overlapping categories of bishops and saints.4 The fourth-century legalization of Christianity added political significance to exorcism, which verified Christianity’s superiority and promoted its expansion.5 Exorcisms performed through sacred relics bolstered belief in saints, whose posthumous miracles simultaneously confirmed their place in heaven and their continued involvement on earth.6 On a broad scale, exorcism represented the inexorable Christian march to

3 These examples are from Merovingian hagiographies and chronicles. On the symptoms of demonic possession, see Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 36-54. Symptoms of demonic possession closely resembled those of divine possession during the High and Late Middle Ages. See Caciola, 54-75. This essay focuses on demonic possession in Merovingian Gaul, but similar symptoms would not necessarily be out of place for people possessed by various spirits in other times and places. The well-known anthropological work of James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890; Mineola: Dover, 2002), 93, reports that “the belief in temporary incarnation or inspiration is world-wide … the presence of the spirit is revealed by convulsive shiverings and shakings of the man’s whole body, by wild gestures and excited looks, all of which are referred, not to the man himself, but to the spirit which has entered into him.” More recent anthropological studies of spirit possession include I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London: Routledge, 1989); and Morton Klass, Mind over Mind: The Anthropology and Psychology of Spirit Possession (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 4 Possession of Mary Magdalene: Mark 16:9 and Luke 8:2. The cure of the woman: Luke 13:10-17. Transfer of demons from man to pigs: Mark 5:1-20; Luke 8:26-39; and Matt. 8:28-34. According to the account in Matthew, there were two possessed men rather than one. Apostles’ power over demons: Matt. 10:1-8; Mark 3:14-15, 6:7-13; and Luke 9:1. The Old Testament contains only one account of possible demonic possession, when a spirit plagues Saul: 1 Sam. 16:14. On possession in the Bible, see Eric Sorenson, Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early Christianity (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 2002); and Caciola, 36-37. 5 Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity A.D. 200-1000 (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 66; Kathleen Sands, Demon Possession in Elizabethan England (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 3. 6 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), 107. 184 Amelia Kennedy

victory over evil.7 Writings on demonic activity, including both medieval texts and recent scholarship, generally place their emphasis on exorcism rather than possession.8 Merovingian hagiographies focus on the miracles and virtues that God allowed to flow from his saints, who are naturally the stars of their own hagiographies. The abbot St. Venantius, for example, “was driven quite often against demons, but he stood firm as victor in the battle.”9 Such triumphant declarations encourage readers to understand possession teleologically, identifying exorcism as the narrative’s crucial, climactic element. The plight of the possessed presents the exorcist with a predictable challenge, the exorcist’s arrival initiates a power struggle between sin and righteousness, and the eventual exorcism provides the happy ending expected from a text glorifying God and his saints. The first part of this essay concentrates not on the exorcist, however, but on the possessed, particularly representations of demoniacs’ bodies.10

7 Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 72-73. 8 Peregrine Horden, “Responses to Possession and Insanity in the Earlier Byzantine World,” Social History of Medicine 6 (1993): 178-179, observes that “possession and exorcism seem inextricable,” not only to medieval hagiographers but also to modern historians and anthropologists, who have studied “the peculiar ritual or drama toward which possession has seemed directed, to the exclusion of the phenomenon’s numerous other aspects.” 9 Gregory of Tours, VP XVI.3, 276. “Nam et ipsis daemonibus saepius inpulsatus est, sed victor in certamine perstitit.” See also Vita Sanctae Balthildis Life A Ch. 16, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 2 (Hanover, 1888), 503; and Gregory of Tours, GC Ch. 3, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 1.2 (Hanover, 1885), 300, in which exorcisms happen “immediately.” Translation of Vita Sanctae Balthildis can be found in Jo Ann McNamara and John Halborg, eds. and trans., with E. Gordon Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 268-278. Translations of GC are adapted from Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988). 10 This essay primarily examines demonically possessed human bodies, although demonic activity in the world encompasses a much broader range of phenomena. André Goddu, “The Failure of Exorcism in the Middle Ages,” in Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverständnis des Mittelalters, ed. Albert Zimmermann and Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 542, notes that a wide variety of problems were attributed to demonic activity during the Early Middle Ages. Understandings of exorcism were therefore inclusive as well: “Exorcism became a symbol of the Christian struggle against the powers of darkness, and its task the liberation of creation from disorder. Hence, all cures and all healing could be considered exorcism, and even destroying a heathen altar or combating a storm was to dislodge a demon.” See also Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 132-133. Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 89, however, distinguishes between demonic possession and disease: “Although the healing of a few people … involved the expulsion of demons, the process of healing must not be confused with exorcism…. Rather than attributing their ailments and misfortunes to the influence of external demonic agents, people usually conceded that they were personally responsible for both their sins and their illnesses.” 185 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

What attitudes did demons, exorcists, and authors themselves hold toward the bodies with which they interacted? An examination of the language of physical space that writers used to describe possessed bodies provides a useful point of departure. Writers routinely stressed possession’s physical, material, and spatial qualities. The possessed body became a “vessel” that displayed obvious physical symptoms. Representations of possessed bodies did more than set the individual up for an inevitable exorcism. The second part of this paper explores the difficulties, alternative endings, and failures that arose in possession narratives. These incidents complicate the dominant tendency to celebrate exorcism as a sign of the exorcist’s sanctity, a display of divine power, and a triumph of good over evil. The nature of possession, as expressed through depictions of demoniacs’ bodies, made failed exorcisms possible and meant that even success stories hinted at human vulnerability and the possibility that things could have gone differently.

Possessed Bodies and the Language of Physical Space Christian rhetoric imagined the body as a holy vessel, but demons worked tirelessly to corrupt this ideal and defile the bodily temple.11 Accounts of possession maintained perceptions of the body as the physical casing around a supernatural force. Consequently, a vocabulary of buildings and containers was pervasive. Exorcism of demons from human bodies paralleled the purification of sacred buildings and the demolition of pagan shrines. Christians denied the divinity of pagan gods and goddesses, but they accepted their existence and classified them as demons.12 As Christianity gained official recognition and followers during the fourth century, exorcism stood alongside the destruction of pagan temples in the

11 Multiple biblical passages reflect the notion of human bodies as temples or vessels, for example: 1 Cor. 3:16-17; 1 Cor. 6:19-20; Ps. 30:13; Jer. 22:28; Acts 9:15; 1 Thess. 4:4; and 2 Tim. 2:20-21. 12 Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 65. See for example Vitae Caesarii episcopi Arelatensis Libri Duo II.18, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 3 (Hanover, 1896), 491, in which a demon named for the pagan deity Diana assails a female slave. Translations of this work are adapted from William Klingshirn, trans., Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994). For more on Caesarius, see William Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On this incident in particular, see Klingshirn, 237. 186 Amelia Kennedy

broader movement to eradicate “demonic” pagan influence.13 By channeling their abilities against demonically tainted people and buildings, exorcists promoted the collapse of paganism and the rise of Christianity.14 Exorcism thus entered the narrative of Christian progress. Over the years, demons persistently entered inanimate objects as well as human bodies. A cask full of beer intended for a pagan offering shattered when St. Columbanus breathed upon it, and “it became evident that the devil had been hidden in the vessel so that through the profane liquid, he could seize the souls of those offering the sacrifice.”15 Even as possession’s association with a more general understanding of sin eclipsed its association with paganism, demons continued to enter inanimate objects.16 One demon perched on the mouth of a jar before St. Genovefa dislodged it.17 Another lurked in a fountain until it found a human host, whose body it eventually had to abandon.18 Parallels between bodies and physical structures thus endured, influencing understandings of possession. Language describing possessed bodies echoed writers’ discussions of polluted containers and buildings. Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530-609), author of the Life of Radegund, called a female demoniac a “little vessel (vasculum).”19 Baudonivia, who added a second book to Radegund’s Life,

13 Brown, Rise of Western Christendom, 72. See for example Sulpicius Severus, “The Life of Saint Martin of Tours” Ch. 13, trans. F. R. Hoare, in Soldiers of Christ: Saints and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Thomas Noble and Thomas Head (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 16. 14 Sands, 3-4. 15 Jonas of Bobbio, Vitae Columbani abbatis discipulorumque eius I.27, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 4 (Hanover, 1902), 102. “…manifesteque datur intellegi diabolum in eo vase fuisse occultatum, qui per profanum ligorem caperet animas sacrificantum.” Translation of this work is my own. Another beer container explodes in Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Vedastis episcopi Atrebatensis duplex Ch. 7, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 3 (Hanover, 1896), 410-411. On these two episodes, see Yitzhak Hen, Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul A.D. 481-751 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 190-191; and Bonnie Effros, Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 9-10. 16 Brown, Cult of the Saints, 110. 17 Vita Genovefae Ch. 48, 235. 18 Florentius, Vita Rusticulae sive Marciae abbatissae Arelatensis Ch. 13, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 4 (Hanover, 1902), 346. Translations of this work are adapted from McNamara and Halborg, Sainted Women, 122-136. There has been some debate about the dating of this text. Pierre Riché, “La Vita S. Rusticulae: Note d’hagiographie mérovingienne,” Analecta Bollandiana 72 (1954): 369-377, maintains that it is most likely a product of the seventh century. 19 Venantius Fortunatus, De Vita Sanctae Radegundis I.33, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 2 (Hanover, 1888), 375. 187 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

likewise labeled a possessed woman as a “vessel (vas).”20 Reducing the human to a mere “vessel” negated the human’s original personality and free will. Like demon-infested buckets of water, possessed humans could not heal themselves. Both water buckets and demoniacs lacked agency and a clear sense of identity. Some demoniacs seemed so absent from their own bodies that, although the demons felt pain, they themselves did not. In these cases, authors used the demoniacs’ displaced identities to highlight the demons’ total takeover of frail human flesh. A scene from Florentius’s Life of Rusticula demonstrates how connections between the human body and physical space enabled the author’s discussion of bodily weakness. A group of demoniacs foretold Rusticula’s arrival in their city with dread, saying that she came “to torment us and to cast us out from our habitation.”21 Once in her presence, they asked why she came “to torment us and to expel us from our homes?”22 After reciting the sins by which the demons had entered their bodies, the possessed again beseeched Rusticula not to force them from their “homes.”23 Unmoved by their pleas, Rusticula expelled every demon. This episode fits within conventional expectations about exorcism and saintly power. Conflict between Rusticula and the demons seems inevitable from the start. Although the demons complained about Rusticula’s coming, they went to meet her when she arrived, perhaps because they knew that resistance was futile. When Rusticula placed a cross on the demoniacs’ heads, she found immediate success. Read with an emphasis on exorcism and exorcist, this narrative reaches its most important message at its conclusion, the triumph of God and his saint over evil. Additional readings are possible, however, to take into account representations of the possessed bodies themselves. TheLife ’s main concern may have been the marvels God worked through Rusticula, but privileging this anecdote’s miraculous culmination downplays the struggle preceding it. To recount Rusticula’s exorcism, Florentius first described

20 Baudonivia, De Vita Sanctae Radegundis II.27, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 2 (Hanover, 1888), 394. Translations of this work are adapted from McNamara and Halborg, Sainted Women, 86-105. 21 Florentius, Vita Rusticulae Ch. 13, 345. “…ut nos torqueat et de habitatione nostra eiciat.” 22 Ibid. “Cur nos famula Christi torquere venisti et de domiciliis nostris expellere?” 23 Ibid., 346. “Et obtestabantur eam per crucem et clavos Domini, ut non eos iuberet egredi de domiciliis suis.” 188 Amelia Kennedy

the possessed. He mentioned suffering related to demonic possession, but the demons were the sufferers, asking why Rusticula wished to “torment” (torqueat), “cast out” (eiciat), and “expel” (expellere) them. Meanwhile, the bodies’ human selves seemed to have left the building. Any pain felt by the humans disappeared, leaving only the physical shell of the body and the demon within. The demoniacs addressed Rusticula, but they spoke from the demons’ perspective, their own voices lost. Although demoniacs in other narratives sometimes retained enough of their faculties to seek a cure, these people, speaking as their demons, instead begged not to be rescued. The demons’ resistance to eviction calls to mind New Testament writings on the body as a residence for the soul. In his second epistle to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “We know, if our earthly house of this habitation (terrestris domus nostra huius habitationis; i.e. the body) be dissolved, that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven” (2 Cor. 5:1). Paul depicted the body as a vessel for the soul and emphasized that this habitation was only temporary, liable to dissolution. Peter also described the body as a temporary physical space: “I think it is meet as long as I am in this tabernacle (tabernaculo), to stir you up by putting you in remembrance. Being assured that the laying away of this my tabernacle is at hand” (2 Pet. 1:13-14). The word “tabernacle” not only carries religious and historical significance, but also stresses the body’s mutable nature, since “tabernacle” denotes a portable dwelling. The body housed the soul, but this home was neither permanent nor stable. It remained vulnerable to physical decay, moral corruption, and demonic invasion. Furthermore, emphasis on the possessed bodies as “habitation” and “homes” suggests that the demoniacs had acted sinfully, enabling their own downfall. The terms indicate an orderly move-in rather than a hostile takeover. The demoniacs did not struggle to remain free. Instead, by committing such sins as gluttony, theft, and homicide, they rolled out the welcome mat.24 The demons’ use of the diminutivedomicilium to describe their new accommodations implies disdain for the humans, whose bodies were more like shacks than holy temples. Additionally, the

24 Ibid., 345-346. “…confitebatur unusquisque per singula, unus, quia poculum aquae absque signaculo hausisset, alius, quia per gulam, alius, quia per periurium, alius per furtum, alius per homicidium, vel reliquis malis. Unus autem ex ipsis dicebat, quia in fonte se posuerat; cum autem vellet bibere de aqua ipsa infelix ipse homo et signum crucis ibidem minime fecisset, ita in eum fuisset ingressus spiritus malignus.” 189 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

idea of “habitation” for demons and “unclean spirits” parallels language in Revelation 18:1-2 describing Babylon’s ruin: “I saw another angel come down from heaven … and he cried out with a strong voice, saying: Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen; and is become the habitation of devils (habitatio daemoniorum), and the hold of every unclean spirit (spiritus inmundi).” The language of physical space in theLife of Rusticula therefore provided commentary not only on reassuring divine power, but also on the corruptibility of the fallen human body, the collusion of humans with the devil, and the grave spiritual hazards of demonic possession. Possession’s symptoms further highlighted its physicality, and the emphasis on physicality again spiraled outward to encompass larger religious issues. Demons typically required specific entry points into the body. Throughout the Middle Ages, the mouth enjoyed particular popularity as an entrance. According to medieval etymologies, the Latin os (mouth) and ostium (door) were related. The mouth functioned as the “door” separating the body’s interior and exterior.25 The devil in the beer vat described above had planned to enter multiple peoples’ mouths as they drank.26 Two people in the Life of Rusticula acquired demons when they drank water without making the sign of the cross, giving the demons access to their mouths.27 Imagining the mouth as a door encouraged the perception of the body as a building. Furthermore, ingestion of a demon via the mouth contrasted with consumption of the Eucharist.28 In both cases, the mouth supplied a portal for a supernatural force, but intake of Christ and the demon represented the opposite moral extremes that the human mouth was capable of accepting. Once a demon gained entry, it usually brought physical destruction to the human body. One female demoniac could not leave home without being dive-bombed by a flock of crows, which lacerated any exposed skin.29 A possessed psalm singer did not realize that his limbs belonged to him and so began to disfigure them.30 People who vandalized St. Genesius’s tomb

25 Caciola, 42. On demonic entry into human bodies, see Caciola, 41-43, and Sands, 13-15. 26 Jonas of Bobbio, Vitae Columbani I.27, 102. 27 Florentius, Vita Rusticulae Ch. 13, 346. 28 According to Caciola, 232, exorcists between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries tried (typically with no success) to use the Eucharist as treatment for possession, “in an apparent attempt to have God and the demon battle it out within the human body.” 29 Vitae Caesarii II.21, 492. 30 Vita Genovefae Ch. 47, 234-235. 190 Amelia Kennedy

became possessed and “raged and bit themselves with their own teeth.”31 One demoniac needed to be restrained to prevent him from ripping apart anything he could.32 Another leapt out of a building, chased down the litter carrying St. Rusticula, stuck his head inside the litter, and “tried to devour the most blessed one’s hand.”33 A “madman” afflicted by a demon “bit to pieces everything he could reach with gaping jaws and bloody teeth.”34 Demonic possession physically ravaged demoniacs’ fallen bodies. Just as openings like the mouth allowed demons to enter, certain body parts acted as exits for demons when the exorcist arrived to oust them. A demon that had possessed a woman for a number of days finally “went out roaring through her ear” because of St. Radegund’s prayers.35 Palpable signs commonly accompanied successful exorcisms. St. Rusticula cured a demoniac who “vomited out blood as in the form of a man.”36 Leubela, a woman afflicted by the devil, was healed when a worm crawled out of her back.37 Twelve demoniacs left behind a strong odor after Genovefa cured them.38 Visible bodily expulsions and lingering smells strengthened belief in demons as perceptible forces that created physical consequences for their human victims.39

31 Gregory of Tours, GM Ch. 68, ed. Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 1.2 (Hanover, 1885), 84. “…debachantes aut propriis se dentibus lacerantes…” Translations of GM are adapted from Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, trans. Raymond Van Dam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988). 32 Vitae Sanctae Balthildis Ch. 17, 504. 33 Florentius, Vita Rusticulae Ch. 16, 346. “…manus beatissimae devorare conabatur.” 34 Gregory of Tours, VP IX.2, 254. “…unus ad eum adductus est rabidus, qui rictibus patulis dentibusque cruentis quod attingere poterat dentibus propriis laniabat.” 35 Fortunatus, De Vita Sanctae Radegundis I.33, 375. “…rugiens per aurem egrediens…” 36 Florentius, Vita Rusticulae Ch. 16, 346. “…quasi effigiem hominis sanguine plenam evomuit…” 37 Fortunatus, De Vita Sanctae Radegundis I.28, 373. 38 Vita Genovefae Ch. 30, 228. 39 Did the physical consequences that demons caused mean that demons themselves had bodies? Belief in demonic corporeality shifted during the Middle Ages. Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 128-129, explains that early Christian authorities, who generally attributed the fall of the angels to sexual transgression, held that angels and demons had bodies. When church leaders suggested that pride, rather than sexual transgression, was the cause of the fall, the need for angelic and demonic corporeality lessened, but they remained reluctant to abandon the idea completely. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) posited that these bodies were composed of different kinds of air. Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604) proposed a sliding scale of corporeality on which angels and demons were more material than God but less material than humans. During the twelfth century, belief in angelic and demonic bodies declined. 191 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Broader discussions about humanity’s fallen state encompassed the concerns that Merovingian authors conveyed through possessed bodies. The individual’s body expressed its spiritual distress through concrete symptoms. Transitions from abstract, universal issues of sin to concrete, individual issues of possession worked in reverse as well. Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542, explained why the perils of demonic possession applied to his entire congregation, even though they themselves were not possessed. He composed his sermon in response to “that raving demoniac” who had interrupted mass the previous Sunday.40 Caesarius did not linger on the demoniac’s appearance and symptoms. Rather, the spectacle gave him a starting point for translating possession into abstract, spiritual terms: “You will never fear the demon that is in another’s flesh if you do not have one in your own soul.”41 He added that “a man has as many demons as he has vices.”42 Spiritual “exorcism” therefore had a place alongside physical exorcism. Demoniacs were not the only people trapped in diabolical snares, after all—even physically healthy Christians sinned and therefore suffered from hidden demons. Caesarius encouraged his audience to see demonic possession as a personal, internal, universal issue. Evil’s transitions from abstract to concrete and back again were a central feature of demonic possession. The link between its visible symptoms and the invisible forces causing them facilitated such transitions. Exorcists’ appeal lay in giving evil a concrete form that could be combatted.43 They saw the root cause of the symptoms: evil within. Nevertheless, once visible,

40 Caesarius of Arles, Sancti Caesarii Arelatensis Sermones I., ed. Germain Morin, in CCSL 103 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953), sermon 79, 325. “…insaniens ille inerguminus…” Translations of this work are adapted from Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, Volume I, trans. Mary Magdeleine Mueller (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1956). 41 Caesarius of Arles, Sermones I, sermon 79, 326. “Numquam timebis daemonem qui est in carne aliena, si eum non habueris in anima tua.” 42 Ibid. “…quot vitia habuerit, tot habet daemones.” The differences between Caesarius and other early medieval authors are due in part to Caesarius’s background. According to Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles, 3, Caesarius’s Provence was a “more thoroughly romanized world” than “the Frankish heartland of central and northern Gaul.… By concentrating on the writings of a preacher [Caesarius] steeped in the traditions of Lérins rather than a hagiographer [Gregory of Tours] devoted to St. Martin, we may call attention to a strategy of christianization in which the power of rhetoric was more highly esteemed than the potency of relics, and to a measurement of christianization that does not equate its progress with the success of a local saint’s cult.” 43 Brown, Cult of the Saints, 110, argues that “the horror of the demonic was its very facelessness.… The vast prestige of Saint Martin came from the fact that, as an exorcist, he could concretize, and, so, mercifully delimit and render manageable tense moments, by being able to perceive and isolate the demon lurking within them.” 192 Amelia Kennedy evil did not lose all of its power. Concerns about diabolic activity on earth resisted simple solutions, in part because boundaries between the abstract and the concrete remained fluid. Even once demons were expunged, their existence continued, as they returned, temporarily at least, to the realm of invisible evil. This fluidity made dealing with demons a demanding task. Moreover, some of the physical symptoms of possession were horrifying in their own right, not just because of the associated fears that they conjured. Demoniacs who foamed at the mouth or sank their teeth into flesh induced fear on a visceral level. The possessed body therefore had flexible symbolic potential. Its very physicality terrified almost as much as it reassured. Possessed bodies assumed numerous roles and identities. They were defiled temples, hollow vessels, homes for demons. These identities corresponded with wider issues in the expanding Christian community, such as pagan survivals, sin and temptation, and the Fall. Hagiographers touched on these troublesome topics through their vivid descriptions of possessed bodies, while Caesarius of Arles used the example of a demoniac to make abstract points about morality. Demonic possession, though alarming enough in and of itself, bred additional anxieties since it reminded Christian authors of the dangers abounding in the postlapsarian world. Its physical symptoms condensed these numerous and amorphous fears into a concrete form.44 Exorcism seemed to supply the answer, a restoration of bodily integrity and order that unfolded with ostensible regularity. In his description of the “rhythm of a cure by exorcism at a shrine,” Peter Brown calls exorcism a “reassuring” demonstration of saints’ praesentia and potentia that corresponded neatly with “expectations of the exercise of ‘clean’ power.”45 Nonetheless, complications disrupted this “rhythm,” and the risk of failure, however small, lingered in the background. The complex tangle of concerns contained in the quivering flesh of the demoniac defied easy resolution.

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 107, 110. 193 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Complications, Ambiguities, and Failures Surrounding Exorcism Not every exorcism proceeded smoothly. As ruptures in the familiar, soothing patterns of the cure, these complicated and unsuccessful episodes demand attention. How did clergy members view laborious exorcisms? Did outright failures push them to reevaluate the entire process? To avoid discarding exorcism as fundamentally flawed, authorities proposed various justifications for misfires. According to André Goddu, some sixth- and seventh-century Church leaders argued that a failed exorcism meant that the “demoniac” had never truly been possessed. Something else was wrong instead.46 Accounts of botched exorcisms in Merovingian chronicles and hagiographies tend not to rely on this explanation, however. Demons that proved tricky to expel were still demons, and the rare demoniac who remained possessed was still a true demoniac. Complicated or failed exorcisms in Merovingian texts instead spoke to the difficulties of postlapsarian life, the vulnerability of the human body, and the importance of the Church as a guide. The possessed body communicated a vast array of concerns, in many cases implicating humans in their own downfall. Once possessed, the human capitulated to the demon, which orchestrated the body’s actions and words, often physically transforming it into something unrecognizably grotesque. Exorcism meant a conflict between demonic and divine power. Successful exorcism, worked by clergy members and saints, removed demonic influence from the body and restored the original human self. Demoniacs depended entirely on external forces and circumstances, including the availability and suitability of an exorcist and the inscrutable will of God. Throughout the Middle Ages, Church leaders continually reconsidered and refined their views on the relationship between humans and God. Setbacks such as failed exorcisms generated uncomfortable tensions that contributed to developments in these views. One way for demons to escape exorcism was to avoid possessing human bodies in the first place. Certain crafty demons realized that they could ensnare souls just as well while remaining outside of their victims. Take, for

46 Goddu, 549. 194 Amelia Kennedy example, the story of a man who did not want to die.47 At the suggestion of a demon, however, the man found a suitable place for hanging himself and tied a noose. He begged, “Help me, St. Paul!” This was followed by silence from the saint. The demon spoke instead: “Quick, go on, do not delay; finish speedily what you have begun.”48 Just in time, St. Paul intervened, and the demon’s power over the man broke. The saint’s delayed arrival and the man’s increasingly close encounter with death build suspense. Although this suspense is largely a narrative strategy that makes for a more satisfying last-minute rescue, it nonetheless introduces a sliver of uneasiness. The demon managed to exert considerable control over the man without even possessing him. While possession highlights the vulnerability of the body, this anecdote makes obvious the vulnerability of the will. St. Paul’s slowness to respond raises further concerns. Many hagiographers made a point of noting that exorcists cured people immediately, but a closer reading often reveals that the process was not so straightforward. St. Paul’s tardiness corresponds with the delayed and difficult exorcisms also described in the literature. Other demons tried to possess human bodies secretly. The demoniac carried out the tasks of daily life with no obvious signs of trouble. In such cases, possession persisted until a saint’s fortuitous arrival. When St. Nicetius heard a deacon sing, for example, he realized instantly that the deacon was possessed and called on the man to be quiet: “May the enemy of justice not be so bold as to sing!” The demon’s presence had apparently eluded everyone else: “All those present were astonished, knowing nothing evil of the deacon; but then the demon in him began to cry out and say that the holy man was putting him to great torment.” The account concludes, “The holy man placed his hands on the deacon, chased out the demon, and

47 Gregory of Tours, GM Ch. 28, 54-55. There are many additional examples of demons that harm humans without possessing them. See for instance Gregory of Tours, VP IX.2, 254; and VP X.2, 257. In these texts, demons appear to unwitting humans in the guise of holy figures, St. Martin and Christ respectively. The devil also appeared in the form of Christ to the fourth-century saint Martin, but Martin was not fooled; see Severus, “Life of Saint Martin” Ch. 24, 26. On discernment between good and evil spirits, see Clare Stancliffe, St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 236. On discernment during the High Middle Ages, see Caciola. During Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, demons frequently received the blame for sinful human actions; for instance, Gregory of Tours, VP I.1, 214, in which “demons” pelt saints with rocks as they pray in the desert. See Stancliffe, 193-195. 48 Gregory of Tours, GM Ch. 28, 54. “Adiuva me, sanctae Paulae!” “Heia, age, ne moreris; expeti celerius quae coepisti.” 195 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

brought him back to his senses.49 Saints were valuable to the community because of their exceptional capacity for spotting and eradicating evil.50 Yet an unsettling backstory led up to the saint’s entrance. For just how long had the demon resided unseen in the human body? What damage had it done during that time? How many demons loitered invisibly in other bodies and would never be dislodged because a competent saint would never arrive? Possession could become a chronic problem.51 A woman in Baudonivia’s Life of Radegund, for instance, was “flagellated” by her demon for fifteen years.52 This detail, which stands out for its specification of a precise number of years and its slightly unusual phrasing (ter quinos rather than quindecim), prompts readers to question why she went for so long without a cure. Were there no convenient churches? Were saints in short supply? Did her demon prevent her from seeking help? Baudonivia gives no explicit answer to these questions, leaving the sense that curing demoniacs was in fact a difficult proposition, either because exorcists were scarce or because demons took advantage of human vulnerability to rest happily ensconced. In extreme cases, the demon lodged itself so deeply in the human body that it challenged the abilities of even a devout and skillful exorcist. St. Germanus (c. 375-446) encountered a boy who was demonically possessed, but the demon proved stubborn:

