Flags of our (Great-Grand) Fathers

I try not to blog about my political opinions here -- there are other venues where I let off that kind of steam. I find it jarring when history-themed blogs morph into contemporary Op-Ed sections, even when I agree with the sentiments expressed. Some issues, of course, bridge the distance between the Civil War era and the politics of 2007 – such is the reach, and the legacy, of that cataclysmic struggle. One of those enduring issues is a simple but universally recognized emblem and the emotions it evokes. Thankfully, wayward Californian John Coski at the Museum of the Confederacy wrote the book on the Confederate battle flag, so you don’t have to.

Speaking of Op-Ed sections, the battle flag controversy was highlighted in one of my local papers several months ago. I made note of it, and intended to write a letter to the editor, but responding to long-discredited “black Confederate” mythology (the part of the editorial that pushed my buttons) seems increasingly pointless. It’s here to stay. I’m reminded of something I read recently in the acknowledgments to Ray Mulesky’s book, Thunder From a Clear Sky. While Ray was trying to ferret out the details of the “battle” of Browning Springs, Kentucky, with Harold Utley of the Hopkins County Historical Society, Mr. Utley made the profound and sadly accurate comment that “once something is wrong in print, it is likely wrong forever.”

If that was true in the past, it’s all the MORE true in the age of the internet.

The SF Chronicle essay in question, “Give the Confederate flag a break: The Stars-and-Bars is a diversion in the nation's fight for racial harmony,” is a well-intentioned call for people to cool their jets, take the long view, and remove the chips from their shoulders (take a moment to read it in full if you want to make sense of my specific references here). It’s also another subtle example of something wrong in print that will help perpetuate misconceptions until the end of time (and I’m not speaking of the common mislabeling of the battle flag as the “Stars and Bars,” which refers, in fact, to a Confederate national flag).

The editorial starts off well enough, discussing the relevance of symbols, but quickly swerves off logical kilter with specious analogies. No one is suggesting the flag be banned from country music concerts. Legal objections to the flag (from organizations like the NAACP) have to do with it being used in a quasi-official capacity – flying over a state house, for example. Considering that it represented some of the armies that went to war with the United States, objections to the flag under these circumstances don’t seem unreasonable. And considering that, like it or not, it is historically associated with the most virulently racist organizations in the history of our nation, it’s unrealistic to assert that the meaning many black Americans assign to that symbol is unfair or irrational. Symbols are powerful things, and diametrically opposed interpretations do not cancel each other out. A non-racist sense of pride in one’s heritage, symbolized by that flag, is no more valid, and no more historical, than a sense of revulsion by those who see it as emblematic of the armies that fought to perpetuate slavery. Or who see it as emblematic of the KKK and their ilk.

Had the Op-Ed author, Mr. O’Neill, satisfied himself with the “Heritage not Hate” perspective, I would not feel compelled to comment on it. But I was dismayed to read the fresh renewal, in my Sunday paper, of some of the most discredited mythology about the Civil War. The issue of so-called Black Confederates has been so thoroughly refuted, it's astonishing that rational people continue to raise it (he wrote, “between 60,000 and 90,000 black men, both free and slave, also served under the banner of the Stars and Bars”). The entire rationale (whether extended consciously or not) behind the notion of large numbers of black people fighting for the South is to diminish the connection between slavery and the Civil War. After all, how could it be about slavery if blacks themselves fought with the Confederates?

The answer is that they did not, except in isolated and exceptional instances. It was illegal for blacks to fight. Even as late as 1864, when General Patrick Cleburne suggested recruiting slaves as an answer to the South’s critical shortage of manpower, he was nearly run out of town on a rail for such a radical proposition. The CSA did not consider recruiting slaves in earnest until just before the war ended.

The phrasing is key: 10s of thousands of black men “served” with Confederate armies. This is a staple of neo-Confederate web sites that attempt to remove slavery from the equation entirely. To them, it was a war of aggression by mongrel hordes (immigrants) against those true American patriots – keepers of the Revolutionary flame – who sought only to salvage self-determination. But if the slaves put to work on behalf of southern armies served for the Confederacy, we must likewise conclude that a lot of allied POWs served with Japanese forces in WWII. You can see how absurd it becomes when forced labor is referred to in the context of willing, or even conscripted soldiers.

And while it's true that "the vast majority. . .owned no slaves,” it's a disingenuous argument. The 1860 census shows that close to 25% of all white southern families owned slaves (and in each of those slaveholding families, likely only one person was named as the owner). The institution was part and parcel of the southern economy, and southern antebellum culture. People who did not own slaves aspired to own them, benefitted from the presence of them, or otherwise facilitated the system. And regardless, the armies were sent into battle to achieve the objectives of the government. In this case the objective was independence to protect a system of chattel slavery, and soldiers were fighting for that whether they realized it or not.

The nation was split literally between slave and free soil interests. The election of a president from a party with explicitly abolitionist roots precipitated secession, which in turn led directly to the war. The architects of secession (see Apostles of Disunion), made it painfully clear that slavery was the central issue, and leading Confederates themselves made no bones about the fact that independence was necessary to preserve slavery. With all the primary resources at our disposal, it's a tortured argument for someone today to say the American Civil War was not about slavery, but about states rights. The only state right at issue was the right to preserve and expand the institution into the western territories. Ironically, the Confederate Constitution took that right to the other extreme: it prohibited states of the Confederacy from interfering with slavery even within their own borders. Which is to say states would have to allow slavery whether they wanted it or not. So much for states rights.