After examining [the boy] for a while, Germanus put off performing the exorcism on that same day, although he usually expelled even the most rabid demons at the first laying on of hands. He did so because the demon had penetrated the

49 Gregory of Tours, VP VIII.4, 244. “…nec praesumat canere iustitiae inimicus.” “Stupentibus autem omnibus qui aderant et nihil mali de diacono noverant, exclamavit daemonium in eo, et se torqueri a sancto inmensis cruciatibus, confitetur…Tunc inpositis sanctus diacono manibus, eiecto daemone, personam restituit integrae menti.” For a similar example, see Constantius of Lyons, Vita Germani episcopi Autissiodorensis auctore Constantio (Vie de Saint Germain d’Auxerre) Ch. 32, ed. and trans. René Borius (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1965), 180-182. This edition provides the original Latin with a facing French translation. English translation can be found in Constantius of Lyons, “The Life of Saint Germanus of Auxerre,” trans. F. R. Hoare, in Soldiers of Christ, ed. Thomas Noble and Thomas Head, 79-106. 50 Brown, 110. 51 Horden, 181. 52 Baudonivia, De Vita Sanctae Radegundis II.27, 394. “Una ex illis, quae gravius tribulabatur, iam ter quinos habens annos, ex quo eam spiritus nequam flagellabat…” 196 Amelia Kennedy

insides and innermost regions of the wretched youth so that at certain times [the demon] possessed the body just as if it were its own vessel. [Germanus] arranged for the boy to be shut in with him that night. Then, indeed, the demon burst out openly from its inner lair. As if in torture it revealed how it had seized its victim in the innocence of early childhood. Now at [Germanus’s] order it went out of him, and the next day the youth was returned to the palace, purged.53

Constantius of Lyons, who authored this account between 475 and 480, drew attention to the dangerous physicality of possession. He described the boy as a “vessel” and a “lair,” terms that defined the body as an empty space bounded by an external shell. Moreover, the reasons given for the demon’s virtually complete ownership of the body emphasized physicality. Exorcism proved difficult not because of the demon’s subtle treachery or the boy’s exceptional sinfulness, but because the demon had plunged itself deeply into its young vessel. The demon was so entrenched that it resisted expulsion and forced Germanus to alter his usual healing methods. Simple touch was inadequate. More time and closer contact were necessary to restore the boy’s identity and control over his body’s actions. Cases in which the demon responded to exorcism by only some people and not others further demonstrated demonic stubbornness and the challenges of procuring a suitable exorcist. The bishop Quintianus (d. 525) sent priests to cure a demoniac, but when the priests’ exorcisms failed, Quintianus himself cured the man.54 The bishop is the central figure in this account, and his ability to succeed where others have failed marks his impressive connection to divine power. Additionally, his position, hierarchically superior to those of the priests, suggests the importance of the episcopal office and displays the special role of the bishop as liaison between

53 Constantius of Lyons, Vita Germani Ch. 39, 194-196. “Quem diu examinatum purgare die eadem distulit cum soleret furiosissimos daemones prima manus inpositione depellere. Ita enim miserandi iuuenis medullas et interiora penetrauerat ut quasi uas proprium certis temporibus possideret. Recludi eum secum nocte constituit. Tum uero ex interioribus latebris manifestus erupit et quasi inter tormenta conpositus tempus indicat, quo ab ineunte aetate ceperat innocentem. Itaque iussus egreditur, purgatusque adulescens post diem palatio reformatur.” Translation of this passage is my own. 54 Gregory of Tours, VP IV.4, 226. See also Vita Sanctae Balthildis Ch. 17, 504-505, in which the demoniac is the son of the “venerable” bishop Leudegund, who evidently cannot cure him (though the narrative does not mention that he tried). The demoniac is brought to Balthild’s sepulcher and healed. 197 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

God and lay Christians. God’s refusal to work through the priests, even though the bishop sent them, implies that exorcism was an unpredictable, even fickle process. An even more impressive string of failures precedes the eventual exorcism in the Life of Glodesind. A craftsman named Odilulfus, plagued by a demon for eleven years, “had gone to many saints’ places to receive health by expelling the demon…. But he found the help he sought from none of them. And he had given out his substance to many carnal doctors to secure help but nothing did it profit him.”55 The demon only left when it came into contact with Glodesind’s body. The failure of “carnal doctors” positioned the Church and its methods over any other forms of healing. Yet even other saints failed to heal the man. The demon’s tenacity not only pointed out Glodesind’s exceptional piety, but also raised questions about the suitability of the other saints whose shrines the man had visited. Proper mediation between demoniac and divine power was not always easy to find or verify. Fortunately for Odilulfus, he eventually stumbled upon the saint he needed. A late happy ending was better than none. Yet some demoniacs never experienced a permanent cure. Their persistent possession challenged belief in exorcism as the inevitable victory of the divine over the demonic. Gregory of Tours (c. 539-594) recorded that at age twelve, Anatolius went to live as a hermit in a tiny cell in the corner of a crypt. He ate sparingly and occupied his days with “vigils and prayers.” After eight years, the devil struck:

Seized by a great panic, [Anatolius] began to shout that he was being tortured internally. The next thing that happened … was that with the help of some of Satan’s legions, he moved the squared stones that formed his prison, knocked down the wall, and then clapped his hands together and shouted that he was being burned through and through by God’s saints. He suffered from this madness for a very long time, calling frequently on the name of St. Martin and saying that he was being tortured more by that saint than by the others. As a result, he was brought to Tours. There the evil spirit was

55 McNamara and Halborg, 151. The monk who wrote this Life seems to have written after 830 but probably used an earlier version to do so. 198 Amelia Kennedy

unable to harm him: in my opinion, it was held in check by the miraculous power of St. Martin. He stayed in Tours for about a year without suffering further harm and then went home, but the trouble from which he had recovered soon began again.56

Anatolius’s struggles with demonic possession cautioned against the dangers of excessive precocity. His master, a merchant, had been reluctant to allow him to become a hermit, fearing that the boy’s youth and inexperience would lead to trouble and that his enthusiasm for an ascetic lifestyle would swiftly dissipate. Anatolius’s fall to an “evil spirit” proved the validity of these concerns, especially since he became possessed despite his pure lifestyle. Moreover, possession became a chronic condition for him. Anatolius’s demon, like others mentioned here, displayed special sensitivity to one saint in particular. Martin tortured the demon more than anyone else, and it was Martin’s presence in Tours that temporarily alleviated Anatolius’s condition. This account ends with the return of the demon, but it offers no explanation for why Anatolius found no lasting relief. Instead, Gregory complicated the story: did an exorcism even occur? Was Anatolius actually free from his demon during his time in Tours? The demon was “held in check” but perhaps never expelled. While Anatolius’s demon interfered with his ability to function, some forms of possession were painless, superficially profitable, and incurable. Such is the case with one woman described in Gregory’s Histories.57 Whenever a robbery occurred, she knew where the thief had gone and what

56 Gregory of Tours, Histories VIII.34, ed. Wilhelm Arndt and Bruno Krusch, in MGH: SRM 1.1, (Hanover, 1885), 403-404. “…vigiliis orationibusquae…” “…pavore validum perpessus, clamare coepit, intrinsecus se torqueri. Unde factum est, ut, adiuvante ei… diabolicae partis militia, amotis quadris quibus conclusus tenebatur, eliderit perietem in terram, conlidens palmas et clamans, se a sanctis Dei peruri. Cumque diutissime in hac insania teneretur et sancti Martini crebrius confiteretur nomen ac diceret, se potius ab eo quam a sanctis aliis cruciare, Thoronus adducitur. Sed malus spiritus, credo, ob virtutem adque magnitudinem sancti conpraessus, nequaquam hominem mutelavit. Nam in loco ipso per anni curriculum degens, cum nihil male pateretur, regressus est, sed rursus quae caruerat incurrit.” 57 Gregory of Tours, Histories VII.44, 364-365. Gregory modeled this woman’s story on that of a similar woman described in Acts 16:16-18. The exorcism in Acts succeeded, however: “And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain girl, having a pythonical spirit, met us, who brought to her masters much gain by divining. This same following Paul and us, cried out, saying: These men are the servants of the most high God, who preach unto you the way of salvation. And this she did many days. But Paul being grieved, turned, and said to the spirit: I command thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go out from her. And he went out the same hour.” 199 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

had been done with the stolen goods. By virtue of her skill in divination, she gained freedom from her masters, amassed considerable wealth, and inspired the awe of onlookers, who saw her as “something divine.”58 Bishop Ageric of Verdun instead diagnosed her as possessed of “an unclean spirit of divination.”59 Although the bishop prayed and anointed her forehead, the demon merely cried out and identified itself but did not budge from its bodily host. The end of the story is unsettling for its lack of closure. Still possessed and aware that she could no longer stay in town, the woman left to seek Queen Fredegund’s protection. The bishop’s ineffective exorcism, which stands out amidst the successful ones more commonly described in Gregory’s writings, raises further questions about supernatural forces, their influence on the body, and the proper roles for the people involved. Who had control over the woman’s body? The bishop, through a representative of divine power, did not. He brought the woman into his presence and induced the demon to reveal itself, but he ultimately could not expel it. The woman herself lacked control, unable to command her prophetic gift. Her pronouncements about thieves and stolen goods seem reflexive rather than controlled. If “anyone” suffered a burglary, she “immediately” declared what she knew.60 Gregory notes the demon’s outcries during the encounter between the woman and the bishop but mentions nothing about the woman speaking as herself. The demon emerges as the dominant character in this episode, thanks to its influence over the woman and its defiance of the bishop. While narratives of difficult exorcisms indicated the necessity of proper mediation, failed exorcisms illustrated the human body’s remarkable talent for hosting demons regardless of saintly or clerical intervention. Sinful fallen bodies provided an ideal environment for demons. Possessed bodies were akin to pagan temples or demonically tainted jugs of water. Merovingian writers stressed the physicality of possession: the body parts where demons entered and exited, the disturbing symptoms, and the tendency for victims to behave self-destructively. Comparisons between possessed bodies and containers allowed authors to express how demons

58 Gregory of Tours, Histories VII.44, 364. “…ita ut putaretur esse aliquid divinum in populis.” 59 Ibid., 365. “…cognovit in eam inmundum spiritum esse phitonis.” 60 Ibid., 364. “Si quis enim aut furtum aut aliquid mali perferret, statim haec, quo fur abiit, cui tradedit vel quid ex hoc fecerit, edicebat.” 200 Amelia Kennedy interacted with humans. Demons exploited human vulnerability to displace their victims’ personalities and hijack control of their behavior. The frenzied actions of the human body became the actions of the demon, and some of the responsibility for these actions shifted away from the human individual.61 As expressed through language that compared possessed bodies to vessels, demoniacs had forfeited substantial portions of themselves, thanks to a combination of demonic trickery and inherited human weakness. Demoniacs thus depended on the power and benevolence of God and the exorcist. Most possession narratives ended when the exorcist expelled the demon. Yet these texts contain more than celebrations of good’s victory over evil. Possessed bodies, even those that did not receive much explicit attention from the author, told the story of postlapsarian struggle and its attendant difficulty. Exorcisms usually worked despite these complications— but not always. Exorcists faltered and occasionally failed. Even successful exorcisms did not destroy demons, which exited human bodies and went to lurk in water fountains until other human victims could be found. Vulnerability was central to writers’ perceptions of the human body, which was continually buffeted by supernatural forces, both good and evil. As shown in this essay, however, bodies were fragile containers whose individual identities were easily subordinated to external supernatural agents. Given the fallen nature of the human body, only the truly devout were capable of using pain and bodily mutability for the sake of sanctity.

This research was funded in part by a 2010 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the Office for Undergraduate Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

61 Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, 89, asserts that acceptance or displacement of responsibility marked a key difference between disease and possession. Demoniacs’ responsibility did not vanish completely, however, as demonstrated by texts stating that the demoniacs had sinned and caused their own possession. 201 essaystraces Hannah Nemer The Transformative Impact of Civil War Photography

traces

This photo by ground-breaking photographer Mathew B. Brady was taken during the Battle of Antietam, in Maryland, the bloodiest single-day battle in US history. Brady’s Antietam photos reflected a turning point in military photography as they shifted the public’s attention from heroics to death. (Photo by Mathew B. Brady.)

The use of photography to document wartime experience was a crucial innovation of the American Civil War, generating new understandings of war and death and transforming the popular perception of war, as civilians became more fully aware of the scale

203 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

of loss that the conflict entailed. Civil War photography proved innovative both in the methods of its production and distribution, and perhaps most significantly, in its subject matter. Ironically, a tool that enabled the military to develop its strategy and capacity also taught Americans to recognize the destructive potential of war. Prior to the Civil War, photography played only a minor role in war documentation. While the earliest recorded war photographs document the Mexican War (1846-1848), such photographs were few in number and not widely distributed, minimizing their influence on photography and the military.1 Photography was similarly used in the Crimean War and the Second Opium War in China, but the images remained relatively remote, often captured far from the documenting country, and therefore did not substantially influence photography practices in the United States.2 Throughout the Civil War, public demand drove interest in wartime photography. Landscape photographs as well as the carte de visite, a small portrait photograph the size of a visiting card, became widely popular in the United States during the 1850s. This consumer culture surrounding photography led many early Civil War photographers to specialize in the lucrative portraits of soldiers, which were sent home to loved ones. The photographers who instead specialized in landscape photography began to capture the actual battle scenes of the war. Though less common than portraits, battlefield photography became a critical medium through which war imagery could be expressed.3 While the military initially doubted the significance of wartime photography, photographers ultimately earned the governmental support necessary to document the war. The War Department in Washington at first rejected an 1861 proposal by the American Photographical Society to include photography in military operations.4 However, recognizing the medium’s potential for both documentation and military strategy, persistent “pictorial historians,” such as the groundbreaking photographer Mathew B. Brady,

1 Robert Taft, Photography and the American Society (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942), 223-224. 2 Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 17. 3 Ibid., 18. 4 Taft, 224. 204 Hannah Nemer

received government backing.5 With “wagons from Washington,” Brady documented the First Battle of Bull Run, the first of many Civil War battle scenes that he would capture.6

The Reality of War Brought Starkly Home Prior to the use of photography in the Civil War, war was primarily depicted by painters and illustrators, who emphasized the heroism of war. From patriotic portraits of the American Revolution that incorporated the colors of America’s flag and American symbolism, to battles set in majestic landscapes, to images of “cavalry troops perform[ing] amazing feats of equestrian gymnastics, riding, shooting, flourishing their sabers, and huzzahing all at the same time,” pre-Civil War imagery featured celebrated heroes.7 Such images offered romanticized notions of war that shaped the expectations and imaginations of both Union and Confederate recruits.8 The realities of war were vastly different, however. Photography made public the suffering of war, changing the discourse surrounding deadly conflict. A Confederate nurse articulated this sentiment, writing in her journal, “I do not think that words are in our vocabulary expressive enough to present to the mind the realities of that sad scene.”9 War photography, often manipulated to appear more gruesome, created a new visual vocabulary. In 1862, a New York Times article, noting the “terrible distinctness” of Brady’s Antietam photographs, wrote: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war…. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”10 Antietam, the source of the first battlefield death scenes, reflected a turning point in military photography, as it shifted the public’s focus again from military heroics to

5 Mathew B. Brady, interview by George Alfred Townsend, New York, April 12, 1891; Taft, 225-226. 6 W. Fletcher Thompson, Jr., The Image of War: The Pictorial Reporting of the American Civil War (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959), 57. 7 Ibid., 16-17. 8 Ibid. 9 Drew Gilpin Faust, “A Riddle of Death”: Mortality and Meaning in the American Civil War, presented as the 34th Annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, 1995. 10 Jennifer Armstrong, Photo by Brady (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1961), 63. 205 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

“A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863.” Negative by T. H. O’Sullivan: positive by A. Gardner. Gardner’s Sketch Book, plate 36.17 Photographs of nameless soldiers shocked the public, as they might have been the viewer’s son or relative.

images beyond the bayonet charge.11 These revelatory images transformed the American Civil War into the first “living room war.”12 Photographs could evoke reactions that transcended their immediate settings. In Reading American Photographs, Alan Trachtenberg suggests that these wartime photographs served as intentional monuments to war’s victims, with a careful combination of text and photograph expressing the “sacred memories” of the time.13 This is clear with Timothy O’Sullivan’s frequently reprinted photograph of the Battle of Gettysburg’s aftermath, “A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863.”14 Trachtenberg writes of the image and its accompanying text, “The title alone transposes the image

11 Cimbala and Miller, 18; Thompson, 57-58.. 12 Debra Pentecost, War Photojournalism and Audiences: Making Meaning from Tragic Moments (Vancouver: Simon Fraser University, June 2002), 35. 13 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 99. 14 Ibid., 102. 206 Hannah Nemer from the specific to the general, to allegory and hortatorical statement: horse and rider dimly seen in the rear as the Grim Reaper materializes as if from the mist of battle.”15 Indeed, such photographs addressed conflicts beyond the Civil War itself, serving as cautionary tales against the evils and traumas of war. Prominent civil war photographer Alexander Gardner wrote the accompanying text to O’Sullivan’s photograph, which appeared in Gardner’s printed collection Sketch Book: “Such a picture conveys a useful moral. It shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreaded details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.”16 The photographs of gruesome battle scenes and war casualties made public images of the dead, altering both public and political approaches to mortality. Brady’s gallery in New York, which featured photographs of nameless soldiers, shocked the public, which had previously known Brady for his portraits of famous Americans.18 In contrast, the Americans depicted in his Civil War work were anonymous. They might have been the viewer’s son or close relative, lying dead or severely wounded on the battlefield. Capitalizing on the anonymity and yet the emotional proximity of such images, Civil War photographs furthered fears that an individual’s loved one had unceremoniously died in battle, his death unrecorded and unnoticed. Slain soldiers might be tossed into mass graves or left to rot on the battlefield, while records of the dead were often inaccurate. The resulting public outrage led to a movement to identify and honor the Civil War’s dead. Civilians tried to pull identities from photographs, hoping to connect the dead to surviving relatives.19 In this way, the Civil War heralded the onset of national cemeteries and formalized the government’s involvement in honoring the military dead. Concerns from both the public and military, in large part driven by media portrayals of death, spurred the process of systematically recording and burying the dead.20

15 Ibid., 99. 16 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 99. 17 Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Vol. 1 (1866)—Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. 18 Armstrong, 63-65. 19 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 131. 20 Ibid., 103. 207 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

This famous portrait of Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant, taken at Cold Harbor in 1864 by Mathew B. Brady, heralded a new stage of photography, portraying Grant as a serious leader who lacked the time to stage a sitting portrait. (Photo by Mathew B. Brady.)

Photography also influenced public perceptions of military leaders. The 1864 appointment of Ulysses S. Grant as the commander of all Union armies heralded a new stage of photography. Portraits of Grant were distinct from portraits of generals past, depicting Grant as a serious leader who lacked the time to stage a sitting portrait. He was famously photographed leaning against a tree, ignoring the camera and focusing on a point in the distance. Kevin Morrow of the Civil War Times noted, “This image sent a critical message to the public: Here is a commander focused on nothing else but

208 Hannah Nemer

winning the war.”21 In this vein, photographs shaped public perceptions of the Union’s strength relative to that of the Confederacy. As the Union army had more resources to allocate to photography than the resource-starved Confederacy, Confederate perspectives were underrepresented in photographs, allowing northern photographers to control the discourse of the war. Just as the Union’s strategy was to fight a war of attrition in which the Confederacy would become demoralized, photographers captured the disparities between the Union and Confederate forces. Photographs of Union depots overflowing with supplies were juxtaposed to those of the depleted Confederate stores, a presentation that would wear down the morale of Confederate troops.22

Photography as a Military Resource Over time, the military’s efforts to include photography as a component of strategy has reflected a calculated desire to use photographers as resources to improve military practices. For instance, photography improved mapmaking technology. Topographical engineers, who studied potential routes for troops, enlisted Brady and his photographers in making photographic duplicates of maps by exposing negatives that contained either map tracings or photographs of previously printed maps.23 Photography thus inspired shifts in cartography that would allow thousands of quality maps to be more effectively produced and distributed in both the North and South.24 Photography also enhanced military information systems, as army engineers studied photographs and sketches of roads and bridges in areas of military operation to better learn the strengths and weaknesses of their construction. In 1863, enlisted photographer Andrew J. Russell worked closely with generals to provide photographs for illustrated instruction manuals, which served the military by demonstrating “experiments made to determine the most practical and expeditious modes to be resorted to in the construction, destruction and reconstruction of roads and bridges.”25 These

21 Kevin Morrow, “The Birth of Photojournalism,” Civil War Times 46 (1986): 40-46. 22 Ibid. 23 Thompson, 76-77. 24 Kennedy, 72-73. 25 Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” Representations 9 (Winter 1985): 25. 209 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

“Arks Made of Frames Covered with Canvas for Transferring Military Stores and Cars by Water,” Andrew J. Russell, 1863. The military used photos like this one to illustrate military innovations.

featured images of tools required to both construct and to destroy areas of industrial development, enhancing military strategies in an increasingly industrial society. Engineer Herman Haupt collected such photographic documentation, publishing Photographs Illustrative of Operations in Construction and Transportation in 1863. As suggested by the collection’s subtitle, the photographic series would be sent to officers “with a view to increasing the efficiency and economy of the public service, and especially to suggest expedients whereby our own communications can be most readily preserved or restored, and those of the enemy most rapidly and effectually destroyed.”26 Photographs such as “Arks made of Frames Covered with Canvas for Transferring Military Stores and Cars by Water” displayed the material involved in technological advances, in an attempt to convey the intentions behind the military innovation. Such photographs celebrated advances in industry and technology while instructing the application of

26 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 107. 210 Hannah Nemer

those developments.

Civil War Photography and Modernity Civil War photographs both reflect and are a product of America’s transition towards an industrial society. Army-sponsored photographs captured what would become routine procedures in construction and military practice, setting the groundwork for the industrial mindset critical to disciplining both the military and workforce. Alan Trachtenberg writes that such photographic albums captured the Civil War as “a proto- industrial experience, introducing a new scale in organizational systems and overturning older individualistic and local patterns.”27 The photographs made diverse laborers appear homogenous in their military utility, depicting freed black men as components of the labor force. While more public photographs continued to depict black men as subservient to white officers, the inclusion of black laborers in construction photographs reflects the “industrial vision” indicative of modern warfare.28 Race mattered less to the military here than industrial production and progress. Photographs themselves were a product of industrial society, as the Civil War begot circumstances that perpetuated both the demand for and production of industrial photography. To more effectively photograph battle scenes, Brady increased the capacity of traditional photographic production methods, making photography production mobile by converting the back of a wagon into a darkroom. This “What-is-it wagon” became Brady’s signature, as the specially crafted vehicle followed the famous photographer and his camera into battle.29 Transportation-ready photograph production became increasingly crucial, leading to the advent of the “Photograph Train,” a train converted into a dark room for one of the army-hired photographers, allowing for expedited travel, production, and delivery of photographs.30 These photographic processes testify to the development and growth of the United States. Trachtenberg notes, “Photography proved a not inconsiderable element in the war’s modernity, in what made that event

27 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 109-110. 28 Ibid. 29 James D. Horan, Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (New York: Crown Publishers, 1955), 38. 30 Ibid., 56. 211 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

such a profound watershed in the transformation of America into a modern nation-state and military-industrial power.” He further notes “the camera’s endowment of visibility, in images virtually simultaneous with the event, sealing the final stamp of modernity on the war.”31 Still, cameras were in the early development stages, allowing greater growth of the industry throughout future conflicts. Despite Brady’s advances, cameras were still difficult to maneuver on the battlefield due to their weight and size. They could only capture stationary images and the negatives had to be developed immediately.32 As technology developed in post-war years, photography played an even more central role in war-based media. Photographs were prevalent throughout the First World War, often used for record keeping as well as propaganda. Photographic propaganda became even more explicit in World War II, when photographs were carefully censored and systematically manipulated. With the advent of the television, both still and moving photography played an even larger role in shaping public perceptions of conflict, particularly during the Vietnam War. Photographs, used to display what many saw as the injustices of war, prompted visceral reactions throughout the United States.33 Even today, photography and film remain the primary media for depictions of war. Though camera technology has developed much since the nineteenth century, its application during the Civil War established a precedent for the use of photojournalism in conflict areas, forever altering the dynamic between civilians, military personnel, and war itself. Intimately tying civilians to conflict, it forced changes in governments’ approaches to war and its aftermath.

31 Trachtenberg, “Albums of War,” 27. 32 Morrow, 40-46. 33 The Encyclopedia of War, s.v. “War Photography.” 212 Berkay Max Marvel Comics’ Civil War: Erdemandi An Allegory of September 11 in an American Civil War Framework

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States caused nationwide hysteria over issues of national security, domestic terrorism, and civil liberties. The United States government addressed these issues by passing the PATRIOT Act and launching a full-scale war against terrorism and its supporters, while citizens in many parts of the country “erected spontaneous memorials consisting of candles, flags, and posters of missing people.”1 However, the prevailing atmosphere of grief and distress soon gave way to sentiments of nationalism, patriotism, and American heroism.2 tracesWhile this response was reflected in many pop-culture products of the time, perhaps no format was better suited to portraying “heroism” than comic books. In fact, the regular storylines of comics like Captain America and Spider-Man were temporarily suspended and 9/11 dominated the next few issues. These issues discussed the superheroes’ inability to stop the attacks and asked whether superheroes could still protect society in the twenty-first century. This trauma was revisited when

1 Veronike Bragard et al., eds., Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2011), 3. 2 Ibid. 213 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Marvel Comics produced the multivolume, crossover superhero storyline Civil War over a period of roughly one year between 2006 and 2007. TheCivil War plot, while demonstrating similarities to events that took place around September 11, was crafted as an allegorical treatment of the American Civil War and the terrorist attacks addressing contentious post-9/11 debates over national security and civil liberties. In particular, the series critiqued the American hyper-nationalism of the time by portraying Captain America’s alienation from American patriotic ideology, which had previously been his character’s foundation.

Fiction and Reality: Reactions to Attacks The explosion that destroyed the World Trade Center killed many people who went to work that morning just as on any other day. In the fictional world of Marvel Comics, it is also an ordinary school day for the children at Stamford Elementary School. In one panel, children are seen playing peacefully in the schoolyard as the villain, Nitro, activates his superpower. The following three panels show a fireball killing the children before barreling through the rest of the town. The next page shows a post- apocalyptic scene of the decimated town strewn with skeletons, wounded bodies, and a scorched American flag lying on the ground, as a superhero search-and-rescue team combs through the debris.3 These sorts of images are commonly found in photographs from 9/11.4 Likewise, the fact that the explosion in Stamford killed many innocent people spurs a discussion about imposing broader restrictions on humans with superpowers, just as the 9/11 attacks led to a debate in the real United States about personal freedoms versus national security. The fate of captured superheroes is also similar to that of the terrorists. The “War on Terror” compelled the United States to maintain “untouchable and inaccessible” detention facilities.5 Because the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay naval base that the government used as a

3 Mark Millar, Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event Issue 1 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), 12-13. 4 Mail Foreign Service, “First pictures as the World Trade Centre rises from the ruins of 9/11,” Daily Mail, February 5, 2010. 5 Travis Langley, “Freedom Versus Security: The Basic Human Dilemma from 9/11 to Marvel’s Civil War,” International Journal of Comic Art (Spring 2009): 636. 214 Berkay Max Erdemandi

Superheroes help in search-and-rescue operations after the explosion in Stamford, from Civil War 1. (Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.)

detention camp for hundreds of suspect al-Qaeda or Taliban loyalists is located outside US territory, the prisoners were not subject to the due process that would otherwise be applied within the nation’s borders.6 In the Civil War series, “rebel” Firefighters at Ground Zero. Images like this one provided a model for superheroes are similarly imprisoned Marvel Comics’s Civil War series. in “Negative Zone,” located in an (Photo courtesy of Mail Foreign Service.) alternate dimension. In The Amazing Spider-Man 535, Iron Man explains to Spider-Man during a visit to the Negative Zone that the “detention is permanent.”7 Although he already revealed his secret identity to the public in support of the Superhero Registration Act (SRA), Spider-Man changes sides upon seeing fellow superhumans imprisoned together with the supervillains, and denied their basic rights. In a sense, the pro-SRA superheroes see the others as rebels, if not terrorists.

6 Ibid., 428. 7 Stan Lee, The Amazing Spider-Man (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2006), 12. 215 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

An Allegory of September 11 in an American Civil War Framework The allegorical narrative of Marvel’s series includes metaphors of post-9/11 unrest, the “War on Terror,” and a changing American identity. Just as the reactions of a scared and angry nation authorized the government to pursue a war on terror, in the Marvel universe the fictional United States government issues legislation authorizing a war against rebellious superheroes, fueled by public fear of superhumans. Civilians are crucial to the shaping of the government’s reaction in both scenarios, because as Frankfurt School theorist Erich Fromm once suggested, people have a contradictory desire for both personal freedom and security.8 In this sense, the series reflects both the American Civil War theme of freedom versus slavery and the 9/11 theme of civil liberties versus national security. Feeling vulnerable and frightened by the attacks, the majority of Americans did not object to the government’s increased security measures—which included wire-tapping, e-mail monitoring, stricter airport regulations, and easier access to intelligence on American soil— even though it meant limiting their personal liberties.9 The PATRIOT Act gave more authority to law enforcement agencies to acquire information about individuals within the United States, made immigration procedures harder, made detaining and deporting immigrants who were suspects of terrorism-related acts easier, and expanded the definition of terrorism to include domestic terrorism. In a similar fashion, Marvel’s fictional United States government signs the SRA into law, requiring superheroes to register their real identities with the authorities of the Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate (S.H.I.E.L.D), a government-supervised espionage and law enforcement agency. The SRA garners both support and opposition in the fictional United States, much like the PATRIOT Act did. United States representative from Ohio, Dennis J. Kucinich, voiced his opposition to the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act on February 8, 2011, exhorting his fellow citizens to “remember our Constitutional experience.” He added, “We didn’t hear ‘give me liberty or give me a wiretap.’ We didn’t hear ‘don’t tread on me, but it’s okay to spy.’ What we heard was a ringing

8 Ibid., 427. 9 Ibid., 428. 216 Berkay Max Erdemandi

declaration about freedom and it was enshrined in a Constitution.”10 Although the implementation of the PATRIOT Act was criticized, events never went as far as they did in the fictional Marvel Universe. In the comic book, the front pages of newspapers announce the passage of the SRA by Congress while simultaneously reporting that Captain America is forming an underground resistance force. The paper also runs pictures of New York City citizens cheering for superheroes who support the act.11 Discussions over the SRA divide the superhero community into two opposing groups, with superheroes who support the SRA employed as government agents to capture the rebels.12 The superheroes and civilians who support either side participate in the re-creation of American identity centering on the debate over security and personal liberties. In the real United States, pre-9/11 and post-9/11 definitions of “American-ness” differ in nature. Before the attack, the United States was seen as isolated, untouchable, and so strong that no one would dare attack it. After 9/11, Americans realized that it was indeed possible that the country could be the target of terrorist attacks, and the government would be unable to stop it. The superheroes inCivil War struggle with the same dilemma. This makes it difficult for readers to choose sides between Iron Man, who supports broad government regulations to protect civilians, and Captain America, who believes that registering superhero identities will take away their personal freedoms.13 By asking the readers to choose a side, the comics’ creators force readers to question their own values. The polarization this question created among readers of Marvel’s Civil War was also inevitable in a post-Civil War and post-9/11 nation. The atmosphere that dominates Marvel’s Civil War creates the feeling that the majority of fictional Americans support the government’s position that superheroes should register their identities in order to make citizens feel more secure. The famous quote from then-President George W. Bush, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” created a similar

10 “Kucinich Speaks during Debate on PATRIOT Act Reauthorization,” C-SPAN, Feb. 8, 2011. 11 Mark Millar, Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event Issue 2 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), 6. 12 Mark Millar, Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event Issue 3 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), 17-19. 13 Mark Millar, Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event Issue 1 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), 32. 217 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

atmosphere in the United States.14 Many Americans were convinced that the government was justified in spying on citizens in exchange for this feeling of security. Lincoln’s presidency was also known for having a “dark side,” as the president suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the first year of the Civil War in response to riots and militia activity in the border states, giving Lincoln the power to detain “disloyal persons” indefinitely without trial. Lincoln also ignored a Supreme Court justice’s decision overturning the order, imposed martial law in border areas, and limited freedom of speech and the press. Marvel’s Civil War also plays on the idea that the nation was polarized between slavery and freedom during the Civil War. The notion of “brother fighting brother” is predominant in the comic book. Abraham Lincoln’s words from his famous 1858 “House Divided” speech summarizes what both superhero teams are trying to achieve, though they have different ideals: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.... I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.”15

The Death of Captain America Although Captain America represented the best qualities of the country since the comic’s first publication, the United States of the 1940s and that of 2001 differ greatly.16 When Captain America first appeared in the World War II-era, the country was a melting pot. As the atmosphere changed from World War II through McCarthyism and the Cold War, the

The assassination of Captain America, from Captain America meta-narrative also Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America. (Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.)

14 “You are either with us or against us,” CNN.com, November 6, 2001. 15 Abraham Lincoln, “A House Divided,” speech given June 17, 1858, accessed via PBS Online Resource Bank. 16 Jason Dittmer, “Captain America’s Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post- 9/11 Geopolitics,” Annals of Association of American Geographers 95.3. (2005): 629. 218 Berkay Max Erdemandi

changed, adapting to the new social phenomena.17 Twenty-first century America has its own distinct social structure and is a world superpower. Inevitably, Captain America had to adapt to the contemporary image of the United States, just as he adapted with the times before. Scholar Brian Swafford claims thatCivil War is an open-ended story because the conflict remains unresolved and readers are left with many unanswered questions.18 Swafford may be referring to Captain America’s death, the future of the SRA, and the divided state of the superhero community as “unanswered questions.” But these cliffhangers conclude the story in a way that reexamines the patriotism that Captain America symbolizes with an implicit nod to 9/11 as well as the American Civil War. In the final battle between the two superhero groups, Captain America surrenders while winning. The illustrations show Iron Man lying on the ground, his armored suit severely damaged, telling Captain America to “finish it.”19 As Captain America prepares to take the winning shot, he is stopped by fictional American citizens and policemen. The short dialogue between them and Captain America makes him realize that what he is fighting for runs counter to everything that he previously believed:

Citizen 1: Get the hell away from him. Citizen 2: Hold him down! Hold him down! Captain America: Let me go! Please, I don’t want to hurt you! Citizen 1: Don’t want to hurt us? Are you trying to be funny? The final battle: superheroes face off, from Civil Citizen 2: It’s a little late for War 7. (Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.) that, man!20

17 Ibid., 642. 18 Brian Swafford. “The Death of Captain America: An Open-ended Allegorical Reading of Marvel Comics’ Civil War Storyline,” International Journal of Comic Art 10.2 (2008), 642. 19 Mark Millar, Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event Issue 7 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), 25. 20 Ibid., 26. 219 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Signaling his team to stop fighting, Captain America drops his shield, takes off his mask, and surrenders not as Captain America but as Steve Rogers, and he is assassinated on the steps in front of the courthouse in Washington, DC. By surrendering as Steve Rogers, Captain America shows that he is always the protector of American freedom and personal liberties.

Captain America surrenders, from Civil War 7. Rogers chooses to surrender (Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.) because he does not believe in the cause of the war. As the police take him away Rogers mutters, “They are not arresting Captain America, they are arresting Steve Rogers. That’s a very different thing.”21 In the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln fought in part to rid the country of slavery, the explicit antonym of freedom. For Captain America in Marvel’s Civil War, “registering” is no different than becoming a slave. Worthy of the titles he has been given in the course of the comic’s publication, “Sentinel of Liberty,” “Commie Smasher,” and “Super Soldier,” Captain America does not want to be recorded, regulated, and controlled by the government.22 Accordingly, he fights for his central principles, freedom and individualism. And like Lincoln, Captain America does not die a natural death, but is assassinated. His death is also a reference to the morphing American identity in the actual United States, symbolizing a change within forced by an outside entity.

Captain America’s Shield vs. Iron Man’s Uni-Beam The fact that Iron Man and Captain America are chosen as the leading figures of these two opposing sides is another clear metaphor for a shifting in American identity. As a representation of a new, technologically advanced,

21 Ibid., 29. 22 Steve Rogers: Super-Soldier Nos. 1-4 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2011); Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty Nos. 1-12 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2011); Dittmer, 631. 220 Berkay Max Erdemandi

Space Age United States, Iron Man is juxtaposed with the World War II hero and veteran Captain America to play up a new meaning of “American patriotism.” On the cover of the first issue of Captain America in March 1941, the eponymous hero is depicted punching Hitler. Faced with the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States declared war on the Axis powers. Similarly, Captain America traveled to Europe to fight against the Nazis and protect democracy and freedom. Initially, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created Captain America punches Hitler on the cover of this character to generate a sense of togetherness Captain America 1, published 1941. (Image courtesy as a nation and to support the US army in its fight of Marvel Comics.) against the Nazis.23 Captain America, a deliberately political manifestation and cultural product of World War II nationalism, became a more general symbol of American nationalism over the course of almost seventy years of publication. As an example of what Renan called “the cult of the flag,” Captain America has the ability to embody the nation in a way that traditional symbols such as the bald eagle or the flag cannot.24 Compared to these symbols, Captain America’s moving image and his willingness to die for his country forges a unique personal contact with his readers.25 Captain America and In contrast, Iron Man first appeared on the Iron Man fight each other in 2007. (Image courtesy scene in 1963. The alter ego of multimillionaire of Marvel Comics.) businessman Tony Stark is a product of the Space Age, during which the United States’ foreign and domestic policies were highly influenced by an emphasis on scientific advancement. Tony Stark invented a high-tech armored suit for himself when he was kidnapped to build a weapon of mass destruction. He later developed this suit and dedicated himself to protect the world as Iron Man. Later, Captain America

23 Dittmer, 624. 24 Ibid., 629. 25 Ibid., 630. 221 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

and Iron Man worked together in the Avengers. According to Jason Dittmer, Captain America’s place in the American geopolitical script is important because the hero has actively participated in the reconstruction of American identity since the comic’s first publication.26 Arguably the reverse geopolitical relation after 9/11—America’s loss of its “isolation” from rest of the world and being attacked at home—caused Captain America to question himself and the ideals for which he stood. Because most American superheroes are

The cover of Civil War, fixated on protecting urban areas, the image of depicting the victorious Iron- two planes penetrating the American homeland Man with Captain America’s shield (2007). (Image was as traumatic for Captain America as it was for courtesy of Marvel Comics.) other Americans.27 The September 11 attacks made Americans recognize something they took for granted: times were a lot different than the 1940s, and the enemy laywithin the nation’s borders. The events of 9/11 were Captain America’s opportunity to return to his origins with a clear, but arguably reversed, geopolitical script. September 11 was “a nostalgic return to ‘The Good War (World War II)’ with its clear categories of good and evil, freedom and fascism.”28 Iron Man, with his high-tech suit, weapons, and unlimited technological opportunities represents post-World War II United States. Captain America, on the other hand, still personifies the American Dream, individualism, and traditional American values. Iron Man symbolizes offense, while Captain America is more defensive. Dittmer argues that Captain America was given a shield, not something brutal, as a symbol of his defensive nature. In Civil War, the differences in their natures is also evident in their leadership. Iron Man supports the government’s plans to regulate the superhumans and gains its trust and support in return. In the negotiation phase and in the last battle, Iron Man pursues a more aggressive approach than Captain America, who believes that the only way to win this war is to refrain from fighting each

26 Ibid., 629. 27 Nicole Devarrenne, “‘A Language Heroically Commensurate with His Body’: Nationalism, Fascism, and the Language of the Superhero Comic,” International Journal of Comic Art 10.1 (2008): 49. 28 Dittmer, 637. 222 Berkay Max Erdemandi

other, because fighting will only harm civilians and fellow superheroes.29

Conclusion: The End? Marvel’s Civil War is unique in comparison with other comic series because it not only creates a narrative that is constructed on the civil war theme taken from America’s own history, but it also develops a storyline using the twenty-first century phenomenon of 9/11. Marvel’sCivil War is a great example of the fact that comic books are not always written for children, but at times can aim to convey more complicated ideas.30 Both the real-time events surrounding 9/11 and the fictional events in Marvel’sCivil War situate the dilemma the nation faces within the debate over the role of freedom and security. TheCivil War Captain America fights like a leader and reconstructs American identity in a way that only he can. But as one commentator said, “Captain America’s story arc … has been called right-wing, left-wing, jingoist, communist, anti-American and flag-waiving.”31 This analysis echoes the many conflicting ideas about Abraham Lincoln, whose attitudes toward race were more complicated than popularly represented and who curtailed civil liberties in the service of ending slavery and keeping the Union together. In Marvel’s Civil War, Captain America does not take a stance against the government, but rather his protest is a resistance against restrictions on civil liberties and freedom. Even when he challenges pro-SRA superheroes, he is fighting to protect their secret identities and he tries to unite the superhero world. By juxtaposing the American Civil War and September 11, Marvel’s Civil War demonstrates that American identity has been shaped around the meaning of freedom and heroes who have fought for it.

29 Mark Millar, Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event Issue 3 (New York: Marvel Publishing, 2007), 20. 30 Gary Hoppenstand, editorial in The Journal of Popular Culture 39.4 (2006): 522. 31 Dittmer, 628. 223 Katie-Ann Crosshatching in Trethewey’s Majeski Native Guard as the Ideal Texture of Documented History

Although the cliché warns us never to judge a book by its cover, a surprising amount of information can be gleaned from the cover image of Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, a poetry collection that deals in part with the complicated story of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a Confederate militia of “free persons of color” formed traces in 1861.1 On this work’s evocative cover, the crosshatched text of two opposing voices intersecting on the same page speaks to the issues of overlap and “inscriptive restoration” that Trethewey cites as themes of her work.2 This cover imagery is developed metaphorically throughout the poems to suggest the intersections between black and white histories. But crosshatching also represents a

1 Natasha Trethewey is the current Poet Laureate of the United States and she won a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard in 2006. 2 Charles Henry Rowell, “Inscriptive Restorations: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey,” Callaloo 27.4 (2004): 1023. 224 Katie-Ann Majeski

model for creating a better record of history, by adding texture to existing documentation and presenting new perspectives rather than seeking to replace traditional versions of events entirely. Trethewey is concerned with images and what can be gleaned from a glimpse into a photograph or a moment of life. In her poetry, she investigates the “punctums” or the “things in the photograph that draw you outside the frame,” which “allows her to enter the realm of the imagination.”3 It is therefore fitting that Trethewey would select a cover image that serves as a metaphor for the historical project she undertakes with these poems. As critic William M. Ramsey notes, the cover of Native Guard “signals Trethewey’s intent to construct a new southern history that displaces a once-totalizing white narrative that suppressed black experience.”4 According to Ramsey, this collection creates “a multi-vocal, hybrid regional space” that becomes a richer, more comprehensive public record.5

Intersecting Black and White Memory The reader enters Trethewey’s fictionalized mind of a Native Guard soldier through diary entries in the sonnet sequence and title poem “Native Guard.” The image of crosshatching recurs here in several places, most strikingly in the December 1862 entry, where the speaker explains that he documents his journal entries by “cross-writing” his own entries into another man’s journal that was found in an abandoned Confederate home.6 The speaker describes the journal as “near full / with someone else’s words, overlapped now, / crosshatched beneath mine,” indicating the way that the journal tells two stories, one of the Confederate writer and one of the Native Guardsman.7 The speaker goes on to say, “on every page, / his story intersecting with my own,” demonstrating a consciousness of the ways that

3 Ibid., 1028. 4 William M. Ramsey, “Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South,” The Southern Literary Journal 44.2 (2012): 132. 5 Ibid., 132-133. 6 Nathan W. Daniels, Thank God My Regiment an African One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels, ed. C.P. Weaver (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), xxi. 7 Lines 11-13 of “Native Guard,” in Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (New York: Mariner Books, 2006). 225 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

these two stories represent different perspectives of the same time period.8 Although each man had a unique experience, their coexistence in the same time and region assured a certain level of overlap in the content of the entries. This crosshatched image speaks to the multiphonic nature of historical documents. Because human memory is inherently flawed, often making discovering the truth about history an elusive goal, this layering of perspectives provides a less biased form of analysis. Crosshatching imagery appears again in the second January 1863 entry of “Native Guard,” in which the speaker describes Native Guard members singing to pace themselves as they recover loose supplies that were washed away by a storm. The reader learns that “it was then a dark man / removed his shirt, revealed the scars, crosshatched / like the lines in this journal, on his back.”9 Because psychological and emotional suffering do not leave physical scars, posterity has no recollection of it unless someone seeks to preserve it, like this speaker does with his journal. In lieu of written documentation, these marks of physical abuse leave their own record. The scars that line his back document the man’s past and personal memory, much like the crosshatched lines in the journal document the speaker’s perspective.10 These memories deepen the reader’s understanding of the man who bears them by offering a glimpse of his suffering. To some extent, his scars mar his back in the same way that this documentation of his abuse and suffering disrupts the perspective of the person who gave him the scars, whether a master or a trader, who likely wouldn’t include the slave’s suffering in his own version of history. However, the tension between the different perspectives here is a bit more uncomfortable than the addition of crosshatched lines to the journal. The scars on this slave’s back provide physical evidence that would be difficult to reconcile with romanticized accounts of a peaceful, nonviolent slavery. With the crosshatched lines in the journal, the perspectives of the Confederates who owned it first are still legible beneath the lines of the Native Guardsmen. This is certainly not the case in this second example, because the man’s scars provide incontrovertible proof of harm done that would be difficult to refute or

8 Ibid., lines 13-14. 9 Ibid., lines 7-9. 10 Giorgia De Cenzo, “Natasha Trethewey: The Native Guard of Southern History,” South Atlantic Review 73:1 (2008): 20-49. 226 Katie-Ann Majeski

attribute to differences in perspective. When Trethewey began working on this collection in the early 2000s, she drew her inspiration from the recovered journal of Native Guard Colonel Nathan Daniels.11 Trethewey’s speaker in “Native Guard” is a fictionalized version of Daniels that allows the poet to add her own commentary on the events, so that the intersection between Daniels and Trethewey mirrors the way her speaker in “Native Guard” adds his perspective to the Confederate’s journal. Another notable aspect of Trethewey’s December 1862 poem is the sense of urgency that the speaker seems to feel in documenting his experience: “we take those things we need / from the Confederates’ abandoned homes: / salt, sugar, even this journal.”12 In his view, the journal is as precious as salt and sugar, a gem that could not be left behind. Trethewey’s need to add to the existing version of events reflects the urgency that her speaker felt to document his own perspective.

Mixing Public and Private Memories The first edition ofNative Guard was a hardcover version featuring the image of a deep blue flower on the cover. Trethewey abandoned the flower and opted for the crosshatched text for the next edition, a choice that places more emphasis on the historical aspects of Native Guard, while the morose flower speaks more to the elegiac tone of many of the poems. The flower image reflects the personal components of the collection, such as the poems about her mother’s grave, as Trethewey seeks to restore not only the history of the Native Guard but also that of her mother and her biracial family in Mississippi. She says that she sees many of her poems dealing with “other aspects of Mississippi history—some that intersect with the lives of people in my own family.”13 One such personal intersection involves miscegenation, which is a crosshatching of its own. These types of intersections arise in many of Trethewey’s other poems, making the metaphor of crosshatching applicable beyond the literal image of the journal as it appears in “Native Guard.” Trethewey arrived at this collection’s mix of public and private histories

11 Jee Eun Kim, “‘His Story Intersecting with My Own’: Miscegenation as History in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard,” Valley Voices: A Literary Review 11.1 (2011): 19. 12 Lines 9-11 of “Native Guard,” in Trethewey. 13 Quoted in Rowell, “Inscriptive Restorations,” 1033. 227 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

through a crosshatching of her own, saying that she needed to include the elegies for her mother in the same collection as her monuments to the Native Guard because she “had, for the sake of one poem, told a lie and needed to fix it in another one.” She felt she had lost her commitment to the truth by writing of her mother’s grave as a source of comfort in “Graveyard Blues,” and therefore aimed to address her own dishonesty and disillusionment by writing “Monument.”14 Her need to add more history to the documentation of her grief for her mother resonates with her need to add to the scant extant history of the Louisiana Native Guard. These ideas contribute to the theme of updating history and giving voice to its silences. When lines or words are crosshatched with existing ones, they do not erase or seek to dominate the preexisting lines. Instead, the two sets intersect at points and coexist on the page. These principles hold true if one views both Trethewey’s additions of “Monument” and her elegies to the Native Guard as lines being overlapped with existing ones. When Trethewey wrote “Monument” she did not erase “Graveyard Blues” or remove it from the collection. Similarly, when she wrote the Native Guard poems she did not seek to destroy the existing biased accounts of the Civil War in Louisiana. Instead she added texture to the existing histories with new information that challenges without erasing.

Fighting Erasures of Memory This type of crosshatching models a type of historical analysis that has become more prevalent since the 1960s.15 With new capabilities in technology and research, historians found that they were able to delve more deeply into social history and develop new angles on events that had been viewed from a one-sided perspective and had become securely nestled as master narratives in history textbooks for years. It became possible to conceive of figures like Thomas Jefferson in dual terms, as both the celebrated presidential figure and as the family man, and plantation owner of Monticello.16 But what is most important about this type of history in Jefferson’s case is that it does not attempt to eradicate the traditional image of him as a founding father. Instead, it seeks to add texture and layers to the existing information about

14 Pearl Amelia McHaney, “An Interview with Natasha Trethewey,” Five Points 11.3 (2007): 100-101. 15 Joyce Appleby, “The Power of History,” American Historical Review 103.1 (1998): 3-4. 16 Ibid., 4. 228 Katie-Ann Majeski

him, much like Trethewey does with her work in Native Guard. Of course this new history was and still is apt to alienate and offend those who subscribe to old perspectives. Historian Joyce Appleby notes that “the public is peculiarly nostalgic about historical knowledge and thus repeatedly horrified when historians disturb prior accounts of an event.”17 But Trethewey’s crosshatching strategy is effective because it is less jarring to the public. It allows the previous accounts to stand, rather than completely overturning long-accepted beliefs. Admittedly, at times one version of events must prevail over another, but on the whole, Trethewey works to add to the “tome of memory / with its random blank pages.”18 Her elegies for the forgotten Native Guard seek to fill in the blank pages of memory rather than erase prior accounts. A large part of Trethewey’s work deals with fighting erasures, like the omission of the Native Guard from public memory. She has described how she saw an erasure of her own work firsthand. When the Library of Congress was cataloguing Native Guard, the librarian suggested it be classified as “literature” or “poetry.” Tretheway had to fight for the official classification to include the subject “Civil War history.”19 Because she was disappointed to see all of her endeavors to fill in the blank pages of national memory being erased before her eyes, it is understandable that she would not use her own work to erase other narratives. Trethewey’s Native Guard intersects with prior historical accounts that regarded the Native Guard as nothing but a supply unit, just as her speaker in “Native Guard” allows his story to overlap with that of the Confederate soldier in the journal. Knowing the ways in which our predecessors conceived of historical events, such as understanding why units like the Native Guard were not initially appreciated, provides us with critical context and perspective. While crosshatching may initially appear to be nothing more than an attractive cover image for Trethewey’s collection, it is a metaphor that symbolizes her way of thinking about history and the multi-perspective view that is so crucial to understanding of the past.

17 Ibid., 11-12. 18 Lines 15-16 of “Theories of Time and Space,” in Trethewey. 19 Marc McKee, “A Conversation with Natasha Trethewey,” The Missouri Review 33.2 (2010): 156-157. 229 Evangeline Mee “Working with One Hand and Fighting with the Other”: An Oral History of Kate Bradley and Community Organizing in Appalachia

traces

J.W. and Kate Bradley in their home in Wartburg, Tennessee. (Photo courtesy of Margaret Ecker.) After meeting with a Berkeley professor in folklore who told me, candidly, that among other things he did not care very much about my fieldwork experience as an undergraduate, I returned home to Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhat demoralized. The professor had said he was more concerned with the theory-based side of folkloristics. Sure, I knew about the South, but could I deconstruct the Eurocentric genealogy of folklore? “Read Lacan and come back,” he said curtly.

230 Evangeline Mee

My studies in folklore had been debunked, or so I felt. But just a few days later I found myself driving an hour west to interview two community and environmental justice activists for the Southern Oral History Program’s “Long Women’s Movement in the American South” collection. A confluence of interests, both academic and personal, brought me to the home of W. and Kate Bradley in Wartburg, Tennessee, that day. The Smoky and Cumberland Mountains are a vital part of my family life, as they are for many east Tennesseans. The mountains hold the memories of my childhood and young adult life, and they are integral to my idea of home and sense of place. The environmental, economic, and social violation of mountain communities by the coal industry was therefore an urgent issue to me. Additionally, my interest in social and oral history attracted me to stories of resistance coming from affected communities, and to women activists in particular. Often, history focuses on high-profile characters, but oral history takes a more grassroots approach, searching for previously unheard voices, like those of women and racial minorities. That is how I ended up on the doorstep of J.W. and Kate Bradley one afternoon in late May of 2012. Wartburg, a small town in Morgan County, Tennessee, is situated in the midst of the lush Cumberland Mountains, a range in the southeastern section of the Appalachians. I had often visited the state park that neighbors Wartburg, but after missing three turns before finally arriving at the Bradleys’s house at the end of a long, steep driveway, I felt like anything but a local. I was greeted at the doorway by J.W. and Kate, both in their seventies and no more than five-and-a-half feet tall. “Well, you passed the test,” J.W. said with an avuncular grin. “Most people can’t even find our house.” My visit with the Bradleys began with instructions to order off a Mexican restaurant take-out menu and ended with an invitation to their family reunion that weekend. In the meantime, I sat on the sofa with Kate as she spoke of her life, including stories about her involvement in Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), and her community leadership and activism. J.W., who was a little hard of hearing, sat on the La-Z-Boy to the left and spontaneously interpolated throughout the interview with aphorisms and stories of his involvement with SOCM. Despite their lifelong commitment to community activism and economic and environmental justice, very little has been written about the Bradleys. Their stories have been confined mostly to newspaper articles and

231 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

passing mentions in books about strip mining and Appalachian activism. Little information about Kate has been published beyond noting that she was the wife of the founder of SOCM. When I began to interview Kate and several other SOCM women, I anticipated a narrative of activism solely within the context of Save Our Cumberland Mountains. As I completed the interviews, however, I realized that the women had done much more, dedicating their lives to a myriad of social and community issues. Previous literature on women activists, especially in the civil rights movement era, concludes that “men led, but women organized.”1 This thesis has been appraised and critiqued over the past years. Typically, it is the accuracy of the “but” that has been called into question and subjected to revision, as it was by my interviews. Kate Bradley explained how she and other women in her community used gender-based forms of activism to both organize and lead in effective and important ways. These women leaders all shared a passion for justice, an indelible sense of place, toughness in the face of diversity, an ability to multi-task and be resourceful, and a selfless commitment to the betterment of their communities. More than a commitment to a single organization, they were defined by the ability to take on anything, whether it was volunteering, speech-making, lobbying, fundraising, protesting, or raising a family.