Mr. O’Neill makes the oft-seen point that since the U.S. flag flew over the entire nation prior to the Civil War, it, too, was an emblem of slavery. How to explain to someone that the flag of emancipation transcends the reason emancipation was necessary? In the short life of the Confederacy, how could the battle flag transcend the reasons the Confederacy was seeking independence? How could it transcend the negative associations of the next 100 years?

In one concluding paragraph, O’Neill writes, “Though the Confederate flag remains an easy target for politicians looking to take cheap shots, the heritage represented by that flag is far from simple. Though it retains negative power, there surely is not a soul left on the planet who waves that flag in support of slavery. Voters whose ancestors gave their lives under that banner should not be written off by the party that has, historically, best defended their interests."

Certainly the first sentence rings true, but it bears mentioning that many of those voters he refers to wrote off the party – not the other way around – during the an era of forced integration and civil rights protests. Indeed, there was a monumental resurgence of the battle flag in direct response to court-ordered integration, well in advance of the Civil War centennial.

I agree with much of what Mr. O’Neill wrote in his essay. I share his exasperation with the hollow, pseudo-controversies of each successive election cycle. And I certainly agree that people today should be given the benefit of the doubt when celebrating or honoring their heritage -- that a presumption of racism is unwarranted. It’s pointless to pass moral judgment on the common soldier of 1861, and equally pointless to take an emotional stake in defending their honor (this enduring emotional charge may be unique to civil warfare, while more recent enemies quickly become trading partners and allies). But you can't have it both ways. You can't insist that others appreciate your affinity for the banner, while insisting that their interpretations of that symbol are irrational. Both views have a long, tangible history.

Mr. O’Neil may think I am missing the larger points of his editorial while focusing on a few passing comments (I will email him a copy of this blog entry). But I think everything hinges on this issue of states rights vs. slavery. If one is to easily dismiss the negative connotations that generations of African-Americans, for example, assign to the battle flag, one must first make the case that the war was not really about slavery, then rationalize the particular association of the battle flag with the Klan. Good luck with that exercise.

But one needn’t rewrite the history of the Civil War to make the other, thoughtful arguments. No one who honors the service and sacrifice of their Confederate ancestors owes anyone an apology today. Individuals fought for all kinds of reasons, and in the final analysis, it’s just history. It’s always best to face it head-on.

I really liked this passage in O'Neill's essay, and it's a good one to close with here:

And so it goes, in the words of recently departed Kurt Vonnegut, a wry commentator on human folly in all its guises whose leavening humor and wisdom will be sorely missed in a nation fairly bereft of both qualities. And nowhere is that wisdom and humor needed more than in our bogged-down-in-B.S. attitudes toward race, wherein we continue to countenance unequal schools and a vast disparity in opportunity while arguing about words and old flags.

iTunes U

Even though I did not own an iPod or other MP3 player until just recently, I have amassed a vast library of free podcasts—mainly of various radio programs—that I thought might be nice to listen to during long walks or drives, or while outside doing solitary work.

Of course in real life, long walks are hard to come by, long drives feature a live soundtrack of boys fighting in the backseat, and I try to do as little work outside as possible. But still, I love the technology, and the mobility of podcasts, and I continue to collect them just in case.

Lately, I started downloading some interesting-sounding lectures from various universities, on all manner of topics. There are some fairly amazing repositories for college-level presentations—usually introductory—on everything from astronomy to the history of Rome. If you have iTunes installed, a good starting place is here (click on the link to iTunes U to save you navigating it from scratch). You can also go straight to the university websites, and usually find an iTunes U icon (or search the site with keywords "itunes" or "podcasts"). This web page has a handy list of podcasts by university, with links.

[click on the images at top and bottom of this entry to get a larger view, if necessary]

There's some Civil War stuff there, if you look for it. At UC Berkeley, Jennifer Burns has a long list of lectures on U.S. history starting with the Civil War—I listened to part of the first one, and took issue with a couple statements, but thought it very listen-able, all in all. That's a tough lecture, any way you shake it.

I see from her biography that she's moving on to the University of Virginia soon. Her apparent interest in Ayn Rand probably informs her interpretations of the Civil War. She does ask the question, "who freed the slaves" (a question we see Kevin Levin took up in his classroom recently). Professor Burns' answer is, the slaves did.

Over at Princeton's website, Dimitri's favorite professor holds forth on "Abraham Lincoln's Invention of Presidential War Powers." For some of the reasons I mentioned in the 2nd paragraph above, I am very much enamored of the 60-second Lecture series at the University of Pennsylvania. Now that is a cool idea: get over-educated people in various fields to summarize their subjects in one minute. The first thing you'll notice is that many of them run long. "Intracellular landfills" runs over two minutes! My favorite: "What Makes a Poem a Poem," by Charles Bernstein. One minute, twenty-two seconds. And it's really all you budding poets need to know.

Buster Kilrain in Song...