The Bradleys and Activism Kate and J.W. Bradley were both born in Petros, Tennessee, a coalfield community in the Cumberland Mountains. Birthed by the same coal company doctor, both were born into large families and had coal-mining fathers. Kate remembers her father “going to work and coming in black with coal dust.”2 She recalled, “It was kind of a hard life, but my mother always worked and had a big garden and raised all kinds of our food. And daddy, he’d pick berries and go in the woods and kill squirrels and all that kind of stuff. But school and church was about all we had back then.”3

1 Charles Payne, “Men Led, but Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement, eds. Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 8. 2 Kate Bradley, interview by Evangeline Mee, May 29, 2012, transcript, 2. 3 Ibid. 232 Evangeline Mee

Petros was “just a poor community in Morgan County” with a railroad and depot for the coal.4 The town was also home to the Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex, a prison built in 1896, whose inmates included James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kate recalled that “at one time, Petros was incorporated, and they had a bank and a jail and all kinds of stores and lots of that.”5 All that has changed since the Bradleys moved ten miles down the road to Wartburg in 1994. “There’s nothing there now,” she said. “It’s just a dead place. It’s all gone. They closed the prison last year, and that was the last thing. They took the railroad out and everything’s gone.”6 The Bradleys’ activism centered on issues of social, economic, and environmental justice in their community and surrounding towns. “We was just trying to make a poor community better with healthcare and protection of jobs and protection from strip mine hazards,” J.W. said.7 SOCM, which now stands for Statewide Organizing for Community Empowerment, was founded in 1972, when concerned citizens realized that large, absentee land corporations were failing to pay taxes on their mineral land. The activists won the appeal that required appropriate taxation and formed the organization to address other problems created by the strip mining industry. J.W. described the SOCM’s founding as a response to water pollution caused by strip mining waste. He explained that, at first, the Petros community members’ defeatism prevented them from rallying against the giant coal company. However, that changed after a 1969 flood washed away several homes, causing people to act. Local citizens were also empowered by Vanderbilt University students. J.W. said that the students told the community, “Y’all have got some problems. You need to organize and fight these problems.” Thirteen people from five surrounding counties were sent to Nashville to lobby against the coal companies. The Department of Revenue heard their complaints, but they had other problems. J.W. decided to form an organization and offered five dollars to the person who named it.8 From there, SOCM was born.

4 J.W. Bradley, interview by Evangeline Mee, August 11, 2012, transcript, 20. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Kate Bradley, interview, 23. 8 J.W. Bradley, interview, 7. 233 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

This story points to several key topics that came up in conversation with the Bradleys: the health clinic, relationships with Vanderbilt students, legislative action, community support, toxic pollution caused by the coal industry, and raising support and funds for the betterment of the community. While J.W. was busy organizing SOCM, Kate was not only vital to the organization but was simultaneously leading the establishment of a health clinic program by creating connections with Vanderbilt students and engaging in grassroots initiatives.

Mountain People’s Health Clinic: Petros, Tennessee In the 1980s, the Nashville Tennessean published an article describing the Clear Fork Creek Valley as “a tortured moonscape of a place, rocked by dynamite blasts along the ridges, its roads potted by coal trucks, pungent acids trickling into its streams.” According to the newspaper, “Strip mines which derange the drainage causing floods and land erosion are everywhere. The heavy machinery used requires little manpower. Miners are out of work and the young are moving away.”9 Journalists writing about the valley often employed the same pejorative language used to describe the state of Appalachian communities in these and surrounding counties, calling them “geographically divisive but confining.”10 Petros was one of these seemingly hopeless communities. Its population seemed too small and too poor to be able to address its problems, including lack of medical care, dilapidated public schools, and the havoc that strip mining was wreaking on their land and people. In 1969, a group of Vanderbilt students, later named the Student Community Health Coalition, mobilized efforts to address deficient medical care in rural Appalachian communities. When the students arrived in Petros, they found active community members eager to serve as agents of change. The Bradleys were among them. J.W. revealed that it was Kate who raised money for a community building and library for a health clinic.11 Kate offered a history of the health clinic, showing her collaborative ethic and commitment to community health:

9 F.T. Billings, “A Teaching Relationship: students in rural health care,” Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Assoc. (1980): 167. 10 Ibid. 11 Kate Bradley, interview, 8. 234 Evangeline Mee

I was on the health council in Wartburg and on the county health council. Me and J.W. was on that, and they rotated me and him as members of the health council for twenty-five years. But we helped get a health clinic built out here, working with them. And then I got interested in raising money to build a health clinic. And we had a little engineer from Vanderbilt that drew the plans up for the clinic. And then they come up and worked. So they even had dinners down at Vanderbilt: bean and onion and cornbread dinners. And they helped us raise money. We got donations from everywhere. And we got that clinic built.

And we had a boy from Vanderbilt that got out of medical school, and he was our first doctor. And then the engineer’s wife was a nurse practitioner, and she was our first nurse. And we really had lots of luck, and the Lord blessed us. And the people in Petros were pretty good to help. It’s mostly family and friends. It got to where we would work, and then other people would want to come in and take over that didn’t know a thing about what they was doing. So we had to work with one hand and fight with the other ’til it finally got awful disgusting. But we got what we wanted done.12

Even buying the land for the health clinic was a battle, as demonstrated by a story Kate told about traveling to Nashville to vie for the land with Southern Railroad. Surrounded by the county judge, members of the Agriculture Extension Office, and “a bunch of them over there trying to block us from getting that railroad land,” Kate Bradley was the only woman in a room of powerful men.13 “Course they didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them,” she said. “We’d been fighting for months.”14 Not only did Kate end up getting the land and seeing to it that the health clinic was built, she led the fundraising efforts for the entire project.

12 Ibid., 7. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 8. 235 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Cupcakes and Quilt Raffles Throughout the interview, Kate asserted her reliance on grassroots fundraising rather than funds from politicians and corporations. “Well, that was money that I’d raised with cupcakes and quilt raffles!” she said.15 This comes as no surprise: despite the resources poured into the region throughout Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” eastern Tennessee has rarely found government on any level to be a reliable ally. Kate raised funds selling small items such as jars of canned goods, cakes, and quilts. She asserted the importance of non-profit work in her life, emphasizing that she “never worked for anything that paid any money. It was all volunteer. Never got a nickel for nothing.”16 In the following passage Kate explains the breadth of her efforts and those of women in her community, which attracted national awareness:

We sold rummage every Saturday, J.W.’s mother and another old lady there in the community. Every Saturday they’d work all day in the rummage sales, you know, selling. A big, Methodist church would give us truckloads of rummage to sell, and we made a lot of money. And then we’d cook! We sold pies and cakes and had dinners. There’s one boy from Vanderbilt, his aunt in New Jersey … had a bake sale and sent us the money to own the clinic. And one of the girls that stayed with us, they made a record at her high school and sold it and give us the money from that. And we just had a lot of little things. Women done it, you know. And it just really went over. It was fun but it was a lot of work.17

Kate’s relationship with the Vanderbilt students proved fortuitous and, as the students travelled far and wide, so did awareness of the plight of the little town of Petros. Years later, Kate encountered a Vanderbilt student in California, only to learn that he had once purchased cans of pickled beans and jelly from her. In addition to the work the students accomplished, the relationships they forged lasted a lifetime. Kate and J.W. still speak lovingly

15 Ibid., 27. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Ibid., 8. 236 Evangeline Mee

of the students, many of whom they have kept in touch with. “We all come from pretty wealthy homes, but we didn’t have love like you give us,” Kate said a student once told her.18 The depth of their bond signaled a rapport that opened the door to the acceptance of outside resources and help.

Leading and Working Together Kate’s commitment to opening the health clinic was a full-time job, yet she still managed to support her husband and his organization. J.W. was the leader and the public face of SOCM from 1972-1977, but Kate had an equally important, albeit behind-the-scenes, role.19 While he was taking people on tours of strip mines, she was in the kitchen cooking, so that when they returned, supper would be ready and on the table. Kate said that she “fed everybody that come through the valley. We had all kinds of people come through. We fed people running for president and senators and preachers. I told him I’ve fed the saints and the sinners!”20 While Kate took pride in her work, she did not downplay the time and effort it required. She remembers cooking for a crowd every weekend. The Bradleys rarely had a family dinner because guests were always “dropping by.”21 “I worked myself to death trying to feed them all and keep them going,” she said.22 She recalled those days with pleasure, smiling as she said, “I fed everybody in the world.”23 The Bradleys’ efforts to improve their community through grassroots organizing were successful both legislatively and locally. The health clinic was built, the schools improved, laws and bills restricting and halting strip mining were passed, and a community was brought together and empowered through its fight for justice. Historian Temma Kaplan writes that the ordinary women she studied while researching grassroots movements were “concerned with local issues and necessary tasks, to provide services rather than to build power bases.”24 Likewise, Kate Bradley did not gain much

18 Ibid., 33. 19 Geoffrey L. Buckley, Mountains of Injustice: Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 92. 20 Kate Bradley, interview, 3. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Ibid., 20. 23 Ibid. 24 Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996), 6. 237 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

public recognition but worked within her own means, using seemingly inconsequential methods to effect change. In an article about the civil rights movement, Charles Payne argues that “since women tend to be more deeply invested than men in networks of kin and community” they were more likely to join the movement and stay involved in less flashy, more community-based activities such as weekly meetings and neighborhood canvassing.25 He cites Karen Sack’s research, which demonstrates that “women created the organization, made people feel a part of it, as well as doing the everyday work upon which most things depended, while men made public announcements, confronted and negotiated with management.26 From this, however, he pithily concluded that “women are organizers; men are leaders.”27 His article’s summation of why women were more involved than men argued that because of women’s religiosity, they had a higher desire for “personal efficacy,” and thus a predilection for the organizational and community-based side of activist politics.28 But Kaplan and other writers have since asserted that women went farther than Payne suggests. Kaplan affirms that these women were active organizers as well as leaders, modifying Payne’s thesis. She writes of women leaders possessing not an innate, genetic quality that made them act a certain way, but rather a “female consciousness developed from cultural experiences of helping families and communities survive.”29 She applied sociologist Max Weber’s theory of the charismatic leader to many of the women described in her book “insofar as they appear to have inherent magical qualities of authority that justify their ethical mission.”30 However, “unlike [charismatic] leaders who stand aloof … participating only in the most publicized meetings, the women pay as much attention to the nitty-gritty of daily organizing as to making points that register at the national level. In doing so they create new political cultures.”31 The political culture of Petros, Tennessee, that Kate Bradley helped create included the “nitty-gritty daily organizing”

25 Payne, 8. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Kaplan, 7. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 4. 238 Evangeline Mee

that consisted of leading weekend rummage sales, quilt raffles, bake sales, canning sales, and cooking for everyone that her husband’s organization brought through her home. At the same time, Kate never let her small-town background stop her from voicing her message about the health clinic and the schools in Petros. She went from never having given a public speech before to giving “speeches everywhere.”32 She modestly recounted speaking to an auditorium full of Tennessee public school superintendents, where she demanded more funding for their community’s decaying education system. At one assembly, she was called to speak about the health clinic. She said, “When we got down there … I was first. And I made my talk and, well, I was the speaker of the day and I didn’t even know it.”33 J.W. and Kate are both charismatic leaders, but they also supported each other and each other’s causes. Even before SOCM or the health clinic, they volunteered together at their church. “J.W. done the labor; I raised the money to build two churches,” said Kate.34 As heavily committed as they were to their projects, they were as equally committed to each other. Kate noted: “I backed him; he backed me.”35 Kate cooked for SOCM, and when she would go to Nashville for a fundraiser, J.W. would come along to help. Though their roles in terms of their leadership and involvement varied, both were willing to do whatever it took to improve their communities. The scales of each of their roles were also different. J.W.’s work was mostly with SOCM, and he focused his attention on legislative appeals, lobbying in Washington, and leading an organization that fought giant companies and gained a level of regional recognition. Meanwhile, Kate was working from the ground floor, making sure that people J.W. showed around the mines were always fed. Her own work was more confined to her immediate community of Petros. The health clinic and prison that she devoted most of her time to gained local publicity, but not to the extent that SOCM did. Still, the organizations they were involved in received federal recognition. As Kate noted, “Yeah, we got invited to the White House.”36

32 Kate Bradley, interview, 8. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Ibid., 13. 36 Ibid., 13. 239 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Why Women? Why Kate? Why did so many observers point specifically to women as the force behind community activism? Kate said what other women I interviewed echoed: women were the strongest part of SOCM. “We’ve had several women that were president of SOCM after J.W. that was good leaders.… The women were the strongest in there! They backed J.W. better than many of the men. I mean, they’d go forward, and they’d get in trouble and everything. But women made SOCM strong.”37 Former SOCM President Carol Ford said that women were active in the organization because they cared about their families and their homes, “and they were the one home to do it!”38 She called them “very brave women,” saying, “and sometimes if the men are off working, trying to do their best, that leaves you.”39 But what made Kate special? Like many in the community, her father was a coalminer. She was one of seven children, yet she seemed to believe that she was the only child in her family who made something of herself. After telling a story about her fundraising, she said that “it just come natural” for her to raise money.40 “Honey, I’m the only one in my family. I don’t have a brother or a sister that ever was outgoing or ever done anything worthwhile,” she said.41 “I just always liked to be active.”42 Kate explained her activism by describing how she was the latest in a long line of fiercely independent women in her family. Whereas J.W. had little to report about his mother—a beautician, partial breadwinner, and failed grocery store owner—Kate could not avoid interjecting from across the room to speak about women in her community and in her family tree:

All the mountain women worked to help provide. There was women that made gardens and canned and preserved and put up stuff.… My mother was a stronghold in our family. She would work in that garden, put up stuff for the winter for all of us, and she practically fed us. So the mountain women was

37 Ibid., 4. 38 Carol Ford, interview by Evangeline Mee, May 30, 2012, 19. 39 Ibid. 40 Kate Bradley, interview, 11. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 12. 240 Evangeline Mee

strong. And they had cows, chickens, and they did all that.43

It was at this point that J.W. reentered the conversation to mention a fact that he believed I needed to know. “And her mother’s mother was an Indian,” he said. He added that because of her race, she wasn’t allowed to be buried in the local cemetery.44 It was not until I did further research that I understood the poignancy of J.W.’s comment. Growing up in Knoxville, I had heard people talk about the “Malungeons” my entire life. This mysterious race of people, sometimes even referred to as “mountain niggers,” were a figment of local folklore and they did not appear in Knoxville often enough to break outside the realm of myth. My one relevant memory was in high school, when a girl I had grown up playing soccer with claimed that she was Malungeon. Since then, I have discovered that there has been intense academic interest in the Malungeons. For instance, in the article “Transgressions in Race and Place: The Ubiquitous Native Grandmother in America’s Cultural Memory,” Darlene Wilson and Patricia Beaver write about the history of racism and disenfranchisement surrounding those of mixed-ancestry in Appalachia. Even more pertinent than the complex and dynamic racial history of Appalachia was the article’s attention to the historically prescribed characteristics of the ubiquitous Malungeon grandmother. The authors painted a portrait that highlighted the “subtle theme of female will and independence” that has been “woven through the vernacular history of the Malungeons.”45 They asserted, “The association of Malungeon ethnicity with independent women remains active even today.”46 While I would never presume to attribute Kate’s activism to an innate ethnic independence, she did appear to be aware of the cultural sentiments surrounding women of mixed ancestry, and this may have influenced her sense of identity. In the details that Kate included about the women in her life, she asserted that their strength rose from their resilience and ingenuity, their need to support their family, and their ability to multitask. On top of the fulltime

43 J.W. Bradley, interview, 19. 44 Ibid. 45 Darlene Wilson and Patricia Beaver, “Transgressions in Race and Place: The Ubiquitous Native Grandmother in America’s Cultural Memory,” in Neither Separate Nor Equal: Women, Race, and Class in the South, ed. Barbara Smith (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 49. 46 Ibid., 50. 241 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

job of caring for and keeping the family afloat, these women still had energy to serve their communities. Kate had described in detail her work with the Brushy Mountain Prison, but it was not until my later interview with J.W. that she revealed that her grandmother “was the first woman that ever went in that prison when it was first built” and “she cooked for them.”47

Back then there wasn’t no roads or no way to get in or out of Petros. It was just muddy roads and rocks. It’d take people a day or two to get in there if they come to see somebody at the prisons or some of their family. And my grandmother, she had a room, and she would let them stay all night and fix their breakfast for a dollar. But she’d take them in and feed them all. And give them a place to stay if they didn’t have nowhere to go. She was an old mountaineer, but she was tough. Yeah, taught me a lot. Yeah, she was a wise old woman. She was rowdy sometimes, but she was sharp. She knew what she’s—she was a McCoy.48

In those last few minutes of the interview, Kate emphasized that she descended from a line of strong, tough women. By asserting her lineage from a family of such folkloric fame as the McCoys, she wrapped herself in a birthright of mythic proportions. But Kate dispelled the stereotypes that the McCoys typically conjure, of “mountain people” being clannish and violent, by recounting how her grandmother happily fed and hosted people from across the country. When she related the terrors she had faced as an activist, I understood how well she fit into her family tree of courageous women. In Appalachian coal mining communities, companies often practiced clandestine forms of intimidation and violence towards resistant citizens. The Bradleys, with their involvement in SOCM, were no exception. J.W. spoke of being physically assaulted in a courtroom where no sheriffs were present and no one came to his aid. While Kate avoided physical harm, she still experienced palpable intimidation from coal company personnel. Kate said that coal companies were known for “burn outs” where they would set fire to troublemakers’

47 J.W. Bradley, interview, 22. 48 Ibid. 242 Evangeline Mee homes.49 It would take many more pages to complete the narrative of Kate’s activism, including her work in the Brushy Mountain Prison, for which she was invited to Washington, DC, and recognized as one of the “Fifty Most Courageous Women in America.” Even without this, there is more than enough evidence to highlight Kate Bradley’s incredible “life of volunteer” and life of leadership. The women I met in Tennessee demonstrated an alternative way to live. Many had never been to college, never traveled outside the United States, and probably—though I didn’t ask—never read Lacan. Their wisdom did not come from schooling or extensive travel or reading. It came from a history of knowing who they were personally, who they were in their families, who they were in their communities, and who they were in the hollow of East Tennessee that they called home. They were grounded with a stalwart sense of justice, and they were willing to do whatever it took to secure that for their family and their community. Kate Bradley’s oral history gives voice to the often-evanescent histories of women in eastern Tennessee. Her personal account is evidence of the tenacious spirit of individuals in small communities. The details of her activism paint a rich portrait of Appalachian resistance that continues to this day.

49 Kate Bradley, interview, 29. 243 Trevor Erlacher The Specter of Fascism: Defining the “F-Word”

In one sense—a moral sense—there could hardly be more agreement today on the subject of fascism as a general, interwar European political phenomenon.1 Liberals, conservatives, and socialists all concur on the immorality of fascism. Of all its conventional varieties, German National Socialism in particular has come to epitomize our notion of malevolence, serving as a guidepost to righteous certitude in an otherwise postmodern world of doubt, ambiguity, and fruitless debate. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, used Nazism as the cornerstone of his influential postwar doctrine of Christian Realism. Nazism has also provided a common point of reference for the most hackneyed arguments against ethical relativism. traces Indeed, Nazism’s present-day status as evil par excellence has led to an unfortunate proliferation of the so-called reductio ad Hitlerum in daily conversation, political rhetoric, and Internet forums.2 All of the other putative varieties of

1 Fascism, that is, with a little ‘f,’ to distinguish it from its Italian namesake. 2 This phenomenon is summed up in Godwin’s Law, formulated by American attorney Mike Godwin, partly in jest, to state that as a given “online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1.” The result, Godwin argues, is a trivialization of the Holocaust. See Andrew McFarlane, (2010-07-14). “Is it ever OK to call someone a Nazi?”. BBC News Magazine. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/10618638. Retrieved 2011-05-01. 244 Trevor Erlacher

fascism—including the original, Italian Fascism (which we typically regard, despite its chronological priority and extreme brutality, as an entirely more benign, even humorous, junior partner)3—derive the better part of their historical guilt from association with the apogee (or nadir) of fascism in the Third Reich. Yet, this moral certitude does not extend to the academic debate about what fascism, as a political genus, is. It also remains unclear whether we can legitimately categorize National Socialism under “fascism.” Only Italian Fascism, due to its name, is invariably designated as fascist, and even in this case scholars have argued that Nazism actually represented the more “fascistic” of the two.4 The following discussion is typical insofar as it considers only the cases of Italian Fascism and Nazism. Other potential fascisms—the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustasha, Peronist Argentina, Showa Japan, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, to name just a few—inspire far less agreement about classification and rarely enter treatises on fascism’s definition until after it has been established on the basis of the Italian and, usually, the German exemplars. A clear and concise definition of fascism is needed, but a real consensus on what that might entail has yet to emerge. Is fascism an ideology, a collection of movements and regimes, or both? Is it leftwing, rightwing, or “radical centrist”? Is fascism confined to the interwar period? Is a resurgence of it still possible, and if so, how do we know it when we see it? This paper presents a brief critical survey of some of the most prominent attempts to solve these definitional conundrums.5 Approaches to defining generic fascism can be divided into four categories, all of which are problematic for different reasons and motivated by different concerns. The first is the Marxist approach, which takes fascism to be a symptom of late capitalism’s desperate struggle against the working class. The second will be referred to as the ideological approach, which intellectual historians starting with Ernst

3 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (Londen: Hodder Education, 2005), 35. 4 This position is implied by Paxton’s five-stage program of fascist development, since Nazi Germany alone reached the fifth stage and “experienced full radicalization,” whereas Italian Fascism habitually lapsed into mere “military dictatorship.” Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005), 23, 150. 5 More specifically, it will evaluate the arguments of Stanley G. Payne, Robert O. Paxton, George L. Mosse, Roger Griffin, Ernst Nolte, Zeev Sternhell, Gilbert Allardyce, Roger Eatwell, Geoff Eley, and Martin Kitchen. 245 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Nolte have typically favored. The third is thefunctionalist (or structuralist) approach, which attempts to understand fascism “in time” as the sum total of its deeds in specific contexts rather than its ideas and rhetoric. The fourth, or nominalist, approach argues for a rejection of the other three as logically flawed, philosophically unjustifiable, and detrimental to the study of history. The latter position represents the most rational, modest, and easily defensible of the four, although its acceptance entails a renunciation of the purported heuristic, didactic, and political advantages of an umbrella concept to incorporate all ostensible instances of “fascism.”

The Bestiary: A Typology of Typologies I. The Marxist Approach Self-identified Marxists of different stripes made the first attempts to understand fascism analytically as a generic breed of politics shortly after its appearance in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, prior to Hitler’s rise to power, many of them remained skeptical about the potential for fascism to take root anywhere other than Italy. Writing in 1928, Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti expressed his belief that Fascism could not be exported to other countries, because of the degree to which the economic and class relations peculiar to Italy determined its existence: “A movement of the ‘fascist’ type, like the one in Italy, would have the greatest difficulty in conquering power elsewhere.”6 Antonio Gramsci proposed a similar, Sonderweg-like explanation of Italy’s descent into fascism, arguing that the Risorgimento was a “missed revolution” that had burdened the country with a tortured social and political development thereafter.7 In his 1944 pamphlet, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, Leon Trotsky argued that fascism was a reactionary mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie under the aegis of the capitalist class—their true enemies—against a bewildered and disorganized proletariat. Trotsky did not, however, regard fascism as an inevitable outcome of the crisis of capitalism. Instead, he argued for its latency in any capitalist society, holding the Communist Party’s incompetence, complacency, and cowardice responsible for fascism’s rise to power in Italy

6 Palmiro Togliatti, “On the Question of Fascism,” in Aristotle A. Kallis, ed., The Fascism Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109. 7 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison (New York: Weidenfled and Nicolson, 1971). 246 Trevor Erlacher and Germany.8 More sophisticated Marxist interpretations of fascism have appeared since, though the list-making method of definition has retained its appeal. Martin Kitchen, for example, has posited ten distinguishing marks of fascism, each with a decidedly economistic flavor.9 On the basis of these criteria, Kitchen effectively limits fascism to Germany and Italy, while insisting that many other places came close to fitting his definition, and that refusing to recognize fascism as a possibility in the postwar context “would make it impossible to analyze fascist dangers in the present day.”10 Writing in the 1970s, Kitchen warned of the likelihood, given the economic problems at the time, of a resurgent “neo-fascism” in capitalist countries. The tactical value of the term “fascism” as a general concept for use in Cold War-era socialist politics thus constituted Kitchen’s principal justification for the adoption of his ten-point definition. More recently, one of the most nuanced, nonpartisan, and self-critical statements of the problem from a Marxist perspective has been that of Geoff Eley, who nevertheless retreats to the trite position that fascism was nothing other than the “counterrevolutionary” outgrowth of the interwar “crisis of capitalism”

8 Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder, 1996). 9 They are as follows: 1) Fascism “is a phenomenon of developed industrial states”; 2) “fascist movements are triggered off by a severe socioeconomic crisis”; 3) “fascism is a response to a large and organized working class”; 4) it “recruits its mass following from a politicized, threatened, and frightened petite bourgeoisie”; 5) “fascist regimes are characterized by an alliance between the fascist party leadership and the traditional elites of industry, banking, the bureaucracy, and the military”; 6) fascism was intended to “stabilize, strengthen and, to a certain degree, transform capitalist property relationships and to ensure the social and economic domination of the capitalist class”; 7) “fascism is a terror regime which dispenses with all of the trappings of parliamentary democracy”; 8) “fascist movements use ideology deliberately to manipulate and divert the frustrations and anxieties of the mass following away from their objective source”; 9) “fascist regimes pursue aggressive expansionist foreign political aims”; and 10) fascism displays a “greater degree of intensity” in more developed societies. Martin Kitchen, Fascism (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), 83-91. 10 Ibid. 247 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

in countries with potent workers’ movements.11 Insofar as capitalism is still with us, therefore, fascistic movements and regimes could still appear wherever the prevailing economic order is challenged.12 The Marxist approach to the problem of defining fascism has attempted to bring the phenomenon into line with Karl Marx’s historiosophy. It casts the struggle against fascism in terms of the broader struggle against capitalism as such, effectively conflating the two and laying the crimes of the former at the door of the latter.13 Methodologically, the Marxist approach has left a clear mark on the early attempts of social historians to come to grips with fascism as an “extremism of the center” or a reactionary outburst on the part of the rural and lower middle-class “losers” of cultural and economic “modernization.”14 It remains unclear, however, whether

11 Geoff Eley, “What Produces Fascism: Preindustrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State,” Politics and Society 12, no. 53 (1983): 53-82. In his article, it is worth noting, Eley casts the nominalism advocated by this essay as a consequence of the “Philistine cry of despair” that “‘reality’ is simply too ‘complex.’” The point, however, is not that the world itself is too complex, but that the meanings of some of the words coined to describe it are too contested and imprecise to serve any heuristic purpose beyond the most rudimentary levels of understanding. “Fascism” in the sense of a generic phenomenon is one such term. This is evidenced by the fact that it has introduced far more confusion and dissent than clarity and consensus into the study of actual instances of putative “fascism”: if we take fascism seriously, then it sends us on an infinite detour into semantics rather than a shortcut to discovery and comprehension. 12 According to Eley, fascism was for “capitalism” and against “socialism,” despite the myriad claims of leading fascists to the contrary. Eley thus considers the concept of generic fascism “useful both for understanding of the global right in the twentieth century and also for finding analytical tools for grappling with current rightwing reactions in our embattled world.” Quoted from Eley’s announcement for a workshop in October 2012 at the University of Notre Dame entitled “Fascisms Then and Now: Italy, Japan, Germany.” http://history.nd.edu/events/2012/10/24/13494-fascisms-then-and- now-italy-japan-germany/ [accessed March 30, 2013] 13 The “totalitarian” interpretation of fascism, popular in the West during the Cold War, is the obverse of this thinking. It maintains that fascism, like Stalinism, is a kind of totalitarianism, from which it follows that the crimes of the former are also the crimes of the latter and the legitimate struggle is against modern, antiliberal regimes as such in the name of personal freedom and pluralism. This school of thought is not treated in any detail here because it does not aim to define fascism, but describes fascist regimes within the overarching rubric of totalitarianism. See Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976). 14 See Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 126-79; and Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 433-52. 248 Trevor Erlacher fascism was a “reactionary” or modernizing force.15 Moreover, fascism’s broad support in Italy and Germany among classes other than the petite bourgeoisie, including the urban working class, suggests a fundamental flaw in attempts to define fascism in terms of the typical social composition and economic interests of putatively fascist movements and regimes. Whether they see fascism as the final, inevitable stage of capitalism’s development—its desperate reaction against progress in the face of the ascendant toiling masses—or a type of political formation confined to nations exhibiting specific socioeconomic qualities, those working from the scaffold of Marxism have understood fascism as a dormant potentiality in all modern capitalist societies. Doubts concerning the term’s ontological validity notwithstanding, recognition of the ever-present threat of “generic fascism” to their conception of progress constitutes their chief argument in favor of its retention in historiographical and political discourses.