Steve Earle sings "Dixieland": a long introduction, but it's worth it, as Steve explains what the war was really about, and how the 20th Maine saved us all from talking funny:

Dixieland

I am kilrain and i'm a fightin' man and i come from county clare
And the brits would hang me for a fenian so i took me leave of there
And i crossed the ocean in the "arrianne" the vilest tub afloat
And the captain's brother was a railroad man and he met us the boat
So i joined up with the 20th maine like i said my friend
i'm a fighting man
And we're marchin' south in the pouring rain and we're all goin' down to dixieland

I am kilrain of the 20th maine and we fight for chamberlain
cause he stood right with us when the johnnies came like a banshee on the wind
When the smoke cleared out of gettysburg many a mother wept
For many a good boy died there, sure, and the air smelted
just like death

I am kilrain of the 20th maine and i'd march to hell and back again
For colonel joshua chamberlain - we're all goin' down to dixieland

I am kilrain of the 20th maine and i damn all gentlemen
Whose only worth is their father's name and the
sweat of a workin' man
Well we come from the farms and the city streets and a hundred foreign lands
And we spilled our blood in the battle's heat
Now we're all americans

I am kilrain of the 20th maine and did i tell you friend
i'm a fightin' man
And i'll not be back this way again, cause we're all
goin' down to dixieland

"The Road to Appomattox"

...one more Appomattox-related entry for now: Andrew McKnight sings "The Road to Appomattox," WUWF radiolive television concert, recorded at the Pensacola, FL Museum of Commerce 6/4/2005

"Sholbit" = "the end"

In August of 2006 I posted a blog entry with passing reference to the "Battle of Bloody Island," in which Captain Nathaniel Lyon's 1st Dragoons killed perhaps as many as 200 Pomo Indians near Clear Lake, in northern California. The Pomo's endured, but haven't fared well in modern times as a casino-less tribe living adjacent to a Superfund toxic cleanup site.

About a week ago, the local Sunday paper reported that Elem Pomo, an 8,000-year-old dialect spoken by many of the people slaughtered at Bloody Island, is now spoken fluently by only one person, 59-year-old Loretta Kelsey. It is another vestige of the past, already obscure, moving closer to the brink of oblivion. Unlike so many lost tongues, however, this one survives on reel-to-reel tapes at UC Berkeley, and you can hear some examples from Loretta Kelsey herself on this podcast.

I have never consciously avoided opera

but somehow it took until 2007 for me to attend my first performance, at least a final dress rehearsal. Even then, incentives were required: a free ticket, and a storyline involving one of my favorite subjects: e.g., grilled meats, the poetry of Stephen Dunn, the Civil War.

Finally, with that third item, the right combination clicked into place. By contrast, I do consciously and aggressively avoid musicals of all types (though I may make an exception for Spamalot). I should say, though, at times in my life I have been enamored of certain so-called "rock operas," such as Tommy, and Quadrophenia. When I was about 11-years-old, most of what I knew of the Christian gospels came from hours playing Jesus Christ Superstar LPs on the old Hi-Fi. Of course, I'm referring to the original, with Deep Purple lead singer Ian Gillan as Jesus Christ, not the later, subpar movie soundtrack.

But Appomattox was my first experience with an honest-to-goodness opera. By now you've probably gauged my qualifications for critiquing such a performance. This blog entry offers no expertise—just honest impressions. And maybe it's best that way. It was my expectation, based on snippets of exposure to televised opera, that the singing would be interesting, but unintelligible, and eventually tedious (mercifully, this was sung in English, with superscripts). I'm impressed that people can produce those voices, but I like a little action, too. And if I can't have a blind pinball prodigy, I'll take the burning of Richmond, punctuated by the low thunder of distant artillery.

I did not even have any pre-established opinions on Philip Glass's body of work. When Ranger Manny posted a Glass joke as a comment on this blog, I didn't get it—though plainly it had something to do with monotonous repetition. The show opened last Friday, and many of the paid critics have had their say. Dimitri, over at Civil War Bookshelf, has conveniently linked to a handful of those reviews here. As you might expect, the reviews were all over the board, though at a glance it looks like more negative commentary than positive.

For my part, I was pleasantly surprised. I was impressed. I was genuinely moved—the scene with Lincoln walking in Richmond, the combination of the music, the set, and the moment where he asks someone not to kneel to him, actually raised the hair on my arms and brought water to my eyes. All told, I only looked at my watch a couple times, tapping it to make sure the second hand was moving. Two and a half hours would have been easier to take had the bar been open—a little pick-me-up at intermission goes a long way in wartime.

As mentioned in my last blog entry, the night started with a personal backstage tour, and that alone would have been worth braving rush hour traffic. The War Memorial Opera House is a spectacular building, and backstage is a wonderland of high-tech and classically traditional tools, equipment, shops, costumes and props. Here, I got my first view of Lincoln's coffin, along with uniforms, swords, the Lee and Grant tables, and even the "silent witness." The original Silent Witness is pictured at the top of this post (click on that photo, or read the story of rag doll here—the next photo below, with desk, shows the SF Opera witness—click on image for a larger view). It's fascinating to me to see how much care goes into the details that many people in the audience will never notice.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

I thought the musical score was powerful, but never distracting. It set just the right tone in some very dramatic scenes, and only on occasion did I find myself concentrating on the orchestra at the expense of the stage, so subtly did the music meld into and foster the emotional fluency of the scene. Emotional fluency? Well, I hope you know what I mean. I took notice of when the music seemed to be outside the scene, rather than a part of it.

The level of historical accuracy was remarkably high, and this surprised me the most. I had expected wanton artistic license, even to an absurd degree—was even braced for some over-the-top mythology. Instead, the libretto (a word I looked up a couple weeks ago) was pleasingly true to history. Details about Lee's decision to vacate the lines at Petersburg, the abandonment and destruction of Richmond, Lincoln walking the streets of the Confederate capital with a guard of sailors, Grant's pounding headache during the suspenseful exchange of correspondence with Lee—the headache that went away as soon as Lee agreed to meet. All of this was faithful.