II. The Ideological Approach The ideological approach attempts to define fascism as a discrete ideology, rooted in preceding intellectual traditions. The typically liberal- democratic theorists of this mold maintain that fascism should be understood as comparable with the ideas of liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, and socialism from which it derived. Under this view, fascism was a positively formulated alternative worldview that we should not reduce to an empty negation of these more reputable ideologies. Their approach stands in sharp contrast to the once prevailing attitude that dismissed fascism as purely nihilistic and devoid of intellectual content. They reject the Marxist understanding of fascism as a manifestation of the class struggle under capitalism determined by “material forces,” noting that fascism enjoyed widespread appeal among intellectuals, avant-garde artists, and all classes of interwar Italian and German society. They argue that fascism derived its mass appeal from an initially revolutionary (i.e. socialist) ideology, and that ideas determined its content as much as anything else. To a large extent, this approach constituted a reaction to Ernst Nolte’s

15 See Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “Fascism and Modernization,” World Politics 24, no. 4 (July, 1972): 547-64; Wolfgang Sauer, “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?” American Historical Review 73, no. 2 (Dec., 1967): 404-24; and James A. Gregor “Fascism and Modernization: Some Addenda,” World Politics 26, no. 3 (April, 1974): 370-84. 249 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

work on the question, which problematized the common designation of fascism as a rightwing rejection of socialism. In the 1960s, Nolte controversially presented three theses about fascism. Firstly, he confined fascism to the interwar period, which he called the “era of fascism,” on the basis of fascism’s novelty and its specificity to the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Secondly, he argued that the Bolshevik Revolution, and Marxism more generally, made fascism possible and thinkable. Nolte defined fascism as “anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.”16 Nolte thus argued for the impossibility of situating fascism on the traditional left/right political spectrum. Thirdly, he reconceptualized fascism as a metapolitical phenomenon, calling it “resistance to transcendence.”17 This final item is rather too abstruse and ancillary to the broader historiographic debate to warrant coverage in any detail here. To simplify greatly, however, by “transcendence” Nolte meant the progressive human liberation from tradition in the social, moral, political, technological, material, intellectual, and spiritual spheres. Nolte insisted on the substantial degree of continuity between fascism and preceding intellectual currents stretching back to Charles Marraus and Actione Français. He also proposed six points for a “fascist minimum”—anti-communism, anti-liberalism, anti-conservatism, the Führerprinzip, the party-army, and the aim of totalitarianism—which later scholars have incorporated in whole or in part into their own theories of fascism. Intellectual historians since Nolte have treated fascism not so much as a rejection of socialism as an attempt to reconfigure it in combination with presumably antithetical values and influences. A. J. Gregor, for example, has interpreted Italian Fascism as a coherent ideology of “dissident Marxism” that produced a “developmental dictatorship.” He bases his account on the intellectual development of Mussolini and his followers, noting their indebtedness to socialist ideas and lifelong loyalty to the desirability of mass

16 Ernst Nolte, “The ‘Era of Fascism’ and the Uniqueness of Fascist Ideology,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 152. 17 Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Actione Français, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). 250 Trevor Erlacher

mobilization and revolution despite their turn to nationalism, idealism, and activism, all of which, Gregor argues, were also typical of Marxist movements throughout the twentieth century.18 Gregor’s revision doubts Italian Fascism’s conventional identification with Nazism, and hence the notion of a generic fascism, but this has proved largely inconsequential for the historiography on fascism as a whole.19 Nevertheless, Zeev Sternhell has followed his lead on key points. Sternhell rejects the designation of generic fascism as a rightwing ideology, recasting it as an anti-materialistic, anti-rationalistic, and nationalist revision of Marxism combined with a revolutionary syndicalist “cult of heroism, vitalism, and violence.”20 Sternhell emphatically places Nazism in a category of its own for its biological determinism and racialist anti-Semitism, neither of which figured into Italian Fascism.21 Following Nolte, Gregor, and Sternhell, George L. Mosse presented a refined and influential definition of generic fascism as ideology with his 1979 article, “Toward a General Theory of Fascism.” For Mosse, fascism was an “‘attitude toward life,’ based upon a national mystique which might vary from nation to nation. It was also a revolution, attempting to find a ‘Third Way’ between Marxism and capitalism, but still emphasizing ideology over economic change, the ‘revolution of the spirit’ of which Mussolini spoke, or Hitler’s ‘German Revolution.’”22 Mosse included Nazism in his definition, while remaining sensitive to its unique “style,” ideological pedigree, and origins in the “occult.”23 Shortly thereafter, Stanley G. Payne elaborated on the concept of generic fascism in a similar key, arguing that popular

18 See A. J. Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Gregor, Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 19 R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), 79-80. 20 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12. 21 Juan Linz, for example, who understood fascism as an “ideal type” (in the Weberian sense) whose status as a “latecomer” necessitated its ideological negations. He also pointed to fascism’s positive aspects (populist welfare, exultation of work, collectivism, etc.) and its “distinctive style” as defining features. Juan Linz, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 64-69. 22 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (London: Howard Fetig, 1999), 42. 23 Ibid., 95-136. 251 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

opinion obliged historians to provide a working definition for the “fascist minimum” assumed in everyday parlance, despite the difficulties inherent in doing so, and despite the possibility that the nominalists and skeptics who deny the existence of such a thing may, after all, be right.24 Payne’s somewhat cumbersome typology incorporates Nolte’s three negations and adds two sets of points, termed “ideology and goals” and “style and organization,” respectively. Payne distinguishes between fascist movements and fascist regimes, identifies six varieties of fascism, and provides a list of criteria separating fascism from “right authoritarianism.”25 Also stressing the importance of treating fascism as an intellectual phenomenon, Roger Eatwell favors moving beyond the right/left political dichotomy, carefully discriminating between “propaganda” and “ideology,” and advocating a “spectral-synthetic approach” that emphasizes fascism’s penchant for assimilating divergent elements from liberal, conservative, and socialist thought.26 At the forefront of these more recent attempts to produce a general theory of fascism, Roger Griffin has optimistically proclaimed the emergence of a “new consensus” among Payne, Eatwell, and himself.27 Griffin’s definition of generic fascism, as parsimonious as they come, nevertheless depends on several specialized terms in need of definition themselves. He calls fascism “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”28 For Griffin, this phrase sums up the “lowest-common denominator” of the “ideal type”29 of fascism. Roughly speaking, Griffin means that, at minimum, a program aimed at the regenerative rebirth of a given nation out of some perennial decadence into a new order characterized by non-autocratic yet non-representative and non-pluralistic government informed all fascisms. All of these definitions emphasize fascism’s ideological component, and the necessity of an elaborate, generic, working definition to serve as

24 Stanley G. Payne, “The Concept of Fascism,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 83. 25 Ibid., 84-88. 26 Roger Eatwell, “Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 71-80. 27 Roger Griffin, International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (Arnold, 1998), 14-16. 28 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 26. 29 Max Weber’s category for sociological and historical inquiry, on which more later. 252 Trevor Erlacher

a framework for future inquiries into individual fascisms and comparisons among them, but diverge markedly in their focuses and conclusions. This is not surprising, given the fact that they do not agree on which regimes and movements to include in their analyses of fascism, and therefore depart from markedly different empirical bases.30 This too is not surprising, because the aim of their common endeavor to define generic fascism presupposed the absence of a definition or set of objective criteria that would indicate which regimes and movements make for permissible subjects of comparison in the first place. Thus the very nature of this debate precludes the arrival of its participants at a standard position acceptable to all interested parties.

III. The Functionalist Approach The work of Vichy France specialist Robert Paxton departs from the above approaches in its deemphasis of ideology, shifting the definitional debate away from what fascists “said” to what they “did.”31 In place of the usual attempts to treat generic fascism as a collection of doctrines and, at the very least, intended actions, Paxton offers a five-stage, ontogenic account of the various fascisms. These five stages are: 1) movement formation; 2) creation of a party; 3) seizure of power; 4) exercise of power; and 5) radicalization and entropy. Paxton regards his model as more dynamic, historical, and sensitive to contingency than the ones offered by Griffin, Payne, and others.32 Paxton maintains that the enormous discrepancy between what fascists say before they obtain power and what they do with it after they have acquired it necessitates this approach. Paxton understands fascism as a “process,” not an “essence,” whose diversity in different national contexts is attributable to the fact that it did not make claims to legitimacy on the basis of some “universal scripture”—as in Marxism, liberalism, etc.—but what it considered to be “the most authentic elements of its own community identity.”33 Paxton denies that fascism is a “true ‘ism,’” noting its disdain for universal principles and intellectual consistency, and the absence of any founding fascist thinker or manifesto. Thus, Paxton’s account

30 By contrast to Griffin, Payne, Linz, Mosse, and Eatwell, prolific Mussolini biographer and student of fascism Renzo de Felice joins Sternhell and Gregor in excluding Nazism from the family of fascisms. 31 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), 10. 32 Ibid., 23. 33 Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 89-96. 253 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

of fascist ideology is almost entirely functionalist, that is, he imagines fascists changing their positions extemporaneously according to the needs of the moment, irrespective of their earlier pronouncements, and without following any underlying logic (apart from certain, unconscious patterns of historical development). Nevertheless, entirely against the proclaimed spirit of his approach, Paxton offers a meaty, single-sentence definition of fascism at the end of The Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.34

Additionally, Paxton offers a set of nine “mobilizing passions,” which he denies the dignity of designation as “reasoned propositions,” preferring to think of them as “visceral feelings,” unstated in “fascist public language” yet evident in fascist actions.35 He regards this as his concession to scholars who define fascism as an ideology, and claims the middle ground between their position and fascism as “freewheeling opportunism.” In setting out to present his new conception of generic fascism, Paxton honors a tradition in fascism studies by blaming nearly everyone who preceded him for needlessly complicating the term. He blames the Marxists and leftists of the interwar period for failing to grasp that fascism was “an authentic mass popular enthusiasm and not merely a clever manipulation of populist emotions by the reactionary Right or by capitalism in crisis.” He blames the imitators who adopted and continue to adopt the outward appearance of fascism, but lack its substance. He blames the fascists themselves for presumptuously differing so much from one another in time and space. He blames the scholars who have adopted the allegedly

34 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 218. 35 Ibid., 219-20. 254 Trevor Erlacher

“time-honored convention” of taking fascism for granted as a “body of thought.” Lastly, he blames people in general for the ways in which they have used and abused the word “fascism,” turning it into the “most banal of epithets.”36 Yet Paxton beseeches us not to allow these difficulties to discourage us. “A real phenomenon exists,” he writes, simply asserting what he needs to prove. Paxton rejects the purported “nominalism” of scholars like Sternhell, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and others, who refuse to grant the possibility of a theory of fascism that incorporates Nazism, writing that “the term fascism needs to be rescued from sloppy usage, not thrown out because of it,” and that “it remains indispensable” to an understanding of the twentieth century and the avoidance of any future repeat of its horrors. Paxton eschews the “medieval bestiary” approach, which lays out every individual instance of fascism in great detail without making any generalizations about the features common to all of them. He rejects the “essentialism” of Griffin et al., who aim to construct an “‘ideal type’ that fits no case exactly.” He argues that such approaches “condemn us to a static view, and to a perspective that encourages looking at fascism in isolation.”37 An evidently miffed Griffin gave this account of his and others’ work on fascism a sharp rebuke on the pages of The American Historical Review. Reviewing Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism, Griffin turns the accusation of “essentialism” back onto Paxton, writing that he “presents the empirical facts about the genesis and assault on power of particular fascisms as illustrating the five stages he has identified a priori, which is closer to essentialism than anything that has flowed from the pens and computers of those he criticizes.”38 Furthermore, Griffin maintains that Paxton does not understand what constitutes an “ideal type” in the Weberian sense of the term. “Ideal types,” according to Weber, are deliberately fictive and intended only for heuristic and taxonomic purposes, not the positing of essences.39 The user of an “ideal type” must modestly and openly concede the ethical and epistemological subjectivity of his or her perspective, which

36 Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 89-96. 37 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 21. 38 Roger Griffin, review of The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Paxton, The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): 1531. 39 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Max Weber,” 5.2, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/#IdeTyp (accessed 5/2/2011). 255 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

is more than can be said for Paxton, each of whose five stages constitutes an “ideal type” without his saying so. Moreover, Paxton based his last three stages of fascist ontogeny—from the “seizure of power” to “radicalization/ entropy”—on a mere two cases (Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany), which is entirely insufficient for the generalizations he makes therefrom. Finally, Griffin accuses Paxton of tautologically arriving at his wholly unoriginal and partially inaccurate characterization of fascism40—which Paxton presents at the very end of his monograph as if it could be somehow inferred from the evidence produced in the preceding pages—through a “pre-established definition of what distinguishes a fascist regime from an authoritarian one.”41 The latecomer Paxton’s functionalist approach to fascism commands fewer followers than the ideological approach espoused by Griffin and company and faces a number of the same problems. Paxton has not escaped essentialism, but he refuses to embrace nominalism in the same way that the ideological school of fascism has through their employment of the “ideal type.” Instead, he imagines that there is some third way between the two extremes that consists of a rehistoricization of fascism, but having failed to map out this middle road to the satisfaction of the field, Paxton simply vacillates between both camps.

The Case for Nominalism In 1979, Gilbert Allardyce published “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” an article attacking the very notion of a generic fascism. Allardyce argues that historians have continued to use the word fascism despite the fact that they do not agree on an adequate definition. The essence of an international fascism, beyond the Italian original, continues to elude historians: “Whether they envision fascism as the tool of class interests or the expression of more impersonal forces—the revolt of the masses, the moral crisis of civilization, totalitarianism, or the modernization process—they generally understand it in terms of something

40 Without his consent, Griffin places Paxton in the ranks of the new consensus alongside himself, Payne, Eatwell and Mosse. He also points out the “goal of external expansion” in Paxton’s definition does not apply to the fascisms he otherwise acknowledges in Spain, Britain, and Romania, and that “uneasy collaboration with elites” applies only to Nazism and Fascism. 41 Roger Griffin, review of The Anatomy of Fascism, 1531. 256 Trevor Erlacher

more fundamental and important to history.”42 Allardyce maintains that the available evidence never supported the idea of a generic fascism. Thus, the more historians learned about personalities and movements, the more they diverged from one another in their overarching interpretation of the ostensibly real universal phenomenon. “Few historians, however, have lost confidence that further research will unearth the ‘missing link’ that unites individuals and parties in a generic fascism,” he writes. “In this sense the notion of generic fascism exists in faith and is pursued by reason.”43 Allardyce calls for the application of Ockham’s razor to fascism, which he denies the status of a “generic concept,” an “ideology,” or anything universalistic: “The time has come for historians to admit what Mussolini himself was forced to recognize: universal fascism is an illusion.” Tweaking the term for application to the broad sweep of putative fascisms generates a pure abstraction, devoid of specific content and therefore entirely useless as a methodological tool: “Full of emotion and empty of real meaning, the word fascism is one of the most abused and abusive in our political vocabulary.” Thus Allardyce argued that “the concept of fascism” should go the way of the word “romanticism,” and be “de-modeled, de-ideologized, de-mystified, and, above all, de-escalated.” In closing his essay, Allardyce seconded Nolte’s suggestion that historians confine fascism to the period from 1919 to 1945. We may be stuck with it, but we should nevertheless try to “limit the damage” by relegating it to interwar Europe and rendering it “a foreign word again, untranslatable outside of a limited period in history.”44 There is still much to recommend Allardyce’s prescription, though Eley dismisses it as “pointless.”45 The antinominalists on the other side of the debate have been repairing the damage done by it ever since. But a real consensus on the definition of generic fascism has yet to emerge, even among similar-minded intellectual historians Payne, Griffin, Eatwell et al. All of the formulations surveyed here are equally valid, but by that same token they are all equally invalid. The meanings with which we imbue our words are necessarily arbitrary, but this is no mark against them provided

42 Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” The American Historical Review 84 (1979): 367-68. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 385-88. 45 Eley, “What Produces Fascism,” 56. 257 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

only that they are useful, agreed upon, and understood by the people who use them to communicate. The question, then, is how useful is the word “fascism” as a signifier of some generic, global phenomenon? In the absence of a definition to which everyone can assent, the concept of generic fascism remains almost entirely useless, if not downright harmful, to the study of history. The scholastic debates surrounding the term stand in the same relation to empirical, historical research and analysis as metaphysics to physics—the more we concern ourselves with the lofty, ephemeral realm of pure concepts, the less time and energy we have to devote to the study of what actually exists, which is the historian’s prerogative. Similarly, the unending pursuit of a “fascist minimum” only distracts from the study of real instances of “fascistic” behavior. A common argument for the retention of the word “fascism” in academic discourse, and the worthiness of the quest for a generic definition of it, holds that this will provide us with a framework for comparison among fascisms. Scholars have made a similar argument for retention of the word “totalitarianism,” yet the latter term has fallen almost completely out of favor with many historians for the same reasons that we should regard “fascism” as suspect. Decades of polemical, ideologically charged political use have irrevocably compromised the term “totalitarianism” for use in nonpartisan research. Yet the same is true of “fascism” to an even greater extent. The difference is that left-wing commentators have typically used the latter to demonize motley throngs of color-coordinated thugs or liberal-democratic regimes through association with National Socialism—the universally acknowledged standard of inhuman evil—whereas Cold-Warrior historians and political scientists have used the former to demonize the purportedly more redeemable Soviet Union in the same way. The concept of totalitarianism, which always enjoyed a more coherent and consensus-approved definition than “fascism,” lost its credibility because it failed to fit the reality of life under putatively totalitarian regimes. As an abstract model, it is inaccurate because it blows out of all proportion the power of the state to control society. Totalitarian theory posited a number of theses that proved false or exaggerated in the light of new data, particularly in the Soviet case. Mutatis mutandis, theories of generic fascism have proved unable to explain individual fascisms in any detail across the

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board, and inevitably come into conflict with new findings about specific movements and regimes. Fortunately, comparative history requires neither of these terms. Nazism, Italian Fascism, and any number of other “fascist” movements can just as well be compared without a term to envelop them all as Stalinist Russia and the Third Reich.46 Another argument for the retention of the word fascism in academic discourse possesses greater emotional and political appeal. The Italian Left, as Italian historian R. J. B. Bosworth has pointed out, considers fascism indispensable as a general model. By regarding Fascism’s collaboration with “the ultimate evil of Nazi Germany” in war and genocide as “natural and inevitable,” and preserving the Italian Communist Party’s “myth of resistance,” the post-war Italian Left can use the generic model to “check the rapacity of the rich, the sexism of men, the allure of a revived nationalism,” and “privilege the working class, trade unions, social humanism, [and] those groups, institutions and ideas which Fascism had opposed and oppressed.”47 Marxists have used and continue to use the concept of a generic fascism almost exclusively to castigate their political enemies, who are usually advocates of private property rights and free trade. For the purposes of antiliberal rhetoric, only the general term will do, because it can be defined to include Nazism and thereby carry all of the negative connotations of the Holocaust.48 Paxton’s chief argument against nominalism, as we have seen, is similarly pragmatic and value-laden. Thus he writes that “contemplating fascism, we see most clearly how the twentieth century contrasted with the nineteenth, and what the twenty-first century must avoid.”49 And later, more ominously: “Armed by historical knowledge, we may be able to distinguish today’s ugly but isolated imitations, with their shaved heads and swastika tattoos, from authentic functional equivalents in the form of a mature fascist-conservative alliance. Forewarned, we may be able to detect the real thing when it comes along.”50 A resurgence of fascism is certain,

46 Many of the contributors to a recent edited volume comparing Stalinism and Nazism have done superb work without recourse to the theory or the term “totalitarianism,” thus demonstrating its superfluity as a conceptual framework. See Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 47 Bosworth, Mussolini, 2. 48 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 2-4. 49 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 21. 50 Ibid., 205. 259 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

it would seem! Perhaps historians would do best to leave the soothsaying, moralizing, and cautionary tales to prophets, priests, and politicians. Something as terrible as Hitler’s reign could indeed happen again, but the entirely speculative fear of this possibility should not determine the way we write and interpret history. There are a number of logical problems with the attempts to define fascism treated above. Nearly all of the arguments purporting to demonstrate the nature of a generic fascism rest upon some combination of an appeal to intuition, an appeal to the masses, and an appeal to authority. Only the latter two are informal fallacies, but even the first is suspect for its imprecision and subjectivity. The chief assumption of these arguments is that there are a variety of fascisms beyond the Italian case that we can or must identify on the basis of intuition, public opinion, and/or the opinion of experts. Stanley Payne, for example, employs the latter two, perhaps leaving the first unstated, when he writes:

Given the difficulty in arriving at a common definition of the putatively fascist movements, it is always possible that the extreme nominalists and skeptics could be right, and that a true “fascist minimum” did not exist. Against such skepticism, we have the relative agreement of the majority of contemporary observers in the 1930s that a new form and style of politics had emerged in the radical new nationalist movements of Europe customarily called fascist, a position generally adopted by the majority of scholars and analysts since.51

In this way, Payne’s point of departure in defining fascism, like that of his peers, is sanctioned by two informal fallacies: 1) an argumentum ad populum or appeal to mass perception (i.e. “the majority contemporary observers”); and 2) an argumentum ad verecundiam or appeal to authority (i.e. “the majority of scholars and analysts”). A more delicate procedure is required to determine which movements and regimes to include in this majoritarian notion of fascism. At this stage, the personal convictions of a given theorist come into play. Italian Fascism is invariably included in the lineup without further comment, since it is, after all, the first and

51 Payne, “The Concept of Fascism,” in Kallis, The Fascism Reader, 83-84. 260 Trevor Erlacher only instance of fascism that proudly coined and bore the name “fascist.”52 Beyond this, a given scholar’s sympathy for or antipathy to Italian Fascism appears to determine whether or not they couple it with the second usual suspect, Nazism. Hence, Renzo de Felice—the “anti-anti-Fascist”—refuses to call National Socialism “fascism,” since this would reflect poorly on a movement (i.e. Italian Fascism) that he regards as having had a positive, modernizing impact on his own country. An author like Roger Griffin, by contrast, has no such qualms about lumping these two regimes into the same category because he is not concerned that the Italian nation might look worse for it. Since there is no set of established, objective criteria for determining which regimes are fascist—and if there were, then the debate over fascism’s definition would be solved—every single one of the arguments for a “fascist minimum” considered here constitutes a question-begging exercise in circular reasoning. The proposition to be proved, that “fascism is x,” is assumed in the premise from which it is deduced, that “these regimes are or were fascist.” The nominalist position holds that Italian Fascism, National Socialism, and all other similar phenomena are best understood on their own terms in the full richness of their individuality. The positing of a term to encompass them all is a needless lexical innovation, doomed to be little more than the arbitrary reflection of a particular, biased perspective, and contributing nothing but a distraction from the task of describing and explaining twentieth-century Europe. Language necessarily consists of generalizations and categories intended to organize our experience into manageable and communicable elements. In this sense, “fascism” is just as legitimate a word as any, but given the prevailing confusion about its meaning and the unlikelihood of this situation ever changing for the better, historians and political scientists should either get into the habit of providing their own personal definition of it prior to every use, or retire it from their vocabulary altogether. Abandoning the cause of constructing a definition of fascism compulsory for everyone will liberate all parties concerned from an insoluble debate. Unless the “Era of Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalism” catches on in the near future, there may be no escaping the habit of referring to fascism as

52 Even the Fallangists insisted they were “Spanish” not “fascist.” 261 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

a general interwar phenomenon in courses and textbooks on twentieth- century European history. Educators and historians should nevertheless adopt a healthy skepticism about the idea and encourage students and the public to follow suit. A consensus is not forthcoming and the specter of fascism continues to haunt us, ever evading the finely calibrated instruments of our paranormal investigation into its true nature. Though fascism suffered an ignominious defeat and death in the Second World War, its ghost enjoys a paltry victory in the afterlife, confounding the best efforts of scholars ever since to send it to hell for good.

262 Scott Krause Learning From David Hasselhoff: The Frustrated Desire for Historical Authenticity in Berlin

Opponents to the disfigurement of the East Side Gallery ranged from tracesDavid Hasselhoff to leftist activists. March 2013 protests gave “the Hoff” his largest audience since the early 1990s. (Photo by Scott Krause.)

On March 17, 2013, Berlin’s legendary party crowd rose unusually early to attend a political demonstration. More than 10,000 people gathered to protest the partial destruction of the “East Side Gallery”—the longest remaining, art-bedecked section of the Berlin Wall—to make way for an upscale apartment complex. Protesters could count on prominent celebrity support from David Hasselhoff. Addressing the crowd in front of a counter-culture club, with a slurred speech denouncing the sell-out of culture, “the Hoff” found his bearings 263 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Since the late 1960s, GDR Plattenbauten have occupied Fischerinsel, for which the Old Town was razed. (Photo courtesy of Manfred Brückels.)

when he capped his address with an acapella rendition of his German reunification-era hit, “I’ve Been Looking for Freedom.” The alliance between a 1980s American consumer culture’s ambassador and leftist critics of gentrification, to the joy of thousands of youths born after the fall of the Wall, made the protest both ironic and bizarre. In farcical fashion, the debate on the East Side Gallery highlights a broader debate taking place currently in Berlin: what place should the city assign to the visible traces of the twentieth century in its cityscape? The stance of Berlin’s city administration on the future of the East Side Gallery is emblematic of the sorry and confused relationship of Berlin with its own past. The same local politicians who rushed to voice their support for the East Side Gallery’s preservation had earlier given a building permit for the apartment complex in order to facilitate community development. Granted, coming to terms with the twentieth century cannot be easy in Berlin. The Holocaust was engineered and coordinated from its premises and World War II was unleashed by orders signed there, ultimately consuming the city as its last European battlefield. During the course of the twentieth century, no less than five different political regimes attempted to leave their imprint on the city. Kaiser Wilhelm II tried to counter explosive economic and urban growth with pompous displays of imperial splendor, such as the

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The longest-remaining, art-bedecked section of the Berlin Wall, known as the “East Side Gallery,” became the center of a debate over the preservation of the visible traces of Germany’s twentieth-century history when portions of it were slated to be torn down to make way for an upscale apartment complex. (Photo by Mark W. Hornburg.)