The back-and-forth baritone exchange between Lee and Grant, prior to the meeting at Appomattox, was sung virtually verbatim. I didn't expect that, since the messages themselves are hardly poetic. Initially I found this awkward, but after a time it struck me as increasingly powerful that documentary history served as the script. It was more than a little odd, I suppose, to go to my first opera not as an opera buff, but as a student of the Civil War who, coincidentally, had also made my first visit to Appomattox Court House earlier this year.

There are certain exchanges of correspondence in the O.R. that I have read and re-read because of the combination of historic import and language employed, like the Hood–Sherman correspondence when Sherman demands Atlanta be evacuated. And there is the Grant–Lee correspondence during Lee's retreat to Appomattox. One cannot write fictional correspondence that contains more momentous weight. I posted part of that exchange as a blog entry in April 2006, here. In the opera, this exchange is sung in heavy-hearted baritones by Grant and Lee in their headquarters tents, occupying opposite ends of the stage, while staffers study maps and couriers race back and forth. It was a clean and imaginative way to portray that brilliantly dramatic discourse.

Artistic license was relegated mainly to the female roles, Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Grant, Mrs. Lincoln, but their parts added another dimension to the war's denouement, and, in fact, reflected historic attitudes and tensions. Last March, during the Civil War Forum's Appomattox conference, Ed Bearss devoted an evening talk to the tensions between Julia Grant and Mary Lincoln in the waning days of the war, when they met on the James River. I will say that I found the angry wailings of Mrs. Lee to be jarring and unsettling—seemingly out of bounds with her all-but-invisible presence in Civil War narratives dealing with the events of April 1865. It piqued my curiosity, though, enough to look into it and see what, if anything, might have inspired that portrayal.

As someone who has long had an interest in Native American participation in the war, and having read all I could on Ely Parker—Grant's 3/4 Iroquois (Seneca) military secretary—I wondered if Glass's opera would include one of the most famous of all anecdotal stories from the McLean parlor. Sure enough, there it was—and what dramatist could resist? After Parker transcribed the surrender terms, Lee remarked, according to Parker himself, "I am glad to see one real American here," to which Parker allegedly replied, as he shook Lee's hand, "We are all Americans." As far as I know, Parker is the only source for this too-perfect exchange (recounted here at the Appomattox NHP website), and I don't fault Glass or Christopher Hampton (author of the libretto)—it really is a good story, and I know of no one else in the room who may have discounted it. So good, I used it myself in the first magazine article I ever had published, a now-embarrassing piece on Ely Parker in the defunct Civil War magazine (incidentally, apparently all of the performance's literature misspells his name as "Eli").

One thing about the Ely Parker moment that I found odd is that there is no indication to audience members who haven't read a lot about the Civil War that Parker was part Indian, and decidedly so in appearance. So Lee's comment to him about a real or true American would hold little meaning to anyone who hadn't read that far. For the most part, the story line didn't rely on audience members to be particularly well versed in the subject.

Something that I had read about beforehand, and anticipated with some reservations, was the introduction of scenes jumping into the future to incorporate modern day civil rights struggles. I was afraid it might try to fit too many monumentally emotional dramas into one (McLean) parlor. And it was uncomfortable. Near the end, when a lone white man in a wheel chair—Edgar Ray Killen—came out to spew a white supremacist diatribe, I wondered if things might spiral out of control. But it held together, and in retrospect, the uncomfortable feeling of that scene effectively served to punctuate one of the legacies of the Civil War—the fact that emancipation and equality were two very different things—in a way that would have been hard to deliver with something safer, or trite. To many people, I'm sure, those are the parts that will make this Civil War story relevant.

I should not end this without a few comments on the sets, etc. As mentioned, the costumes and props were spectacular, and had I had some of those fancy opera binoculars, it would have been impressive to note that the amputated limbs looked even more real in magnification. The setwork (is that an opera term? Should be) was stark, but effective, though the burning of Richmond—a small line of flames on one end of the stage—looked more like someone was stoking coals for a tailgate party than it did the conflagration of cotton warehouses.

And those horses. Full-sized, bloody horses, ropes tied to their hind legs, hanging from the sky. I know they were meant to convey something about the carnage and horror of the Civil War, and there is something deeply disturbing about the slaughter of such huge beasts—beasts that were so emblematic of Civil War armies. But it just looked weird to me.

Go to this page and click on "Video Clips of Appomattox" for a taste. The more I remember this production, the more I'd like to see it again.

"I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood. . ."

Way back at the end of January I posted a short blog entry on the forthcoming Philip Glass opera Appomattox, scheduled to open in San Francisco this fall. Then, just like the siege of Petersburg, nine months passed, and finally Robert E. Lee came forward to face the music, only this time he's singing along.

My favorite Chickasaw Okie and long-time Sierra camping buddy, who's in his 17th season backstage at the SF Opera, gave me a tour Tuesday night, and an orchestra seat to the final dress rehearsal. The show opens Friday night. I'd never been to the opera before. But then, no one's ever written one with such studious reliance on The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. It's about time.

Interestingly, at the heart of Act II, a good bit of the actual Grant/Lee correspondence is sung verbatim (in advance of my visit to Appomattox earlier this year, I posted much of that historic exchange here). Between now (3:00 a.m. Pacific on Thursday a.m.) and Sunday night [better make that early next week], I'll post some impressions and observations about Appomattox, the opera. Two other blog entries during that same time frame will include slow gestating & long overdue follow-ups on Stonewall Jackson's sister, and an unexpected Appomattox tie-in from my recent Arkansas vacation, fit in around some Little League action, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and the 49ers. Busy weekend.

Thanks for checking in.

[below: props backstage. What size boot do you wear?]

Once upon a time he commanded a fearsome army against the armies of the United States

sending thousands of U. S. soldiers to their graves in a series of punishing battles. He led hostile forces within striking distance of Washington, and for a time, was the most feared enemy commander with whom the War Department, or the Commander-in-Chief, had ever contended.

Just under 100 years later, the United States named their newest nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine in his honor. I do wonder if there are any, or many, other instances in world history in which a nation so honored the leading commander of opposition forces in a civil war. Perhaps there's something comparable in the storied history of the United Kingdom—I'll rely upon a reader for any info along those lines.

Lord knows there have been lots of things named after Robert E. Lee, including a university, and innumerable high schools. But it is fascinating to see military assets and forts named for one-time adversaries. In contrast to the U. S. S. Robert E. Lee, some of the most prominent and vital United States army installations are named for some of the least successful and most inept enemy commanders—namely, generals Braxton Bragg and John Bell Hood, to say nothing of the Right Reverend Bishop Polk.

As the kids say, "what's up with that"?

Back to the Robert E. Lee, who wouldn't want a submarine named after that guy? She was the first U. S. naval vessel to bear the name, and was launched on December 18, 1959, not too long after the last Confederate veteran died (it used to be accepted that Walter Williams, who died on December 19, 1959, was the last living C.S.A. vet, but this has since been discredited. However, the precise "last" Confederate veteran is likely one of a handful of men who died in the 1950s. William Marvel wrote about this for Blue & Gray magazine at some point).

The Marble Man's nuclear sub was the first U. S. Navy ship, but not the first vessel to carry the name. Here's a photo of the Giraffe, erstwhile steamer out of Glasgow that in 1862 became the blockade runner Robert E. Lee. After more than 20 successful runs through the Federal Blockading Squadron, she was eventually captured and converted for use in the blockade by the U. S. Navy as the U.S.S. Fort Donelson. Read more about that here.

Here's a link to some history of the Robert E. Lee (SSBN 601; later SSN 601) from the laying of her keel in 1958 to when she was decommissioned in 1983.

This photo shows the Robert E. Lee near Mare Island Shipyard, off San Francisco Bay. She would have had little trouble taking out the monitor Camanche, also pictured off Mare Island in one of my early blog entries.

The last one (below, click on for larger view) shows the Robert E. Lee's wardroom. Note the bust of famous enemy general next to the phone. What really caught my attention was the aquarium. Viewing this photo was the first time in my life I had considered the idea of miniature aquatic habitats aboard submarines. There's just something odd about it, like a bird in a birdcage, on an airplane.


But what of actual Confederate naval heroes? Were they honored by their former foes in the U.S. Navy? Indeed. Just five months after the Robert E. Lee joined the Cold War navy, the U.S.S. Semmes, a destroyer named for the pre-eminent Confederate sea captain, Raphael Semmes of the C.S.S. Alabama, set sail (heavily damaged ten years later by a clumsy Greek freighter in Naples Harbor). What about James Iredell Waddell, skipper of the legendary C.S.S. Shenandoah? Sure thing. The U.S.S. Waddell, another destroyer—launched in 1963—received 11 engagement stars for service in waters off Vietnam.

I've nothing else to say on this subject. There was no particular point to this entry, beyond the satisfaction of musing about endlessly interesting threads in American history. All this web searching for destroyers brought to mind one named for someone in my own distant bloodline—it took a turn too early and followed some other destroyers into the rocks.

"a superior bastard. . ."

Following up on my two Jesse James entries (and not yet prepared to critique the two biographies mentioned earlier), here's a little note on the third book under discussion there: Ron Hansen's novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the film adaptation.

There was a pretty meaty article in the Washington Post recently that discusses the novel, and the movie, with much more detail than I was intended to do here—replete with author commentary. So let me just quote some of that, and point you to the rest of it, if you're interested. It's worth a read even if you have only a casual interest in Jesse James (registration required).

It's really a story about fame, mythology, and the cold-blooded truth. And Hollywood. I was really curious to know how Hansen's novel, which came out quite a long time ago and was not widely known, all of a sudden made it to the big screen. Well, of course, it happened just the way you imagine it happening with your novel:

A filmmaker walks into a used bookstore.

Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik was in Melbourne, hanging out with friend Rowland Howard, the Australian rock musician, when they strolled into a second-hand bookstore three years ago. Howard picked up a title, started reading it, then stopped. "He said, 'Wow, this would make a good movie,' and he handed me the book," recalls Dominik. It was Hansen's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Dominik purchased the book, left the bookstore, and started reading. "It knocked me out."

His latest film project had collapsed. He needed work. So he phoned his agent in California. "My agent said, 'Jesse James? Oh, I can sell that. Jesse James is like Batman.'

Hansen offers some fascinating insights from his own James research, the sources he used, how he tried to retain historic authenticity around characterization. How, all these years later, out of the blue, his phone rang. "Something about Brad Pitt."

Already the London TimesOnline has weighed in with a review of sorts: "It's 1881 and when Brad Pitt swaggers into view, dressed from head to toe in black, we know we are in the presence of a superior bastard. The star of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a member of the James Gang and one of America’s most ambivalent myths."