Deutsche Dom. Brick stone modernist buildings still stand as witness to the liberal potential of the Weimar Republic. Nazi legacies survive most visibly through the scars the regime inflicted, in Stolpersteine commemorating deportees, and in open lots. But the Nazis’ architecture still litters the city as well, exemplified most famously by the Olympiastadion. During the city’s division through the Cold War, both East and West sought to remake their portions of the city into showcases for their respective systems’ achievements. The Moscow-inspired Karl-Marx-Allee, the former Stalinallee, still marks the Eastern end of downtown, while the Western end is framed by the modernist, tailfin-compatible architecture of the Kudamm. As of 2013, most of the former deathstrip, a swath of flattened blocks running alongside the Wall, has been reclaimed by hurried construction. Most of the government quarters and the business towers of Potsdamer Platz have been erected there, draped in steel and glass facades, as if to demonstrate to visitors how twenty-first century Berlin has become an open and cosmopolitan global city. A certain behavioral pattern in Berlin continuously threatens this unique trove of twentieth-century architectural milestones and follies. Since the nineteenth century, a raze-and-build mentality has been closely

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The reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloß, the beginnings of which are shown here, will expunge the last traces of the GDR from Unter den Linden Boulevard in the touristic heart of Berlin. (Photo by Scott Krause.)

intertwined with municipal politics. Art critic Karl Scheffler’s 1910 aphorism that Berlin was “damned to always become and never to be” characterizes to this day Berlin’s cycle of destruction, building, and nostalgia. For example, countless foreign visitors search in vain for an Altstadt, a pre-eighteenth century Old Town deemed quintessentially German. The explosive city growth of the nineteenth century, a World War, and a Stalinist demolition campaign during the 1950s took care of that. Instead, visitors are ushered into the Nikolaiviertel, Berlin’s closest equivalent to an Altstadt, only to find that they themselves are older than the houses built there. With the divided city’s 750-year anniversary looming in 1987, Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the GDR’s ruling SED, realized to his dismay that his predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, had systematically destroyed prewar blocks in Berlin’s city center in the name of progress. To rectify this absence, Honecker ordered concentrated reconstruction of half a dozen vanished landmark buildings in a single place, peculiarly framed by iconic GDR Plattenbauten, East Germany’s distinctive pre-fabricated concrete housing blocks. Many Berliners still refer to the Nicolaiviertel as “Honecker’s Disneyland,” with characteristic sarcasm. Honecker’s bid to leave his mark on the cityscape in the form of the

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Excavated remnants of Gestapo prison cells running along the Berlin Wall offer visitors to the “Topography of Terror” the drama of twentieth-century German history in a uniquely condensed fashion. (Photo courtesy of Stefan Josef Müller, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors.)

Palast der Republik has found a less forgiving reception. Nicknamed “Erich’s lamp store,” this 1970s steel carcass, which housed the GDR’s toothless parliament and a concert venue, was demolished in 2008. It is being replaced by the reconstructed Hohenzollern Stadtschloß that occupied the lot until 1950. The fates of Honecker’s two architectural pet projects demonstrate the circuitous nature of Berlin’s breakneck building activity, and suggest that Berlin’s tradition of architectural purges is alive and well. A powerful faction of Berliners would rather erase any trace of the GDR, and by extension of a messy but significant chapter of Berlin’s history. It must be acknowledged that the city has made great strides to commemorate the Nazi era appropriately, but it was a long time coming. In 1987, a temporary outdoor exhibition began on an open lot in the shadow of the Wall to complement the 750th anniversary celebrations in West Berlin. On what was slated to be paved over by a road, excavations unearthed remnants of torture cells of the Gestapo headquarters that once stood at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. These poignant traces of the apparatus of terror in the wasteland along the Wall attracted many more visitors than anyone had projected. The temporary exhibition had only come into fruition after popular demand by counter-culture Kreuzberg residents. It took nearly another

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quarter century, until 2010, for the so-called “Topography of Terror” to find a fitting permanent exhibition space in situ. Since then it has established itself as one the most popular sites commemorating National Socialist terror in Berlin, again surpassing all expectations. The exhibition’s success might be attributed, ironically, to its distanced presentation. Referring to itself as a “Documentation Center” instead of a museum, “Topography” shuns prescriptive interpretations and offers visitors scholarly information. A distillate of the latest historical research on National Socialism awaits those asking how the National Socialist policies of violence were organized and implemented. In an era in which questions on National Socialism remain as urgent as ever, and with its contemporaries vanishing rapidly, this distanced educational offering appears to fit the interests of Berliners and visitors alike. The success of the “Topography” exhibition does not mean that the age of memory politics is over. The effort to channel memory for political purposes is alive and well in other exhibitions, such as the recent “Russen und Deutsche” (Russians and Germans) exhibition in the world-renowned Neues Museum. This joint exhibition had the ambitious agenda to “demonstrate the multifaceted contacts between both nations and reciprocal influences on each other” over 1000 years, and its priorities were signaled with the imprimatur of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joachim Gauck, and with “the generous support” of German energy corporation Eon and Russian mining conglomerate Severstal. Drawing from the holdings of numerous German and Russian museums, the exhibition boasted many rare pieces and illuminated the intensity of cultural contacts between the German and Russian empires in the last third of the nineteenth century. For all these considerable benefits, however, “Russen und Deutsche” botched the twentieth century through glaring omissions. Conspicuously missing from the exhibition were the people living between the Germans and Russians: Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, or Estonians. In an exhibition devoted to Russian-German cooperation, the original protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact provided a particularly sinister example. While the Cold War was mentioned briefly as a fact of postwar life impeding Russian- German reconciliation, wartime genocides, postwar expulsions, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany did not bear mentioning. While the most representative venues in Berlin are occupied with diplomatically worded, politically minded exhibitions, some of the city’s

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The abandoned Red Army barracks of Krampnitz, just beyond the Wall, tell a compelling tale of the Russian-German relationship. (Photo by Scott Krause.) truly unique historical gems are rusting on the outskirts of town. The abandoned Red Army barracks of Krampnitz, just beyond the Wall in Potsdam, tell an account of the Russian-German relationship as compelling as any museum exhibition can. Built in the 1930s during Hitler’s armament drive as cavalry barracks for the nascent Wehrmacht, they were seized by the Red Army in 1945 and altered to fit Soviet tastes. For instance, the aristocratic ballroom of the officers’ club majestically overlooking the Wannsee has been amended by Socialist-Realist murals extolling the virtues of Soviet modernization and virility. A few houses further from this fading splendor, traces left in housing quarters suggest a less comfortable day-to-day life for the enlisted personnel. While the entranceways of their Wehrmacht-era apartments proudly display the technological prowess of their equipment, the graffiti they left behind indicates an anxiety about an uncertain future in a homeland in turmoil. Defiant slogans such as “For Stalin!” lie side-by-side with more somber ones, such as a dove exiting a tank barrel captioned, “Thank you, Potsdam.” The abundance of sites like these make Berlin a historian’s playground, but word is quickly spreading of Berlin as the signature city of the twentieth century. With a vibrant arts and party scene, the city attracts annually over ten million visitors, making it one of Europe’s most popular tourist

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destinations, third only to London and Paris. Sadly, the city’s shaky economic base attests to its inability to fully convert on this opportunity, held back as it is by introspective memory politics and petty local feuds. The botched preservation of the East Side Gallery is only the tip of the iceberg. To this day, no plans exist to commemorate the stormy years of the Weimar Republic in its own right. A possible concerted strategy— promotion and ticketing for all of Berlin’s history museums—is rudimentary at best, even if the success of Museumsinsel, a complex of five internationally known museums, demonstrates the potential of such coordination. The decades-long quest to commemorate the Cold War era appropriately has been the most egregious case study for Berlin’s troubled relationship with its past. After reunification, the Alliertenmuseum opened in the former US garrison’s cinema, named the Outpost, in suburban Zehlendorf. Its exhibition seeks to celebrate cultural bonding between West Berliners and Allied forces in the face of the communist enemy. Less than twenty years after its inauguration, the Alliertenmuseum carries the air of a victory lap for the Cold War and nostalgia for the Western comrades in arms. Visitors are mostly comprised of middle-aged West Berliners and former servicemen on vacation. The other Allied force in Berlin, the Soviet Union, was consoled with its own, smaller museum in Karlshorst all the way across town, whose exhibition focuses on World War II on the Eastern front rather than on the 49-year-long history of Soviet troops in Berlin. This institutional setup creates a vacuum that is filled with a Cold War relic retrofitted into a shrine. In 1962, anti-GDR activist Rainer Hildebrandt opened his own private, makeshift exhibition denouncing the suffering wrought by the Berlin Wall. Since then, the exhibition has expanded greatly in square feet and the Wall itself has long come down, but the institutional structure has not changed. Since Hildebrandt’s death, his widow has added hagiographic sections celebrating the museum’s founder variously as Resistance fighter against Hitler, thorn in the side of the GDR regime, and global human rights activist. Today, this private exhibition with no scholarly advisory board continues to hold a commanding position at the former Checkpoint Charlie, surrounded by Currywurstbuden, vendors selling guaranteed fake pieces of the Berlin Wall, and students dressed in American and Soviet uniforms willing to pose for pictures. However, a serious attempt has been made lately to add a Cold War Museum to Checkpoint Charlie,

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The tacky circus that is Checkpoint Charlie includes students dressed in American and Soviet uniforms posing for pictures with tourists. (Photo by Mark W. Hornburg.) where the 1961 standoff between American and Soviet tanks cemented its place as an epicenter of the Cold War. The proposed municipal Cold War museum presents the unique opportunity to offer, in an historic location, an integrated history on the basis of the newest scholarship. A first temporary exhibition on site has met immediate success. The CDU, one of Berlin’s governing parties, has balked, however, as it would “equate U.S. and Soviet intentions.” Instead, CDU members have alternatively suggested moving the Alliertenmuseum to vacated Tempelhof Airport. In a city littered with costly, at times megalomaniacal projects, the Cold War Museum might succumb to misplaced thrift: because a former airport happens to be unoccupied, this does not mean that it is also the best location for a museum. Millions of tourists who vote with their feet cannot be wrong. They visit the city in search of reminders of the twentieth century in condensed fashion, but wash up at the tacky circus of Checkpoint Charlie. Berlin has the unique potential to educate—and thrive—on the drama of modern European history, but fails to deliver on this potential. Locals’ uncertainty about their city’s identity contributes to this failure. Berliners cannot decide between acknowledging the implications of living in a global metropolis, and cozy provincialism. They fancy their city as fashionable as New York, but want to retain rent prices that are among the lowest in Germany. Those

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Bent street signs symbolize the infinitely delayed opening of Berlin’s new Willy Brandt Airport due to flawed construction. (Photo by Scott Krause.)

students and artists who crossed the Wall first in an easterly direction during the 1990s to find seemingly abundant, cheap housing now bitterly denounce the second wave of gentrification, as it is now being practiced upon them. A generational dynamic exacerbates this anxiety in a seemingly rising city. As the generation that put Berlin back on a global map as a creative hub ages, it becomes increasingly skeptical about further changes in the cityscape. This dynamic made possible the reelection of Klaus Wowereit as Governing Mayor with the same slogan as 2001. For Wowereit, Berlin is still “poor, but sexy,” and he tries his best to keep it that way. While some of his policies, such as the spectacularly failed new Willy Brandt Airport, will hamstring the city’s finances for years to come, the ongoing Euro Crisis has accelerated the influx of thousands of twenty-somethings to Berlin. These newly arrived came to Berlin in search of authenticity. Ironically, this search has galvanized the protest along the East Side Gallery and the surprisingly intense adoration for David Hasselhoff by young Germans, Spaniards, and Americans alike. Together, they long for the glory days of the 1990s. They all came to Berlin to make good on its promise from those days of affordable cost of living, thriving arts scene, and tolerance for all lifestyles. Instead, they witness the disfigurement of the East Side Gallery, the most visible trace of the creative explosion that transformed East Berlin from gray to garishly colored, in order to make room for upscale, neo-bourgeois apartment blocks. It is time to take the East Side Gallery and “the Hoff” seriously, as cultural icons of a bygone era that deserves our and Berlin’s attention.

272 tracesreviews The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Book Reviews

John Fabian Witt. Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History. New York: Free Press, 2012. Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Walters

In 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee remarked, “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” One of the great ironies of war is the effort of each age to regulate it and somehow turn an activity so terrible into something more humane. Lincoln’s Code, the third book from Yale law and history professor John Witt, examines the often contradictory development of the laws of war in the United States, the pivotal influence of the Civil War, and their broader influence on the development of international laws of war. Witt argues that the United States has a long tradition of supporting the creation and enforcement of these laws while simultaneously waging its own brutal wars. According to the author, understanding this dual tradition is even more important now in the wake of 9/11, as the United States redefines its own rules of war and its relation to international standards. Despite the title, Witt is not writing about Abraham Lincoln or even the American Civil War. Instead, he is interested in the frequently contradictory American tradition of regulating warfare and that tradition’s impact on international laws of war. To this end, Lincoln’s Code opens with an overview of European Enlightenment approaches to warfare and its laws, presented as a context from which a distinctly American approach emerges. The author then shifts to the impact of the American Revolution and the legacies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Witt describes Washington as haunted by accusations of violating the laws of war during the French and Indian War and therefore determined to abide by them during the

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American Revolution. Here Witt introduces a central theme, the “confluence of principle and interest” in the period before the American Civil War, which allowed Americans to sidestep many of the contradictions inherent in their approach to war. According to Witt, Americans rarely had to choose between adherence to moral principles or pragmatic policy and military considerations. The Revolution also forced the United States to break with European Enlightenment laws due to the issue of slavery. Jefferson inserted the protection of slaves as one of the key markers of civilized warfare in his writings on the conduct of war, which created an underlying contradiction in American warfare and statesmanship until the Civil War spurred the Union to reconceptualize the laws of war. New American approaches were then embedded in post-Independence treaties with European states. The remainder of Part I traces the maturation of the American approach to the laws of war leading up to the Civil War, particularly the contradictory impacts of America’s military weakness in the War of 1812, the brutality of the frontier wars, the Mexican American War, and America’s support for neutral shipping rights. With this foundation set, in Part II Witt turns to the Civil War, which posed challenges for President Lincoln and the laws of war. Such laws are traditionally designed to govern conflict between states, whereas a civil war is a conflict within a state, creating a large degree of ambiguity. In addition, the enforcement of the laws in the heat of battle depends on training and indoctrination, but the Civil War witnessed the burgeoning of mass volunteer armies on both sides with little training and even less understanding of or respect for the laws of war. While there were many approaches Lincoln could have taken, Witt argues that he chose to treat Confederate armies as criminals rather than soldiers, creating the first “criminal” war. This decision led to even more challenges. For example, international standards on the conduct of war did not allow a country to blockade its own ports, a strategy endorsed by Lincoln in 1861. Witt identifies a growing pattern throughout the war of Lincoln’s use of the laws grounded in pragmatic war aims rather than humanitarianism. Thus Lincoln’s blockade of the South was, as Witt notes, “incoherent as a matter of international law,” but it successfully appeased neutral European states by providing rights to European vessels running the blockade.

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Witt’s main interest, however, is the role of Prussian émigré Francis Lieber in revolutionizing American laws of war. Whereas pre-Civil War norms aimed to limit violence even if the practice of war often diverged from these limits, Lieber argued that since a war should never be fought without a just cause, during war almost any means were not only permissible but recommended so long as the means were necessary to advance the war effort. This argument undermined the entire Enlightenment conception of humanitarian constraints on warfare. Lieber’s reconceptualizations of the laws were published in 1863 as General Orders No. 100 of the United States War Department, and his writings continue to form the bedrock of American and international legal approaches to war, including the definitions of civilians and soldiers, treatment of civilians, protection of property, and appropriate use of force. Perhaps most importantly and with the most devastating consequences, Lieber and General Orders No. 100 prioritized justice over humanitarianism, which Witt argues “helped to produce some of the … most enduring humanitarian crises” both in the Civil War and in more recent wars. Witt closes by analyzing the lasting legacy of Lincoln’s code in the United States and tracing its influence upon European and then international laws governing the conduct of war. Lincoln’s criminalization of the war continued in its aftermath, with the arguments and practice of Reconstruction and widespread military and civilian criminal persecutions of Confederates, both combatant and noncombatant, accused of violating the rules of warfare. After the Civil War, General Orders No. 100 became the conventional wisdom of the United States Army officer corps, fundamentally shaping the Indian wars in the American West, and guiding American actions in South America and the Pacific. Furthermore, Lieber’s code arrived in Europe as a deus ex machina, inspiring imitations in military manuals throughout the continent, and was readily adopted into European treaties because it made codification of war safe for the great powers by once again justifying the use of extreme force. According to Witt, however, as the American code was adopted it was divorced from its assumption of a just cause in war to be used as legitimization for harsh wars of empire and two world wars. Witt supports his arguments with a range of sources, but highlights his judicial training with an abundance of legal documents. He uses a wealth

276 Book Reviews of American sources, including memoirs, correspondence, law codes, and court proceedings. The evidence Witt uses to prove the influence of American laws of war upon European law codes is unfortunately sparser and primarily from the American perspective. Thus, although the continuity between American, European, and international approaches to the laws of war forms a central element of Witt’s argument, he devotes little space to proving this link. Nevertheless, Lincoln’s Code presents a compelling account of the contradictory American traditions of war and its laws that underlie debates in the media today concerning the United States’s adherence to international laws of war versus the freedom to use all means necessary.

Christina Snyder. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2010. Reviewed by Jeanine Navarette

Christina Snyder’s Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America opens with a dramatic retelling of the 1725 death and burial of Tattooed Serpent, a Natchez nobleman and warrior, on the banks of St. Catherine’s Creek in Mississippi. In many respects, Tattooed Serpent’s elaborate burial and funerary arrangements provide the perfect analogy for understanding the multifaceted role that captives played in the culture and social structure of Southeastern indigenous groups from the early Mississippian period into the nineteenth century. Snyder creates a compelling portrait of the fluid nature of indigenous practices of captivity and slavery that existed long before European contact and continued well into the nineteenth century. Focusing primarily on the Southeastern United States, the author argues that captivity had a long and complex history dating back to the pre-Columbian era that was rooted in the “inherent inequality” and elitism of indigenous social systems fashioned around notions of kinship. Despite what the title of her monograph may suggest, Snyder also argues that captives performed a wide range of duties and roles within

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native societies and were not limited to forced labor, as the term “slavery” suggests. Captivity “encompassed a wide continuum of experiences ranging from adoption to slavery.” Captives also had ritualistic roles, such as the servant who was sacrificed to accompany Tattooed Serpent as an attendant in the next life. Non-specialists will benefit in particular from Snyder’s analysis of how notions of kinship informed the practices of captivity. Echoing Orlando Patterson’s characterization of African slavery as causing the “social death” of slaves by isolating them from all social ties, Snyder argues that anyone who lacked kinship ties to a clan or group could be taken captive. Thus, captives were often prisoners of war with rival groups and could be used for any number of purposes to demonstrate a leader’s “mastery over foreign places and external forces.” Captives had powerful diplomatic, symbolic, and economic value to their captors: they could be ritually killed; used as personal servants, agricultural laborers, and translators; or given to a leader’s supporters as tokens of approval or favor. The book is organized chronologically, with the introduction and first chapter serving as a primer to the indigenous hierarchies of the major groups in the region, as well as the development of economic and agricultural practices in the region from the pre-Columbian period to the first contact with Spanish conquistadores in the mid-sixteenth century. The first half of Snyder’s study follows the chronological evolution of native practices of captivity. The author focuses on a few key events and practices, such as the rapid growth of an Indian slave trade to feed the colonial economy of the Carolinas in the 1670s and 1680s; the social upheaval of the Yamasee War of 1715-1718; notions of “crying blood” and the vengeance-fueled violence and captive-taking in the Natchez War of 1729-1731; and the adoption of captives into tribal groups and identity mutability after the fall of theocratic chiefdoms. The later chapters of Snyder’s work explore how a burgeoning pan-Native identity forged in the late eighteenth century in the wake of continued European expansion changed the system of captive-taking to reflect a new sense of shared native racial consciousness and a new awareness of the potential for economic gain from the sale of captives. As a result of this new racial hierarchy, native captors began to target peoples of African descent as the most valuable captives. In these chapters, Snyder demonstrates how

278 Book Reviews some aspects of the colonial system of African slavery were interwoven with native practices of captivity. Because Africans could fetch high prices at auction, they were prized by native communities as captives above white women and children, who could be ransomed for only limited value. Snyder’s final chapter focuses on the Seminoles and their divergence from this pattern of racial exclusivity. Snyder argues that the Seminoles created a “pluralistic society … for diverse groups of black and Indian newcomers” and avoided a codified system of racial slavery. Seminoles and Black Seminoles developed a reciprocal relationship that enabled them to stave off a shared enemy in their bitter fight against removal in the 1830s during the Second Seminole War. Ultimately, Snyder makes a persuasive argument for the shared experience of “war, slavery, and race” of the Indian and American pasts, and for the “intertwined” fates of American history and native history as created at least in part by the processes of captivity. This work contributes to the historiography of native peoples in the colonial era and also engages with the historiography of slavery and bondage in the Americas by moving beyond accounts of the African slave trade. Its focus on the Southeast provides an excellent framework for exploring how interactions with different European groups and between native groups contributed to the rise and fall of the Indian slave trade in a region where native history has too often been displaced by the legacy of plantation slavery. This is a far-reaching work that has the potential to be useful for scholars and students of Native American studies, United States history, and Atlantic World studies.

Manning Marable. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Viking Penguin, 2011. Reviewed by Evan Faulkenbury

On April 3, 1964, only weeks after officially separating from the Nation of Islam (NOI), Malcolm X addressed an integrated audience of thousands at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Reaching the crescendo of his oratory, the minister-activist wondered whether the

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democratic process or racial violence would finally initiate positive change for twenty million African Americans. “It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets,” he declaimed. Superficially, his words appeared threatening, but within the context of Malcolm X’s history of brazen rhetoric, his speech represented an ideological turning point. No longer enslaved to the NOI’s theology of complete black separatism, he began to embrace the possibility that change could occur from within the system. Once again, he had reinvented himself. In Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable argues that his subject’s life comprised a series of personal transformations. Drawing on a vast array of sources including NOI archives opened exclusively for the author, as well as FBI, CIA, and NYPD files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Marable compiles the most extensive biography of Malcolm X to date. Born in 1926 to a family that followed Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of black separatism, racial uplift, and pride in dark skin, Malcolm Little came of age in a world steeped in racism and economic hardship. After moving to Boston in 1941, he promptly dropped out of school and entered the world of street hustling. After reinventing himself as “Detroit Red,” a series of burglaries led to Little’s imprisonment in 1946. In prison he embraced the NOI and its enigmatic leader Elijah Muhammad, changing his name to Malcolm X to reflect his rejection of white society. Following his parole in 1952, he quickly rose to prominence within the NOI and became minister of Mosque Number Seven in Harlem. As a minister and protégé of Elijah Muhammad, he gained national fame as an articulate and impassioned spokesman for black separatism and self-defense. Jealousy and internal politics led to Malcolm X’s suspension from the NOI in November 1963, in spite of his years of service. This break with the NOI created opportunities for him to embrace orthodox Islam, reject the racism of whites, and forge political alliances with others in the black freedom struggle. Marable demonstrates that Malcolm X did not repudiate black nationalism, nor did he become an advocate for integration, but instead began to adopt a philosophy that valued human rights above all else. His final reinvention never came to full fruition, though, as NOI members assassinated him on February 21, 1965, in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. As in any significant biography, the author’s reach extends well past the subject’s life to explore the context of his times. According to Marable, Malcolm X “embodied the spirit, vitality, and political mood of an entire

280 Book Reviews population—black urban mid-twentieth century America.” He does not chronicle Malcolm X’s life in isolation, nor does he suggest that his story was representative of all African Americans during the mid-twentieth century. Instead, his subject serves as a prism through which to understand structural racism in American society. Better than most of his contemporaries, Malcolm X grasped the pervasiveness of racial oppression in the urban north, and his ability to perceive racism offers Marable an opportunity to analyze American society from Malcolm X’s perspective. If, in Marable’s words, “a biography maps the social architecture of an individual’s life,” then Malcolm X’s story is an urban metropolis. Marable avoids hagiography, however. Malcolm X was misogynous, treated his family poorly, and entered into a bizarre alliance with the Ku Klux Klan in 1961 due to shared views on racial separatism. At the same time, Marable uncovers an abundance of previously unknown information about his subject, including the extent to which the FBI and NYPD followed him. Some of the author’s arguments are based on speculation, but he qualifies his suggestions, especially regarding the identities of those who may have been involved in Malcolm X’s murder but never faced trial. Furthermore, the author uncovers evidence that Malcolm X exaggerated elements of his past, particularly his criminal background. In chronicling the inaccuracies and interpretive bias in Alex Haley’s arrangement of Malcolm X’s autobiography, Marable seeks to explain the purpose of the memoir rather than meticulously documenting the errors. According to Marable, even though Malcolm X doctored his past, “self-invention was an effective way for him to reach the most marginalized sectors of the black community, giving justification to their hopes.” Malcolm X wanted his story to relate to African Americans in the urban north, to exemplify how one can challenge racial oppression, and to illuminate the structural racism that permeated American society. When Malcolm X gave his audience the choice between the ballot and the bullet, he hoped they would choose the ballot, but not without sacrificing their militancy. Although he did not live long enough to experience it, he was the fountainhead of the Black Power Movement, arguing that participatory democracy and militant protest need not be mutually exclusive. In this sense, Marable captures Malcolm X’s evolution, complexity, and, most importantly, his impact on the black freedom struggle.

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Bill Schwarz. Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Reviewed by Joel Hebert

In this first volume of what ultimately will be a trilogy, Bill Schwarz builds on his already expansive research on race to make a weighty intervention into the historiographies of Britain and the British Empire. From page one, Schwarz displays his impressive credentials, recounting a fascinating and, one would imagine, hard-to-score interview with the commonly acknowledged antagonist of postwar British politics, Enoch Powell. In 1968, Powell, then a leading Tory MP, made a notorious speech in Birmingham where, in highly divisive language, he predicted the imminent outbreak of racial conflict on the streets of urban Britain. Powell’s retelling of a constituent’s fear that “in twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” gained traction in the working and middle classes. He received hundreds of thousands of letters of support, requiring the services of a specially designated postal van just for “Mr Powell’s postbag.” In this telling interview from the late-1980s, Powell divulged to Schwarz that, much to his chagrin, he could never precisely diagnose the malady that was, in his opinion, crudely transforming Britain in the 1960s into a land where insolence and disrespect ran rampant. Powell kept a thorough file, presumably of press clippings, to document the growing “elemental anarchy” in everyday British life. He called the contents of this file and the nameless social phenomenon it detailed “the Thing.” It is this unidentified force that Schwarz seeks to pin down and historicize. In The White Man’s World, Schwarz convincingly argues that British culture and politics was inflamed in the 1960s and beyond by the loss of empire. Schwarz describes how a new type of “ethnic populism” encompassing the virulent racism of Powellism and the generally anti- immigrant stance of the official New Right was borne up out of and fueled by the lingering memory of the empire and the racial paradigms that were outlined there. This puts Schwarz directly in conflict with historians, like Bernard Porter, who argue that the British people were aloof to empire from beginning to end. Schwarz eloquently argues that to understand race in Britain after 1945, historians must bridge the gap between 282 Book Reviews metropole and periphery, as British conceptions of identity and belonging were largely forged “out there” before these racialized discourses were exported back home. While the focus of the wider Memories of Empire trilogy is on the lingering cultural and political manifestations of empire, in this first volume Schwarz confines himself to analyzing the impact of the mythology of the white settler and the idea of the so-called “white man’s countries” on Britain. In a shrewdly crafted narrative, which jumps between metropole and periphery and between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, Schwarz argues that the idea of whiteness cohered where racial difference was most apparent—the colonial frontier. He sketches out two types of frontiers, natural and racial. Both served to unify settler populations abroad, but he demonstrates that the discourse surrounding the racial frontier was also found in Britain. On the borderlands of empire, one finds the origins of the language of belonging, descriptions of the imperial family, of “blood” and “kith and kin.” But this settler language was invoked just as much at home as it was abroad. The image of the colonies, Schwarz argues, “narrated a series of stories telling British people who they were—or more accurately, perhaps, who they weren’t.” These images combined to create a coherent and loosely unified imperial nationalism, which first appeared in the 1860s as an appeal to a “Greater Britain.” The writers Charles Dilke, J.A. Froude, and J.R. Seeley argued that the white settler societies of the empire together with Britain constituted a cohesive political and cultural unit, complete with a distinct transcolonial nationalism, which bound them together in common cause. In the consciousness of Greater Britishness, frontiers took on a mythology that compensated for the grubby urban quagmire of industrial Britain, while in South Africa or Australia, “wondrous things could happen, and England itself be resurrected.” Indeed, this was a viewpoint taken up in the Dominions as well, where some Australians considered themselves to be Greater Britain’s racial “vanguard.” While “Greater Britain” had a deep following in Britain, Schwarz shows that the settler mythology was not without qualifications that were sometimes difficult to reconcile. First, by virtue of simple proximity and the realities of demography, settlers usually had to commingle with the native populations. To conduct commerce, for instance, they sometimes

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learned indigenous languages. Furthermore, male settlers often had relationships, emotional and sexual, with indigenous women, which confounded racial hierarchies. This raises interesting comparisons to Richard White’s conception of eighteenth-century French Louisiana as a “middle ground” of empire where settlers and indigenous peoples formed bonds seemingly more interconnected and complex than what was expected and portrayed at home.1 Schwarz also makes the important point that, during the South African War, visual representations, spread increasingly through the developing technology of photography and film, helped to extend the imagined community of Greater Britishness, as Britons could place themselves more efficiently into the imagined empire. But visual culture and instantaneous communication could also partly undermine prevailing narratives. For example, more accurate visuals introduced the Afrikaner as the enemy of Britons and settlers alike, forcing people, Schwarz states, to struggle to fit these seemingly white people into a preexisting British conception of racial hierarchy. Other populations, including convicts, prostitutes, the urban poor, and the Irish, were often “divested” of their whiteness because of their alleged delinquency. Given Schwarz’s contention that the memory of settler colonialism and empire had an impact on the consciousness of everyday Britons, The White Man’s World is also open to the justifiable critique that it scarcely focuses on ordinary people. Neither their experiences of empire nor their individual memories of it are fully discussed here. Schwarz structures the narrative around vignettes of the usual suspects of empire, those men (and his actors are exclusively men) who held great sway on the imperial stage, be they British politicians or imperial proconsuls and tribunes. Through this framework, Schwarz gives Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner, Lord Baden- Powell, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Sir Roy Welensky, Ian Smith, Enoch Powell, and others detailed treatment as representative case studies. As valid as the potential criticisms of Schwarz’s “great man” approach are, his focus on them still provides fruitful content and analysis about the forging of race in the colonies and its resultant domestic impact. One of

1 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Cambridge, 2011; first published 1991). 284 Book Reviews the most compelling parts of Schwarz’s study is his discussion of the more contemporary case of southern Africa, and the tensions that arose between London and settlers fiercely committed to the perpetuity of white rule. Whereas much of Schwarz’s study deals with empire purely in the abstract form of memory, emotion, utopia, and mythology, this section, analyzed through the two settler politicians, Roy Welensky of the Central African Federation and Ian Smith of Rhodesia, provides a welcome grounding in the very tangible influence that colonial crises had on domestic politics in the 1960s. The fate of white settlers in southern Africa became a lighting rod issue that emboldened what would become Britain’s New Right. In effect, one can extrapolate from Schwarz’s argument that imperial issues were, at least in part, responsible for the political movement that would later become Thatcherism. Schwarz concludes this volume with Smith and Welensky’s contention that whiteness met its end in southern Africa, the very place, Schwarz argues, where it was born. Yet “if the imperative of racial whiteness died in central Africa,” states Schwarz in the last line of the volume, “in the dark metropole at empire’s end it experienced a strange disturbing resurrection.” There is clearly more to this story, and given this volume’s depth and quality, Schwarz’s two future installments have great potential.

Patrick Porter. Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2009. Reviewed by Mark W. Hornburg

Military Orientalism is a bit of a misnomer. In this book, Patrick Porter, a lecturer at King’s College London in the British Defence Academy’s Joint Services Command and Staff College, takes on “the cultural turn in studying war,” a method of analyzing and designing military strategy that operates on the assumption that different ways of life produce different styles of war. To this perfectly reasonable critique he has yoked the concept of Orientalism, adapted from Edward Said, to argue in part that western military analysts often produce reductionist portraits of eastern

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cultures, describing them as primitive, deceitful, irrational, spiritual, and obsessed with primordial tribal feuds. But in demonstrating that the “East” is more complicated than this simplistic analysis suggests, Porter unpacks texts from western sources that proffer markedly different opinions of eastern cultures, generally more positive if often equally stereotyped, which in turn reflect western fears of decline. Porter also usefully analyzes eastern instrumentalization, for propaganda purposes, of “Orientalist” stereotypes. At the same time, he draws from non-eastern examples, from Sioux to Hutus, to reinforce his points. Can non-eastern cultures be the object of, and can easterners themselves engage in “orientalizing”? Porter seeks to complicate Said’s focus on the use of stereotyping in the service of imperial domination by demonstrating that “Orientalism” has multiple meanings and uses, reconceptualizing it as “a plural and shifting set of epistemological ideas, attitudes, and practices.” The result is a bit of a conceptual swamp, but one from which many interesting ideas emerge. After an introduction and two chapters setting the terms of the debate, Porter offers four case studies of “military Oreintalism” in action. First he demonstrates how British military observers interpreted Japanese success in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 as the result of Japan’s greater social and political cohesion. According to Porter, conservative critics of modernity instrumentalized positive stereotypes of Japanese culture in order to criticize what they saw as Britain’s degeneration. He then examines modern western views of Genghis Kahn, particularly through the work of British strategic theorist Basil Liddell Hart, who employed a romanticized view of Mongol warfare in order to push a military revolution at home during the twentieth century. According to Liddell Hart, Mongol success rested upon mobility, indirection, and self-sufficiency. This contrasted with a misguided western style of war favoring direct combat and immobility, which could be mitigated, he argued, through increased mechanization of western militaries. Next Porter shifts to the recent past, describing how the Taliban pragmatically tossed aside cultural strictures, including rules against suicide bombing, beard trimming, educating women, and use of technology, in order to achieve its strategic goals in Afghanistan. Porter then reinforces this idea of cultural flexibility by describing how the Israeli Army was tripped up during the 2006 Lebanon War by its own essentialist assumptions of Arab inferiority. Hezbollah proved to be vastly more nimble

286 Book Reviews and adaptable than Israeli strategists—peering through an Orientalist lens—thought that it could be, a miscalculation that had enormous political consequences back home. By looking at Orientalism through the lens of military studies, Porter claims to be able to describe “culture in motion” and to demonstrate that “culture can be remade to serve utility.” Throughout the book he creates binaries by opposing key fetish-words, like “ambivalence,” “paradox,” “fluidity,” and “hybridity,” to words like “essentialism,” “determinism,” “primordial,” and “archetype.” The reader is meant to understand that the first set carries a positive valence, regardless of the use to which they’re put. This gives the appearance of valorizing those subjects, including the Taliban and Hezbollah, who represent the first set of terms. Like British military analysts who once praised the “Japanese way of war” as a critique of British degeneration, Porter clearly admires the clever flexibility of the West’s less resource-rich opponents, who have had to make do in waging war. Porter claims that his book is meant for a wide readership, but the general reader is not in need of the military policy prescriptions toward which each chapter is aimed. In this sense, Porter’s role as a public intellectual in dialogue with military professionals further muddies his use of the concept of Orientalism, which in Porter’s hands no longer references a critique of western imperialism. In the end it is unclear whether he is actually criticizing Orientalism or merely seeking to refine it, challenging the “weaponizing” of culture or merely the inept operationalization of culture. Ultimately, a work that offers policy prescriptions ought not to retreat behind the façade of objectivity when moral questions arise.

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Louise McReynolds. Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Reviewed by Gary Guadagnolo

An enterprising entertainment executive will find Louise McReynolds’s Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia primed for television syndication. A program modeled on Law and Order, which McReynolds references throughout the book, seems most apt. Murder Most Russian presents a bounty of grisly murder scenes with which the show might open: a bloodbath in an apartment where the heads of a colonel, his lover, their servant, and a student have been bashed in with hand irons and a log; a drunk whose body is uncovered in a basement, chopped in two, with the torso crammed into a nearby bag; a thirteen-year-old girl found dead in a pawn shop with legs askew and a rag shoved into her mouth; and an unidentifiable body discovered next to its severed head, the eyelids, lips, nose, and ears of which had been sliced off. One can imagine the scene fading to black and the subsequent voiceover: “In the Russian criminal justice system….” Yet, as McReynolds demonstrates, the justice system of late imperial Russia remained in flux, far from a cut-and-dry television procedural. Different constituents—including the autocracy, police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, juries, expert witnesses, filmmakers, crime novelists, and journalists—responded to murder in myriad ways that reflected their social and political ambitions and anxieties. These are their stories. McReynolds begins her account of murder in late imperial Russia in 1864, when Tsar Alexander II introduced sweeping reforms of the Russian legal system as part of a broader effort to modernize his stagnating empire. The old inquisitorial system, in which powerful, corrupt judges lorded over every aspect of the judicial process, was transformed into an adversarial one that guaranteed those accused of committing a crime the right to an attorney and a trial by jury. As this system developed, Russians participated in a number of ways, serving in juries, reading and gossiping about the newspaper coverage of trials, watching cinematic adaptations of scandalous cases, and collecting donations for sympathetic defendants. McReynolds 288 Book Reviews locates murder and the responses it provoked in the particularities of late imperial Russian politics, culture, and society to illuminate how Russians “used the reformed legal system to pave a path from subjecthood toward citizenship.” Drawing from newspaper reports, court transcripts, journal articles, crime fiction, films, and archival materials, she teases out the tensions underlying Russia’s furtive entrance into modernity. As McReynolds explains in detail, the most noteworthy of the legal reforms was the introduction of jury trials. Within fifty years of the first jury trial, held in St. Petersburg on April 17, 1866, juries had decided approximately 7.5 million cases. From their inception, jury trials were preoccupied with murder. In 1873, for example, murder constituted only five percent of crimes but forty percent of jury trials in Russia. Jurors had to be male citizens of the Russian Empire between twenty-five and seventy years of age and meet minimum income or property requirements. They often faced difficult responsibilities: in one case, the jury room was so cold that the ink froze, leaving the jury unable to record their verdict. Consisting primarily of ethnic Russians, juries often sided with defendants. This sympathy reflected both the centrality of mercy to their Orthodox faith and the antipathy they felt toward the state for its abuses of power. The autocracy in turn erroneously attributed the high acquittal rate, just below forty percent, to the presence of illiterate peasants on the jury. The tsar faced a key paradox in advocating for increased public participation: “The men whom Alexander wanted in theory he could not trust in practice.” The reformed judicial system in Russia also gave rise to new kinds of professionals, such as the defense attorney. Their courtroom performances enthralled Russians, who lined up for tickets to watch them in high-profile murder trials. Defense attorneys could attain great prominence, and material reward, through effective argumentation. Their dramatic rhetorical flairs often appealed less to the legal code than to emotion and conscience, though, resulting in accusations of sophistry. Expert witnesses, testifying on everything from the forensic sciences of blood splatter and fingerprint identification to the psychological state of a defendant, underscored an emerging conflict between guilt and culpability that led to successful defenses by reason of insanity and other psychoses. Most importantly, as this nascent legal community sought to explain the motives for murder, they began locating a person’s mental problems in his or her material conditions.

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Russia’s liberals embraced this as an implicit critique of a morally bankrupt autocratic political and social structure that produced weak, degenerate citizens. McReynolds ably demonstrates how these anxieties spilled over into “middlebrow” popular culture, including fiction, theater, and film. She examines in particular the distinctly Russian genre of crime fiction, which focused on uncovering the motive of a crime rather than its perpetrator. This “whydunit” genre finds its epitome in Dostoevsky’sCrime and Punishment, as the reader knows Raskol’nikov has committed murder but must find out why. In a telling move, McReynolds also deconstructs two different fictional serials chronicling the exploits of real-life Russian detective I. D. Putilin. In a series written by M. V. Shevliakov in the late 1890s, Putilin’s successful police work suggests the possibility for a stable future built around logic, order, and modernity. A later version, written by Roman Dobryi from 1907 to 1917, withholds the catharsis of a final arrest from its tales. As McReynolds explains, “No resolution means that no order is restored, no one is punished, and no closure that can make sense of the crime.” This shift was projected onto the silver screen as well. Films of this era, as preoccupied with crime and murder as all other media, usually ended without the satisfaction of revealing who committed the crime, and even worse, why. McReynolds argues that these depictions of the inability to achieve justice reflected frustrations over the impotency of the state and the dysfunction of Russia’s judicial system. In the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution, such discontent only continued to grow. Throughout Murder Most Russian, McReynolds is at her strongest when elucidating how violence revealed deep social and political frictions of the late imperial era. New expressions of urban, national, class, and gender identities clashed with the old aristocratic and patriarchal order, resulting in a body trail leading straight to the morgue. In providing detailed accounts of murder cases both implicitly and explicitly related to these themes, McReynolds crafts an innovative and, at times, exhilarating narrative of the modernization of Russia. Useful too are the frequent comparisons of Russia’s emerging legal culture with that of the rest of Europe. Yet McReynolds rightfully remains adamant that subjective cultural interpretations of murder are as central to comprehending this era as procedural changes to the Russian law code. Russians expressed their increasing pessimism and

290 Book Reviews fatalism in a variety of ways: indeed, murder “proved quite malleable.” McReynolds has succeeded in turning these murders into provocative historical writing. Perhaps one day they will also serve as source material for something akin to Law and Order: Russia.

Kate E. Tunstall, ed. Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment. Bloomsbury: New York, 2012. Reviewd by Ned Richardson-Little

With the explosion of works on the history of human rights, a stark division in the scholarship has emerged between historians who see the Enlightenment as the origin of the idea of modern human rights, and those who understand human rights as an evolving social construct rather than a fixed set of ideas. While the former argue that rational scientific thought inspired the notion of human equality and produced a powerful logic in the form of human rights, inevitably resulting in a global process of liberalization and democratization, the latter see its contemporary meaning significantly differently than did Enlightenment philosophers and revolutionary figures. This second group of historians point to the continuation of slavery, imperialism, gender inequality, and other forms of discrimination long after the apparent dissemination of the “self-evident” logic of human rights as evidence for the shift from Enlightenment ideas to contemporary beliefs in the universal rights of every individual regardless of citizenship, as codified in the Universal Declaration of 1948 and other United Nations documents. Based on the Oxford Amnesty Lectures held in 2010, Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment provides a conflicting set of opinions on this important historiographical problem. Assembling a diverse collection of writings on history, philosophy, and contemporary politics, the volume also includes a response to each of the main essays, some seeking to expand upon the work of the authors and some actively attacking and refuting them.

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Three pairs of papers in particular contribute greatly to these recent debates. In the opening essay, James Tully posits a dichotomy in human rights history between the “High Enlightenment” and “the Democratic Enlightenment.” The first is defined by the idea that there are certain self- evident moral truths that exist beyond political debate and these truths point the way towards a set of universally applicable social, political, and economic institutions. “To declare, project and spread these institutions around the world; to be socialized into them; and to exercise human rights within them is to be on the universal path of development to a universal endpoint,” he writes. This, he claims, is the realization of the Enlightenment project itself. From this line of thought, Tully traces the underlying ideology of liberal democracy, but also of European colonialism, expansionist state socialism, capitalism, and contemporary American imperialism. “The Democratic Enlightenment” focuses instead on the process through which human rights are realized, with a primary emphasis on proposals instead of declarations and the continuous discussion and deliberation of their meaning instead of simple dissemination. This is the vision of human rights that inspired activists contesting hegemonic exclusionary systems in order to end colonialism, realize civil rights for African Americans, and fight for gender equality through non-violence and democratic engagement rather than armed intervention. Tully’s distinction between these two traditions captures what Costas Douzinas has called the Janus-like quality of human rights to “emancipate and dominate, to protect and discipline.” Nonetheless, few thinkers and historical actors actually fit cleanly within the orderly system that Tully imagines. As Christopher Brooke argues in his response, “High Enlightenment” thinkers such as philosopher Immanuel Kant, Tully’s primary example, supported the expansion of certain European institutions but also denounced the establishment of colonies in North America and Africa through fraudulent land purchases and encroachment on the land of native peoples. His ideas may have implied the legitimization of imperialism, yet he himself explicitly opposed such a project. Similarly, while Mahatma Gandhi is held up as the epitome of the “Democratic Enlightenment,” as Samuel Moyn points out in the Afterword, Gandhi rejected the language of human rights as the primary vocabulary of justice. In contrast to Tully’s bifurcated Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel argues

292 Book Reviews for the centrality of Baruch Spinoza and the Radical Enlightenment for the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in particular. Israel sees the idea of human rights as the direct and inevitable outcome of Spinoza’s materialist philosophy, which inspired the ideals of universal equality and democracy. Israel claims that the Déclaration, as authored by the radical comte de Mirabeau, was the logical end product of these ideas. The contradictions between these ideals and reality stem from a general ignorance of the meaning of human rights among the “common people,” the opposition of “organized religion and conservative philosophy,” and the origins of human rights with the “universally rejected and maligned” figure of Spinoza. In response to this narrative of singular invention and transmission, Dan Edelstein delivers a devastating rebuttal to Israel’s methodology and interpretations. He argues that the reduction of radical thought to the ideas of Spinoza alone and the lumping of the entirety of philosophie moderne into a unified coherent doctrine that has remained stable since the eighteenth century is a gross oversimplification. Most damning, through direct reference to historical documentation rather than sloppily cited secondary sources, Edelstein dismantles Israel’s crucial piece of evidence connecting Spinozist doctrine to the Déclaration: Mirabeau’s radical draft of the Déclaration was actually nearly unanimously rejected by the National Assembly. The adopted draft was instead written by a group of moderates with no connection to the Radical Enlightenment. Similarly, while Israel claims that the Assembly rejected all references to God, the Preamble includes a prominent mention of “the Supreme Being.” In contrast to Israel’s Eurocentric and condescending portrayal of Enlightenment human rights, Robin Blackburn argues for a shift in focus to the Caribbean, noting that the parallel existence of slavery alongside Enlightenment concepts of human rights complicates traditional narratives of a European-centered moral epiphany. Blackburn posits that the Haitian Revolution, the only late eighteenth-century revolution to realize equality without distinctions of race, and the long-term impact of political action by enslaved people, are vital starting points for the modern human rights movement. Like other Enlightenment projects, they produced mixed results. Rebellion by the enslaved provided impetus for others to act, such as the British Anti-Slavery Society and the American abolitionist and

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suffragist movements, but eventual anti-slavery measures carried out by the British Empire provided ideological cover for the colonization of Africa. Contrary to this optimistic picture of the Haitian Revolution as a truly democratic human rights revolution in the Enlightenment Era, David Geggus’s counterpoint argues that the post-revolutionary regime was highly authoritarian and its rhetoric rarely met reality. Rather than representing a republic of equals, Haiti was actually a “military autocracy” that quickly abandoned democratic language and officially proclaimed itself an empire. Although freedom from slavery was guaranteed, this did not translate into the active freedoms of citizenship. As Samuel Moyn states in his Afterword, “What is self-evident about human rights turns out not to be very much.” The contributions to this volume do little to contradict him. While historians such as Jonathan Israel present a clean trajectory from Enlightenment ideas to revolution to contemporary human rights, this volume provides numerous examples of the contradictions, ambiguities, and general messiness inherent to the history of human rights over the past several centuries. The question mark of the title challenges oversimplified narratives of progress that often gloss over the paradoxes of human rights, such as European and American revolutionaries comfortable advocating universal freedom while practicing slavery and colonialism. Such contradictions need to be engaged rather than swept under the rug. This volume does an excellent job in charting the course forward across the field.

Michael Lind. Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins, 2012. Reviewed by Wilson Parker

In this intriguing work, former journalist, magazine editor, and think tank founder Michael Lind argues that two schools of thought about government’s role in the economy, the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, have shaped United States history. In the tradition of Alexander Hamilton and John Locke, Hamiltonians envision a partnership

294 Book Reviews between the public and private sectors, where a strong government makes public investments, provides public goods, and makes rules to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Jeffersonians, on the other hand, believe that government and business have an inherently adversarial relationship, and that government is unable to contribute to the economic well-being of a country and therefore should be as small and weak as possible. While these two schools of thought map roughly onto today’s political parties, Lind’s understanding of these schools transcends political boundaries. As the author notes, while deeply suspicious of “Big Government,” the Jeffersonian school also fears “Big Business,” and was responsible for anti-trust regulation and deposit insurance, a reform originally intended to limit the influence of big banks. The Hamiltonian school includes among its most important accomplishments the land-grant universities and banking reforms of Lincoln, the inclusive labor policies of Theodore Roosevelt, the highway system of Eisenhower, and the regulatory agencies of Nixon. While both schools have played a role in shaping the American economy, Lind does not see these economic philosophies as yin and yang. “It would be pleasant,” he writes, “to conclude that each of these traditions of political economy has made its own valuable contribution to the success of the American economy and that the vector created by these opposing forces has been more beneficial than the complete victory of either would have been.” He concludes that that would be untrue, however. “What is good about the American tradition is largely the result of the Hamiltonian developmental tradition, and what is bad about it is largely the result of the Jeffersonian producerist school.” Lind examines American economic history by dividing it into three periods, each of which was built upon fundamentally Hamiltonian ideas and each of which succumbed to a Jeffersonian backlash before being replaced by the next. The first began with the creation of the United States as a distinct political and economic nation, rather than as a source for raw materials to fuel the fires of the English industrial revolution. The Hamiltonians wanted the federal government to protect nascent American industry from foreign competition and raise revenue with a tariff, provide a stable and regulated supply of money through a National Bank, and create a national marketplace

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for goods through internal improvements. Lind discusses government projects that may be less familiar to students of American history. He begins the book with the story of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, a government-funded industrial corporation in Paterson, New Jersey, that helped innovators take their inventions from the drawing board to the market. He details a government insurance scheme for sailors and a variety of other ways that the government promoted economic growth. These efforts helped launch the market revolution, which left in its wake a nation that was more prosperous, integrated, and strong. However, these efforts also created a political and economic elite, generating a backlash that took the form of Jacksonian democracy and the demise of the Whig party. The next era of American economic history has its roots in the reforms pioneered by that self-avowed “Henry Clay whig,” Abraham Lincoln. While the southern Jeffersonians were excluded from Congress, the Hamiltonian Republicans invested in railroad infrastructure and established a national bank regulation scheme, a progressive income tax, a fiat currency, and a system of federally supported land-grant universities. Some of these reforms were repealed only to resurface in several decades as reforms of the Progressive Era. Others were retained and became part of a new system of economic organization. The following decades would see unprecedented economic progress as the power of machines was harnessed to fuel economic growth. Railroads cut across the United States, factories and skyscrapers rose in its cities, and a modern banking system was built to fund it all. However, this era would also see labor abuses, monopolies, unsafe living and working conditions, and widespread corporate cronyism. The Progressive movement, which would plant the intellectual seeds of the next economic system, was created in response to these failures. The next American economic system emerged in response to the New Deal. Lind argues convincingly that the system of regulated banks, cooperation between business and labor, and government-funded research created a third industrial revolution, one that won the Second World War and made the United States a true economic superpower. High wages and robust demand created a stable foundation for growth, which was augmented by public investment in education and infrastructure. Strong regulation mitigated financial crises and prevented monopolistic practices. But the bipartisan progressive Hamiltonian consensus that ended the

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Depression, won the war, regulated the financial system, created Medicare, Medicaid, the EPA, the SEC, and the NLRB, built the highway system, and drastically reduced poverty levels was not to last, as neoliberalism undid many of these reforms. Lind also argues that, in order to gain political support, the United States lowered its protective barriers to developed countries with nationalistic industrial policies, like Japan, Germany, and most recently China, and undeveloped countries like Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and (again) China, which have unfairly low labor costs and regulatory climates. The result of the elimination of government programs vital to growth and the introduction of trade partners who can outcompete the United States has meant stagnant wages for middle-class Americans. These changes are not the fault of the “Reagan Revolution,” Lind argues, because Carter and Clinton are equally at fault. Lind is no pessimist, however. He believes that, as has always been the case after a Jeffersonian backlash to a Hamiltonian economic system, a new and better system will be created. He argues for a renewal of government action to make everyone better off, starting with repairs to our crumbling infrastructure and the creation of a cleaner, smarter energy system. A new American system will foster innovation by investing in education and research, regulate the financial sector to prevent another crisis, and work with the private sector to create growth. The book’s major flaw is Lind’s outright rejection of the Jeffersonian school. Yes, the American economy owes more to the ideas of Hamilton than to those of Jefferson (the opposite is true of the political system). Yes, the Hamiltonian philosophy is more attractive: this is the nation of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” not the “nation of as little government as possible.” But the very pattern he suggests—of Hamiltonian systems propelling growth but having their flaws exposed by the Jeffersonian school—makes an argument for exactly the “vector created by opposing forces” that he rejects as “pleasant” but untrue. The first American system was responsible for creating a national market, but it also featured limited enfranchisement of white males and favored a small urban elite. The second system may have industrialized this country, but it also repressed labor, established monopolies, and featured rampant corruption. Anti-trust laws, for example, which Lind insists are the unwise result of paranoia about big business, were an effective remedy to a serious

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problem. And the economic system ushered in by Roosevelt’s New Deal was not nimble enough to remain competitive in an increasingly interconnected world. The free trade concessions that he criticizes have made the world a wealthier and more peaceful place. Despite this quibble, Lind’s book is thoroughly researched, well written, and brilliantly argued. Readers from all ideological backgrounds interested in politics, history, or economics will find it enjoyable and informative.