Good enough for me.

“The Centennial is worth celebratingbut there is a ghost at the feast.”

—Walker Percy on the Civil War centennial

As promised, a few more comments and quotes from Walker Percy. The two essays of his that I’ve recently re-read are interesting, to me, for the fact that they are written by a philosophical novelist—raised in the Deep South—on the eve of the Civil War centennial. A thoughtful commentator on life in the South, his observations about the region one hundred years after The War are of particular interest to those who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about such things.

I was about two years old when the centennial years began, so have no personal memory of that period, but I imagine it must have been a strange time. There was a veritable explosion of Civil War books published around then, and the pace has hardly subsided since. Concurrently, the Civil Rights movement and racial discord were picking up steam, dating back to Brown vs. the Board of Education Topeka in 1954, and peaking with violent clashes and assassinations throughout the 1960s. The stark disconnect between the centennial celebration of noble combat and North/South (Caucasian) reconciliation on the one hand, and the decidedly unreconciled advent of groups like the Black Panthers on the other, tells a tale about how different parts of segregated America viewed the evolution of society in the decades since the surrender at Appomattox.

Percy’s essay “Red, White, and Blue-Gray” was first published in Commonweal in 1961, one year before his first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for fiction. The essay was published some six years after Emmit Till was murdered, and Rosa Parks was arrested. It was published two years before Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, the March on Washington, and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the city where Percy was born.

It always feels remarkable to me how recently in our history the Civil War was fought. People I’ve known who had little interest in history are surprised to learn that there are people alive today who had a grandparent that fought in the Civil War, or a grandparent born into slavery. It must have seemed all the closer in 1961, which was not too many years after the last veterans of the war reportedly died.

Percy noted that:

“there is a paradox about current Civil War Centennial literature. It commemorates mainly the fighting, the actual frontline killing—which was among the bloodiest and bitterest in modern history. Yet it is all good-natured. Illinois historians say nice things about Forrest; Mississippians, if not Georgians, speak well of Sherman. In the popular media the War is so friendly that the fighting is made to appear as a kind of sacrament of fire by which one side expresses its affection for the other.”

Percy dispensed with the oft-heard notion that history is written by the victors. Serious students of the Civil War learn very quickly that in the written history of the Civil War period, the vanquished held their own quite nicely. Percy wrote:

The South has certain tactical advantages in the present “war” (like the North’s industry and population in the first) and has accordingly won a species of literary revenge. The two great figures of the Civil War were Lincoln and Lee, and since most of the literature is about the fighting, Lee is bound to get the better of it. And what with the American preference for good guys and underdogs, and especially underdog good guys, and Lee’s very great personal qualities and the undistinguished character of his opponents, and finally the Army of Northern Virginia which was always outnumbered and nearly always won—it looks as if the next hundred years will see the South not only running the Senate but taking over the national myth along with it.

He goes on to mention the “unease” liberals felt about the centennial literature, on the basis that commemoration of the war as a problem solved would diminish the current and ongoing struggle for civil rights. Percy also bemoans the fact that certain phrases and concepts were co-opted by white supremacists, though he does not use that phrasing. The concept of “states’ rights" once held a certain political legitimacy, but in 1961, Percy writes, “when a politician mentions states’ rights, it’s a better than even bet that in the next sentence it will become clear what kind of states’ rights he is talking about. It usually comes down to the right to keep the Negro in his place.”

Likewise with the phrase, “A Southern Way of Life,” which Percy imbues with all manner of pleasant and respectable connotations. “But I don’t like to hear the phrase now,” he says, “it usually means segregation and very little else. In New Orleans, which has a delightful way of life, the ‘Southern Way of Life’ usually means ‘Let’s Keep McDonough No. 6 Segregated.’”

Some more passages from “Red, White, and Blue-Gray”:

Still and all, there is no need to worry about the Reconciliation. It was very largely an Anglo-Saxon war, and Anglo-Saxon has been reconciled to Anglo-Saxon. But to whom is the Negro reconciled?

The North did win and did put the South in Arrow collars. The sections are homogenized. Everybody watches the same television programs. In another hundred years, everybody will talk like Art Linkletter. The South as gotten rich and the North has gotten Negroes, and the Negro is treated badly in both places. The Northerners won and freed the slaves and now are fleeing to the suburbs to get away from them… .The South, on the other hand, has always managed to comfort itself by pointing to the hypocrisy of the North—not realizing that it is a sorry game in which the highest score is a tie: “Look, they’re as bad as we are!

I think it's safe to say that things continue to change for the better with respect to the reconciliation Percy was talking about 40-some years ago, though that is a matter of perspective, of course. Jim Crow is dead, or if not dead, driven deep into the sticks. Racism is alive and well, but no longer so overtly institutionalized. The next president of the United States may very well be a black man. Maybe the "ghost at the feast" will soon be sitting at the head table.

Walking away from a mountain. . .

"The truth of it is, I think, that the whole country, South included, is just beginning to see the Civil War whole and entire for the first time. The thing was too big and too bloody, too full of suffering and hatred, too closely knit into the fabric of our meaning as a people, to be held off and looked at—until now. It is like a man walking away from a mountain. The bigger it is, the farther he's got to go before he can see it. Then one day he looks back and there it is, this colossal thing lying across his past."

—from "The American War," Commonweal 65 (March 29, 1957): 655-57; republished in Signposts in a Strange Land, by Walker Percy, edited by Patrick Samway (New York, 1991).