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Film Reviews

Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Columbia Pictures, 2012) and Argo, directed by Ben Affleck (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2012). Reviewed by Brian Drohan

Beginning with the United States’ greatest collective trauma in recent memory, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty opens with a blank screen and the words “September 11, 2001.” For the next few minutes, the audience hears phone calls of 9/11 victims’ last moments, conveying the confusion, panic, and tragedy of that event. The film then flashes forward two years to a torture scene at a CIA “black site.” Screenwriter Mark Boal has said that he wanted the film “to reflect a very complex debate about torture that is still going on.” It is this nexus between 9/11 and torture that has generated the film’s most sustained criticism, as journalists such as Steve Coll and elected officials like Senator Dianne Feinstein have declaredZero Dark Thirty not only inaccurate, but “disturbing” and “misleading.” Regardless of the film’s accuracy, the torture scenes are rough, raw, and emotional, with the CIA interrogator asking direct questions—“Where is bin Laden? Who else is in the Saudi Group?”—while demanding truth from his prisoner—“If you lie to me I hurt you.” Torture, for Bigelow and Boal, reflects America’s visceral and violent response to the al Qaeda attacks. But torture is not Zero Dark Thirty’s only symbol. The protagonist, Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, symbolizes the national security community’s decade- long pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Maya begins as a smart yet untested CIA officer initially uncomfortable with torture, but she soon hardens herself to the demands of the job, going to great lengths to extract the bits and pieces of vital information that she needs. She comes of age while taking the lead in interrogations and stands up to bureaucratic bosses who want to divert resources from the bin Laden hunt. Maya is a machine, devouring

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In Zero Dark Thirty, Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a smart but untested CIA officer who quickly hardens herself to the demands of her job hunting Osama bin Laden. (Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures.)

information and following critical leads wherever they take her. Yet these efforts take their toll: in one scene Maya completes an intense interrogation session, enters the bathroom, and stops for a moment at the sink, her head in her hands, as she attempts to unwind. Maya’s mechanical, unflinching resolve ultimately makes the viewer wonder whether she is as much a zealot as the terrorists she hunts. Arguing that she is “not going to find Abu Ahmed [bin Laden’s courier] from DC,” Maya spends most of the film in Pakistan and Afghanistan—“out there” with the terrorists. Maya’s interactions with non-Americans are almost all violent, or at least confrontational, while the “terrorists” remain shadowy figures with few humanizing features. These interactions create a “clash of civilizations” backdrop for Maya’s personal story, which does nothing to dispel the misunderstanding, fear, and ignorance that still haunt American popular perceptions of Muslims and the Islamic world. Scenes depicting a CIA surveillance team dressed in shalwar kameez driving around the Rawalpindi market, the early morning fajr call to prayer waking Maya from her sleep, and women walking along the street wearing burkas reinforce this problematic “otherness.” After a suicide bomber kills her closest CIA colleague, Maya obsesses over bin Laden and personalizes the quest to find him. Seeing her grief,

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Ben Affleck (standing) stars in Argo as a CIA “exfiltration” expert assigned to rescue six American diplomats trapped in Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis. (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.) another colleague asks her what she will do now. “Smoke everyone involved in this op” and then “kill bin Laden,” she replies. As the hunt continues, she tells another co-worker that she has lost many friends pursuing the elusive al Qaeda leader, but feels that she “was spared to finish the job.” Finally, with the Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s compound imminent, she tells them to go “kill bin Laden for me.” Compared with Zero Dark Thirty’s mechanical characters and emphasis on controversy, Argo also approaches its subject seriously, but adds humanity and intermittent humor. Directed by Ben Affleck, who also stars as CIA “exfiltration” expert Tony Mendez,Argo relates how the CIA rescued six American diplomats who escaped from their embassy during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Hiding in the Canadian ambassador’s house, the escapees live a stressful existence for several months as the US government contemplates action. After stumbling on the bizarre idea of disguising the diplomats as a Canadian film crew for a fake movie, Tony becomes the key to a potential rescue attempt. Convincing the Iranians that the cover is real, however, requires collaboration between the CIA and Hollywood executives. Embracing the apparent absurdity of the premise—going to Hollywood to produce a fake film for the sole purpose of rescuing diplomats hiding in Iran—Argo (also the fake film’s title) injects humor into an otherwise tense

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movie. Tony’s interactions with his Hollywood contacts generate some of Argo’s wittiest dialogue and a smattering of snide remarks, such as when one of Tony’s contacts complains about Hollywood politicking, “If you’re worried about the Ayatollah, try the WGA [Writers’ Guild of America].” Tony writes a postcard to his son and mails it from the airport en route to Iran, knowing that if the operation goes badly he might not see his son again. Argo also develops complexity and compassion in ancillary characters, such as the Canadian ambassador’s Iranian housekeeper, Sahar, who witnesses executions in the streets and, when confronted by the Revolutionary Guard, nervously but bravely protects the hidden Americans from discovery. Even the Iranian airport guards come across as ordinary people who seem excited and engaged with the fake Argo’s storyline after one of the disguised Americans explains the script to them. Another element of humanization involves Affleck’s skillful use of actual footage from the period. Several characters are seen viewing television news or listening to radio reports from 1979, such as when Tony watches a broadcast in which a reporter interviews “regular” Americans. One of the interviewees says of the Iranians that “we should shoot a couple to show them we mean business.” In another broadcast a Vietnam veteran states that he is ready to “bear arms again” if necessary. The hostage crisis left a tremendous imprint on American popular memory. By interspersing news footage throughout the film, Affleck conveys the sense of vulnerability, feebleness, and frustration that many Americans felt at the time. Beyond the central role of the CIA, this sense of American vulnerability and weakness links Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. Despite American military prowess—as evidenced by the power to enter a hostile country and surreptitiously rescue six compatriots or to spend a decade searching for one man and then land heavily armed commandos at his doorstep on the other side of the world to kill him—the United States appears vulnerable after 9/11 and impotent after the 1979 embassy takeover. But here the similarity ends. Zero Dark Thirty has the potential to create two misperceptions, that of a violent Islamic “Other” and the notion that torture was necessary to find bin Laden. Argo, in contrast, searches for a common sense of human decency in the midst of an otherwise troubled and traumatic experience. In terms of a movie-going experience, decency wins.

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Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas (IFC Films, 2010). Reviewed by Christina Hollenbeck

Carlos, directed by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, chronicles the life of international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known by his alias “Carlos the Jackal,” beginning with his operations for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Paris in 1973 until his capture in Sudan in 1994. Adapted from a television miniseries that first aired in France in 2010, the film begins by contextualizing Carlos’s somewhat unusual rise to prominence as a Venezuelan in a Palestinian liberation organization. After Israeli agents assassinate his Paris-based superior, Mohamed Boudia, in 1973, Carlos approaches PFLP’s leader Wadie Haddad about replacing Boudia. Though Carlos appeals to Haddad by detailing his experience with the PFLP and communicating his desire to aid international revolution, he does not elaborate on his ideology or motivations. Haddad denies Carlos the promotion, placing him under Boudia’s replacement, Michael “Andre” Mourkhabal. Carlos then carries out a few botched assignments in Paris. When he tries to assassinate the chairman of Marks & Spencer, for example, his gun fires only once before jamming. He eludes capture, relying on girlfriends for passing messages and smuggling weapons. These women become the first of Carlos’s many temporary allies. After Andre is apprehended by the French police, he identifies Carlos as another agent working for Haddad, but when confronted by Andre and a few French officers, Carlos kills them all and escapes into hiding. Convinced of Carlos’s dedication to the PFLP cause, Haddad places him in charge of an ambitious operation at the upcoming OPEC meeting in Vienna, where he is tasked with capturing all the OPEC oil ministers so that the ensuing chaos and instability will drive up the price of oil. Carlos receives secret orders to execute the Iranian and Saudi Arabian oil ministers, removing Iraq’s most powerful opposition in OPEC. After taking over OPEC headquarters, Carlos discovers his getaway plane does not have the range to transport him safely to Baghdad, and he is forced to choose between executing his targets and holding them for ransom. He decides on the latter, and this deviation effectively ends his cooperation with PFLP. Haddad’s trust is shaken since Carlos chose money, personal safety, and notoriety over following orders. Thereafter, Carlos forms his own syndicate, working for the highest bidder in exchange for 303 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

Édgar Ramírez provides a balanced and thoughtful portrayal of terrorist “Carlos the Jackal.” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films.)

funds and protection. The film glosses over the decade between 1979 and 1989, during which Carlos accepted contracts for missions in the Soviet bloc and throughout Europe and the Middle East. But the end of the Cold War meant the loss of many of Carlos’s allies, who wanted to improve their relations with the West. Carlos flees to Sudan and is granted safe haven under the understanding that he will live quietly and inconspicuously. He ignores these demands, however, and eventually his glamorous lifestyle and ongoing international pressure force Sudan to surrender the fugitive. At the end of the movie, he is transported to Paris to face trial for the murder of the police officers in 1975. Olivier Assayas conducted thorough research to filmCarlos , which has allowed him to meticulously depict the protagonist’s operations. The OPEC mission, which comprises almost fifty minutes of the film, incorporates the recorded testimony of individuals associated with the terrorist, such as team member Hans-Joachim “Angie” Klein, who argued with Carlos before the operation about whether to execute those who did not follow orders. In this testimony we also hear from the unsuspecting receptionist who greeted Carlos’s group upon their arrival, and the oil ministers he held for ransom. Yet the historical representation of Carlos suffers from its inattention to the ten-year gap between 1979 and 1989. This period receives greater focus 304 Film Review in the miniseries and was cut from the film version to reduce its length, but this comes at the expense of downplaying Carlos’s activities behind the Iron Curtain and his often strained relationships with allies. This gap feels especially jarring because Carlos spends so much of the film trying to attain operational autonomy. Exploring what he finally did with it would have revealed much about him as a political leader and man. To its credit, the film refrains from speculating about the terrorist’s motives. Carlos at one point explains his history of serving in the PFLP, but his initial interest in the Palestinian cause is never fleshed out. References to Latin American dictators and Che Guevara serve as nods to Carlos’s revolutionary background, and his oft-repeated goal of inciting world revolution suggests an internationalist approach that might have found Palestine a noble endeavor, but this is never confirmed. Similarly, after Haddad dismisses Carlos from the PFLP, he recommends that Carlos look for work in Latin America, but whether Carlos considered this avenue and why he ultimately stayed in the Middle East is unexplored. Carlos thus remains an enigmatic figure, and the film balances the many different versions of the man: the dedicated international revolutionary he understood himself to be, the fun-loving man his friends and family knew, and the brutal terrorist his many victims encountered. Carlos is sensitive to these multiple facets of his life, exploring their connectivity. International revolution remains his unwavering goal throughout the film, and after the OPEC mission it becomes central to all his activities and relationships. But his revolutionary zeal and willingness to incite terror appear to wane as he ages, even though his personal life remains inextricably tied to the legacies of his youth. The success of the film can be credited in large part to Édgar Ramírez’s subtle performance in the title role. Ramírez plays Carlos as paternalistic and concerned for his comrades, but also as strict and prone to excesses, particularly when confronted with challenges to his authority. He is vain, flaunting bourgeois attire, paying careful attention to his weight (which he loses first through physical training and later through liposuction), and is always in need of attention. Carlos indulges in luxury at the expense of the security that a more disciplined and anonymous existence would provide, which eventually causes his downfall. Most tellingly, he invokes his own name often, perhaps as part of an effort to cultivate his cult of personality.

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Carlos must balance the anxieties of war and the spoils of victory, but he never quite reveals what he is thinking, perhaps because he never knows what to think. A nuanced script reinforces this impression of ambiguity. For example, Carlos convinces Haddad to spare his life after he killed Andre, insisting that he would prefer to die for the PFLP cause. Yet when Carlos has such a chance in Vienna, he is the only member of his team who prefers to resolve the botched mission with ransom rather than martyrdom. After Vienna, Carlos explains to Haddad that his decision to collect ransom was for the good of the revolution, but he is subsequently shown relaxing on the beach with a girlfriend. What is his measure of commitment? The interwoven motifs of excessive violence and ideological uncertainty frame Carlos’s actions over the length of his career. Carlos repeatedly displays his proclivities for violence, proving that “at the moment of truth [he] will pull the trigger,” as one of his Iraqi associates says. The film suggests, however, that Carlos only pulls the trigger when it is in his own interest, whether escaping the French police, keeping the oil ministers in line at OPEC (he kills one minister to do so), or ensuring order in the ranks of his own organization. Carlos actually responds to his associate’s “moment of truth” speech with a frown. It is a subtle moment, but the film is composed of subtleties. Carlos is valuable for its balanced, thoughtful, and documentary-style assessment of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez beyond the hysterics of the “Carlos the Jackal” myth. Stylistically, the emphasis is almost always on Carlos’s actions rather than their socio-political consequences. This careful deconstruction of a complex historical subject prompts the viewer to reflect on Carlos’s actions and motives. Even when Carlos commits serious crimes, the film focuses on their personal toll. After killing Andre, for example, Carlos is visibly shaken. The frequent close-ups of Carlos’s “moments of truth” do not show a terrifying, dehumanized murderer, but a man filled with conscience and doubts.

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Exhibition Reviews

Searching for the Seventies: The DOCUMERICA Photography Project Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery, National Archives, Washington, DC. Reviewed by Jeanine Navarrete

“Two Girls Smoking Pot During an Outing in Cedar Woods near Leakey, Texas,” near San Antonio May 1973. Photo by St. Gil, Marc, 1924-1992. (Photo courtesy of Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery.)

In a gallery a few feet from the soaring rotunda of the National Archives that houses the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the nadir of the American twentieth century comes alive in photographs of the rugged faces of dockworkers, the youthful smiles of teens in San Antonio, and the landscapes blighted by industrial prosperity. The National Archives and Record Administration’s (NARA) temporary exhibition Searching for the Seventies: The DOCUMERICA Photography Project, which runs

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through September 8, 2013, is a visual journey through the “lost decade” of deindustrialization, racial strife, and platform shoes, through the lens of the Environmental Protection Agency’s DOCUMERICA photography project. The opening panel of the exhibit explains DOCUMERICA’s origins as an EPA project to chronicle the effects of pollution, urban sprawl, and overdevelopment on the American environment. The original project was heavily influenced by the burgeoning environmentalist movement of the late 1960s, as well as the federal photography projects of the New Deal Farm Security Administration in the late 1930s and 1940s. These two undercurrents are clear in the exhibit’s simultaneous focus on laborers and landscapes destroyed by industrial pollution, with the addition of portraits of urban and suburban life. Although one of the original criticisms of the project in the 1970s was its focus on small rural towns in a period in which Americans were migrating in greater numbers to urbanized population centers, this has been compensated for in the exhibit, which manages to devote considerable attention to urban and suburban life, as well as rural areas and agricultural landscapes. The exhibit is divided thematically, with different colored stripes representing three major themes: “Ball of Confusion,” “Everybody is a Star,” and “Pave Paradise,” allowing the visitor to follow a particular theme throughout an entire series of photographs. Theme names are taken from well-known rock and R&B song lyrics, and popular music of the decade is played in the exhibit gallery as well. Some of the collection’s photographs are organized by photographer in the “On Assignment” sections of the exhibit. These groupings include work done for DOCUMERICA by John H. White, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the Chicago Tribune, in Chicago’s black neighborhoods, and by Jack Corn, photo editor of the Nashville Tennessean, in the coal mining communities of Appalachia, among others. The exhibit also features one small display case with artifacts and ephemera, including photographers’ notebooks, negatives, and letters from the DOCUMERICA project offices at the EPA. The overall aesthetic of the exhibition room is understated, but the muted tones and lighting allow the visitor to engage with the photographs on display and force the visitor to focus on each photograph in a series individually. Although DOCUMERICA was intended to be informational, it is clear that the photographers enlisted for the project took great artistic license

308 Exhibition Review in interpreting the mission to “pictorially document the environmental movement in America in this decade.” Photographs of bucolic landscapes studded with unsightly tract housing, or of children playing in the shadow and smog of a Birmingham steel plant, are interspersed with emotional portraits like that of a young United Mine Workers secretary orphaned by black lung disease, or of teens experimenting with drugs in a Texas park. All suggest the extent to which heavy industry and economic growth can have unintentionally destructive effects on communities and families. The curatorial decision to keep the photographers’ original captions for each photograph provides further insight into how many of the subjects represented were seen at the time as sites of social crisis. The photographs of the Farm Security Administration painstakingly chronicled the rural refugees of the Dust Bowl and overtly attempted to elicit sympathy for its subjects. DOCUMERICA, on the other hand, captured a much wider swath of American society and reflected a burgeoning multiculturalism in which African Americans, Latinos, the elderly, and other marginalized groups sought inclusion in mainstream politics on their own terms. The exhibit also reflects tension between industry and organized labor in the Northeast and Midwest, and the growing dependence on migrant labor in the Southwest, a historical subject that rarely gets attention in other federally funded national museums or galleries. Derided in contemporary popular culture as exemplifying American excess and poor taste, the seventies have been rescued from the dustbin of history by nearly a decade of innovative historical scholarship, from Bruce Schulman’s The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001) to Jefferson Cowie’sStayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the American Working Class (New York: Free Press, 2010). These works have demonstrated that the period overlooked between the tumult of the 1960s and economic boom of the 1980s was a formative moment in American political, social, and economic history. Led by Senior Curator Bruce I. Bustard, the curatorial staff ofSearching for the Seventies has created an exhibition that puts the seventies into living color and adds a new perspective to this body of scholarly work, while offering a nuanced interpretation of the period that is accessible to the general public. This stunning collection of photographs spans landscapes, neighborhoods, and ethnic groups to evocatively and effectively depict a country in crisis.

309 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Owari Tokugawake no shihō/ Treasures of the Owari Tokugawa Family Metropolitan Tokyo “Edo-Tokyo” Museum, Tokyo, Japan. Reviewed by Daniele Lauro

In a recent volume titled The Edo Inheritance (Edo no idenshi), Tokugawa Tsunenari, current head of the main Tokugawa house and founder of the Tokugawa Memorial Foundation, argues that, despite a misconception still widespread among The exhibition program cover contemporary Japanese, the 265 years in illustrates a selection of the more than 200 pieces in the exhibition which his family held political control over relating to Japan’s warrior culture. (Image courtesy of Metropolitan the country—the so-called Edo period Tokyo “Edo-Tokyo” Museum.) (1603-1868)—were by no means Japan’s “Dark Ages.”1 On the contrary, under the Tokugawa regime Japan experienced uninterrupted peace and economic prosperity after decades of devastating civil strife. This period of internal stability known as Pax Tokugawa set the conditions for the emergence of major urban centers and a complex consumers’ society, contributed to the booming of the printing industry and to high literacy rates, and encouraged the flourishing of a sophisticated warrior culture. The latter is the subject of the touring exhibition Treasures of the Owari Tokugawa Family, which was held at the Edo-Tokyo Museum from January 2 to February 24, 2013. The show, which will be hosted at the Kyushu National Museum from October 12 to December 8, 2013, and at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art from July 5 to August 24, 2014, brings together an outstanding selection of over 200 pieces belonging to the Tokugawa Art Museum (Nagoya), an institution established in 1935 by Tokugawa Yoshichika, nineteenth head of the Owari Tokugawa family, with the purpose of preserving the legacy of Japan’s warrior culture. The Owari clan was one of three collateral branches of the main Tokugawa house and was started by Yoshinao, ninth son of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the shogunate in 1603. With about 10,000

1 See Tsunenari Tokugawa, The Edo Inheritance, trans. Iehiro Tokugawa (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2009). 310 Exhibition Review

items, including nine National Treasures, fifty-nine Important Cultural Properties, and forty-six Important Art Objects, the Tokugawa Museum is among the most representative examples of early modern Japanese warrior art. Among other things, its collection includes swords, warrior implements, and tea utensils that belonged to Tokugawa Ieyasu and that were distributed to the collateral houses after his death in 1616. Arranging the items around four

nuclei—“Samurai Spirit” (shōbu), “Pure A thirteenth-century long sword Elegance” (seiga), “Treasures” (shihō), (tachi) by swordsmith Rai Magotarō. (Photo courtesy of Metropolitan and “Education” (kyōyō)—the exhibition Tokyo “Edo-Tokyo” Museum.) organizers aimed “to recreate the splendor and the history the Owari Tokugawa family” and to address the question of what constitutes the essence of the Tokugawa warrior elite culture.2 The opening section, “Samurai Spirit,” features a display of military paraphernalia including armors, swords, firearms, and implements for archery and horsemanship, thus highlighting the crucial role weapons and other war accoutrements continued to play as symbols of warrior authority and masculine identity during the peaceful centuries of the Tokugawa rule. These items are well-preserved, and the reason for this becomes immediately apparent when one considers that many of these implements were never used for actual fighting. This was the case, for instance, with the seventeenth-century suit of armor with silver coat and white lacing that once belonged to Tokugawa Yoshinao. Every year the Owari clan’s founder ordered a new armor for the annual ceremonial display that took place in his residence on the first month, where he prayed for the longevity and martial success of his family and retainers. The armor on display was prepared by the armorer Katō Hikojūrō Masaharu of the Kasuga school for one of these

2 Tokugawa Bijutsukan, Tokugawa bijutsukanten Owari Tokugawake no shihō [The Tokugawa Art Museum Collection Treasures of the Owari Tokugawa Family] (Nagoya: Chūnichi Shinbunsha, 2013), ii. 311 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

annual rituals and was among Yoshinao’s most valued possesions.3 Other weapons, such as the thirteenth-century long sword by swordsmith Rai Magotarō or the matchlock gun cast by Noda Kiyotaka in 1611, were once possessed by Tokugawa Ieyasu and were passed down to his progeny as precious heirlooms and tangible icons through which political legitimacy and pedigree could be claimed. With a selection of tea implements, nō theather preps, and incense sets, the second part of the exhibit, “Pure Elegance,” explores the efforts of the Tokugawa military elite to obtain validation and refinement through cultural pursuits. Long before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japanese warriors had been eager practitioners of tea culture and passionate collectors of ceramics and other tea utensils. Ieyasu and his retainers continued the sixteenth-century tradition of “refined feudal lords,” using tea gatherings as effective arenas for political activity. Like their predecessors in the Muromachi period

Tokugawa Yoshinao’s seventeenth- (1336-1573), the Tokugawa shoguns patronized century suit of armor (gusoku) nō theather and transformed it into the official with silver coat and white lacing. (Photo courtesy of Metropolitan pastime and entertainment of the warrior class. Tokyo “Edo-Tokyo” Museum.) Tokugawa Yoshinao himself practiced the art of nō, performing the role of leading actor for the Konparu School. Incense-matching contests, a favorite amusement of the imperial court during the Heian period (794-1185), was appropriated by the warrior elite and became part of the samurai education. The third section, “Treasures,” constitutes the core of the exhibition. Here are displayed two of the nine “National Treasures” owned by the Tokugawa Art Museum, namely a number of fragments of the

3 Ibid., 64. 312 Exhibition Review

Chiyohime’s seventeenth-century wedding trousseau. (Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Tokyo “Edo-Tokyo” Museum.)

twelfth-centuryIllustrated Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari emaki), the oldest extant visual depiction of the Heian literary masterpiece Genji Monogatari by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, and the seventeenth-century wedding trousseau owned by Chiyohime, daughter of the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu and wife of the Tokugawa Mitsutomo. The wedding set, also known as “Hatsune Furnishings,” includes a number of luxurious boxes, mirror stands, containers for cosmetic accessories, and chests for clothes, all decorated with the maki-e (“sprinkled lacquer”) technique and with auspicious motifs deriving from the Hatsune (“The First Warbler”) chapter of the Tale of Genji. Considered the quintessential embodiment of courtly elegance, the Tale of Genji was appropriated by the military elite as early as the fourteenth century. Under the Tokugawa, Genji continued to be used as a source of cultural legitimacy and as a political manual, but it also became a didactic if controversial work through which women belonging to samurai families could refine their manners, master elegance, and learn the proper

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way of speaking and behaving.4 “Education,” the show’s closing section, presents examples of the so-called kinkishoga, the four arts of music, go, calligraphy, and painting, which every warrior was expected to master and through which he could achieve cultural refinement and erudition. The wide array of items on display in this section, including musical instruments (sō, biwa, and shamisen), different types of games (go, karuta, sugoroku, and shōgi), written handscrolls, implements for the art of calligraphy, and painted hanging scrolls, testify to the sophistication of the Tokugawa warrior elite culture and the importance placed by the shogunate on education as a sine qua non for a just government, a notion advocated by Confucian scholars. Through a thoughtful selection of objects, a skillful installation, an easy-to-follow path, and a number of bilingual panels that facilitate the visitor’s transition from one section to the other, the organizers succeeded in conveying the degree of complexity and refinement reached by Japan’s warrior elite between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the show also constitutes a joyful celebration of the Tokugawa clan’s splendor and the unparalleled quality of objects belonging to the Tokugawa Art Museum. The collection’s superior craftsmanship and its well-preserved condition, as well as the incredible number of related documents that survived to this day, make the Tokugawa Museum the ideal environment for the scholar eager to investigate Japan’s early modern warrior art and material culture. Nonetheless, it is important to avoid the pitfall of fetishizing the museum and its collections as the absolute embodiment of the art of the warrior elite. The visitor should keep in mind that throughout the Edo period Japan was divided into more than 260 feudal domains, and therefore valuable collections of warrior art are disseminated virtually all over the archipelago and even outside the national borders. Moreover, designations such as “National Treasure” or “Important Cultural Property” are relatively recent inventions. Japan’s complex system of legislation for the classification and preservation of the national cultural patrimony dates back to the 1897 “Law for the Preservation of Ancient Shrines and Temples” and to the 1929

4 See Peter F. Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books for Women? ‘Genji Monogatari’ and ‘Ise Monogatari’ in Late Seventeenth Century Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 60, no.2 (Summer, 2005): 147-193. 314 Exhibition Review

“Law for the Protection of National Treasure,” two measures adopted to preserve the country’s treasures from the effects of modernization, but also to adjust Japan’s cultural properties management practices to Western standards.5 The process of designation of a work as a national treasure is carried out by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, a subsidiary of Japan’s Ministry of Education, and has, therefore, its share of political implications. Though this exhibition shows the splendor and sophistication achieved by the Tokugawa warrior elites throughout the Edo period, it is wiser to think of the Owari Tokugawa legacy as one of the many reflections of Japan’s multifarious daimyo culture.

The Monarchy Exhibition Series: Monarchy and Life of Children under Emperor Franz Joseph I National Museum of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic. Reviewed by Laura Brade

Although the historical building of the National Museum in Prague has been closed since July 2011, the museum is continuing to display new exhibitions during the building’s restoration. The current exhibition series “The Monarchy” examines life in the Bohemian Lands under the Habsburg monarchy during the “long nineteenth century.” The main exhibition “Monarchy” is on display at the National Museum New Building, together with exhibits on the life of children and photographs of people in the nineteenth century, while other exhibits in the series—on food, sportsmen, and music machines—are on display at other National Museum locations. Focusing primarily on life under Emperor Franz Joseph I, the title exhibit encourages visitors to conceive of the monarchy as “simply a retrospection of the childhood of our present modern times.” With QR codes throughout, the museum encourages visitors to use smart phones or tablets to access the exhibit’s multimedia guide. Curators have divided the exhibition into a number of interactive “rooms” displaying various aspects of life under Franz Joseph: a post office, a drawing room, a kitchen, and

5 Christine Guth, “Japan’s National Treasures,” in Money L. Hickman et al., Japan’s Golden Age: Momoyama, ed. Money L. Hickman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 15. 315 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History

a brothel. Concluding with the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, the exhibition remarks on the legacy of the Habsburg myth: “It is possible to draw parallels between the current united Europe and the Habsburg empire of many nations. The Habsburg myth shows a positive side of the Habsburg monarchy heritage.” Although it concludes in 1918, the exhibition curiously addresses neither World War I nor the collapse of the empire. Instead, “The Monarchy” seeks to reinsert the Habsburg Empire into the history of the Bohemian lands not simply as an oppressive conqueror, but as example of a multi-national state. The exhibit primarily focuses on the rapid change and “progress” of the era. The majority of the collection therefore portrays the lives of the upper classes, while only one small portion addresses the lives of farmers and the working class. However, the exhibition on the “Life of Children under Emperor Franz Joseph I” encourages young visitors to pick a social class at the beginning of the tour (farmer, worker, burgher, or aristocrat) and at nine different points the visitor is given a description of the life of a child in that social class. The exhibit is organized topically into sections on pregnancy/ birth, religious rituals (Christian and Jewish), clothing styles, food, sanitary conditions, punishment, disease and treatments, toys and games, family traditions, war, school/work, family relations, and education. Children are encouraged to dress up, play with replicas of nineteenth-century toys, and experience examples of corporal punishment, such as a table where kids can kneel on pebbles or thinly sliced logs. For a small exhibit geared toward younger viewers, “Life of children” is well balanced, offering glimpses into various social classes as well as family traditions for children growing up in Romani, Jewish, or Christian households.

316 traces The source image for this issue’straces cover design is a detail of the ornaments on a dedication plaque at the Civil War Memorial in Raleigh’s Oakwood Cemetary, taken in Summer 2011. Brandon Whitesell, Graphic Designer