Percy, an increasingly obscure southern novelist and friend of Shelby Foote, wrote this essay in anticipation of the Civil War centennial. He makes a number of interesting observations in this essay, and another—"Red, White, and Blue-Gray"—that are deeply compelling and insightful, and, I think, surprising or unexpected to people whose roots and experience lie outside the mysterious South.

The other day my friend Steve, historian emeritus of Loudoun County, reminded me of the quote above, which I was once in the habit of including in Civil War Round Table newsletters, the Civil War Forum's start page, and the like. I was prompted to go back and read the two Civil War-related essays in the Signposts collection, after a long time since last looking them over. An often fascinating thing about rereading something after many years is that you are not the same person who read it the first time around. I'll try to explain the "surprising" or "unexpected" part in my next entry, and include some more passages from those essays.

Who needs a boat, if skillets float?

I only drop in occasionally on the U.S.S. Monitor Center Blog, to see what’s new, and it’s usually rewarding. The August 8th entry shows Jeanne, “curator of scientific instruments and dairy products,” making breakfast topside. For the full flavor of the event, check out this 3-1/2 minute Eggsperiment at Youtube, on the deck of the hottest replica in town.

At one point in mid-June, 1862, sailors recorded temperatures as high as 165 degrees in the galley of the Monitor (and not much cooler where the sailors slept). There's no telling how hot the surface of the ironclad could get under the summer sun, but on August 8, 2007, the deck of the replica reached 165. By my calculations, that comes out to "hot as hell."

As an aside, on the video they note that on June 23 1862, according to the ship’s log, what wood there was in the galley of the iron vessel caught fire, forcing the men to cook up on the deck. The photo, top left, is dated July 9, 1862, and a cookstove is clearly discernible in the left of the image.

One more post on my new Jesse James fixation

—a long-dormant interest brought to the fore again by a recent road trip through Missouri. The fact that there is some fairly recent scholarship on the James Gang gave me a hankering to upgrade the subject to the top of the bedside book stack.

It was easy work to determine which modern biographies are being taken seriously by dedicated outlaw and guerilla aficionados: Ted P. Yeatman's, Frank and Jesse James, the Story Behind the Legend (2000), and T. J. Stiles's, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002).

By way of a clarification, let me say that this blog entry is not intended as a review of the two books in question. I haven't read either one. I'm just shopping. I purchased the Yeatman book in Liberty, and have ordered the other. My sense, based on reviews, is that both are different enough, and substantial enough, to warrant reading. I'll try to get through both of them and report back, or at the very least, report why I might have finished one and come up short on the other. However it shakes out, I feel confident that the combination of the two will serve to make me obnoxiously fluent in Jesse James trivia.

I'll begin with Yeatman's, because it's already on my kitchen table. I like the look and feel of this book, sporting as it does the fat back matter of a deeply-researched study. As I looked for information on both titles, it became immediately apparent that Stiles' book quickly eclipsed whatever fanfare Yeatman's book might have enjoyed. At first blush, I would attribute that to the fact that Yeatman's work was released by a small publisher, while Stiles' biography was published and marketed by Knopf, a major house. But maybe there's more to the picture. The website Stiles has devoted to Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War is impressively loaded with interesting content. There are numerous reviews of Last Rebel available online, and many of them—including critiques by such notable Civil War historians as Michael Fellman, Albert Castel, and Eric Foner, are found at the Stiles site. Interestingly, one of the minor problems Castel identifies is "an over-reliance on the not-always-reliable Eric Foner's propagandistic Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America's Unfinished Revolution." Ouch.

As an aside, Drew Wagenhoffer, in his Civil War Books and Authors blog, has mentioned the Civil War St. Louis website, which is chock full of intriguing links. They have done a nice job with Jesse James material.

Laura [James-in-law] James, over at the endlessly engaging CLEWS: the Historic True Crime Blog, offers a nice, meaty blog entry on the dueling James biographies, including mention of a Yeatman/Stiles "shootout" on the History News Network. Laura establishes her James bona fides by correcting a number of details from Stiles' book. She calls it nitpicking, but every detail, and every error, counts (and for you Civil War types, the more obscure the correction, the better).

I'm a big, big fan of Booknotes transcripts from the old C-SPAN show (did that show go away in 2004?). Mr. Yeatman managed an appearance there, which is no small thing. You can read that here. Unfortunately, he doesn't really answer the question, "Now how does your book fit into all the books that have been written? What's so special about this that you couldn't get in any other book?"

Finally, my commentary on Ron Hansen's novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, will have to wait for another entry. It's just as well, as it deserves to be discussed apart from nonfiction bios.

Late on the afternoon of July 11, after two weeks revisiting some familiar and familial locales in Northern Arkansas and Southern Missiouri . . .

I was transporting my brood northward in a rented Pontiac Torrent en route to Kansas City, there to catch a flight to San Jose. We had a little time to spare, and I had already done what every red-blooded reader of this blog would have done – scanned the map for little red boxes – historical sites – within striking distance of the airport. The closest and most interesting to me was in Liberty, Missouri – the Jesse James Bank Museum. Regrettably, the James farm was a few too many miles out of reach.

It’s an odd aspect of American society that we often tend to romanticize outlaws and cold-blooded murderers. Almost as far back as I can remember, the James Gang held a particular fascination for my friends and me. We all gladly bought into the sympathetic (and wholly inaccurate) image of an American Robin Hood. Same with Bonnie & Clyde. These are not people you want your kids to emulate, but robbing banks and going out in a blaze of glory will cause the son of a C.P.A. to sit up and take notice. Certainly Hollywood plays a key role in perpetuating the sympathy – Warren Beattie’s wide, easy smile said it all. And even as an adult, fully cognizant of the murderous ways of Jesse James and the Younger brothers, a beautiful movie like "The Long Riders," with its Carradines, Keachs and Quaids, full-length dusters, slow motion ricochets, and haunting Ry Cooder soundtrack, makes one wistful about a life that ends in (famous) tragedy.

But I digress. The Bank Museum in Liberty had a nice little gift shop, and you know that if you cannot come away with some kind of reading material, you may as well not even have stopped. I picked up Ted P. Yeatman’s, Frank and Jesse James, the Story Behind the Legend, which pleases the hand with its heft and 1-1/2 inch spine bulk. I’ve since seen some complimentary reviews, and am encouraged by the nearly 100 pages of lengthy, narrative endnotes.

The Yeatman book came out in 2000 (Cumberland House, Nashville). Here is a modern, and by some accounts, definitive biography of the James Brothers, released over a century after Jesse’s death. And two years later comes another “definitive” account, T. J. Stiles,’ Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War [for those of you keeping score at home, there is your first official Civil War reference in this blog entry]. By the looks of things, despite being beat to the punch, Stiles’ book got the most attention, including a review by James McPherson in the New York Review of Books.

It’s too late to continue tonight, even on the Left Coast. So we’ll pick up tomorrow night (Thursday) with Jesse James, Part Two: more mention of the dueling biographies, high praise for a cool blog I just discovered, and commentary on perhaps the best Jesse James book of all, a piece of fiction I was surprised to learn is already a “major motion picture,” replete with pretty boy superstar in the lead role.

[photo at top: Jesse James, 1864. Library of Congress]

Ghost Writers Keep it all in the Family

I don't mean ghost writer in the sense of someone hired to write a celebrity's memoirs. I mean the supernatural kind of ghost, the kind that have trouble holding a pen, or using a keyboard, and who resort to channeling, or making their presence felt in other disconcerting ways.

A comment by Jim Schmidt to my recent blog entry on Jeff Shaara got me thinking more about so-called "FamFic," or Family Fiction, when a famous author's relative endeavors to pick up the slack following the death of the writer. Bookstores today feature many examples of this, from Christopher Tolkein's work in finishing The Silmarillion, to the multiple, pre-Dune novels written by Frank Herbert's son after his death.

Chris Suellentrop at Slate.com wrote an interesting summary of the phenomenon back in 2003, an essay that's still accessible here. In it, he quotes Frank Herbert's son Brian commenting on his mother "intervening from another world." But the Herberts were writing science fiction—in that genre, at least, otherworldly intervention can be accounted for as something outside the bounds of our limited, terrestrial understanding of the universe.

In the same article, Suellentrop gathers some Jeff Shaara quotes as well, and one hopes—if the quotes are accurate—that they're not to be taken as literally as they sound. On the other hand, if they're merely calculated for effect as part of a book tour, it's hard to say which is worse, the marketing ploy, or the sentimental superstition. Suellentrop wrote:

Jeff Shaara takes the [ghostly] conceit to new heights—or at least he did during the promotion of Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, the Killer Angels sequel he authored. Shaara frequently asserted that Michael Shaara was writing through him—that the son was merely a conduit for the completion of his father's literary effort. A sampling of quotes: "While writing Gods and Generals, I have often felt my father's presence, as though he were there helping me write and giving me his blessing"; "When my sister Lila read it, she said, 'This is being written by the ghost of Michael Shaara.' "; "Very often I would feel as though my father was in the room." He also attributed the "ghost of Michael Shaara" phrase to Ronald F. Maxwell, the director of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, saying that Maxwell told him of his manuscript, "I am awe-struck. The ghost of Michael Shaara."

Now, Jeff Shaara may genuinely believe that his father was writing through him, and for all we know, it could even be true. But as a practical matter, how far does the right of a descendant to continue his ancestor's literary work extend?

I'm not sure what to make of this other than that, apparently, ghosts make lousy collaborators. Once more, the whole article ("Dead Man Writing: How to keep writing your late father's books") can be found here.

"a wicked scramble that could have passed for a goal line stand or the attack on Little Round Top."

So said reporters at SFGate.com tonight, the online venue for the San Francisco Chronicle, describing people in the centerfield bleachers at AT&T Park scrambling for Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball. I'm pretty sure it's the first time I've seen a Little Round Top reference in local Giants coverage.

But is it the right analogy?

One man related that "he watched in horror as a woman got knocked over and her husband disappear[ed] into the scrum, leaving their four-year-old son to cower with his teddy bear. . . .he never found out who they were but. . .it did not appear to be the pinnacle of responsible parenting. . . . [editorial note: I have to believe the boy with the bear would one day have come to appreciate it if the old man had resurfaced with that million dollar ball].

The rest of section 144 was aghast at the spectacle of the ball scuffle. 'Fists were flying, elbows were flying, people were digging, swinging, pulling on stuff, nobody cared about anything,' said Chris Goelkel. 'It was madness.' Alan Azem of San Mateo, 'It got to the point where people pushed other people just to get on him.' 'They were pushing grandmothers to the floor,' said Susan Kitchens of Campbell."

Sounds more like a scene from the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania.

Not your father's Civil War. . .

A columnist I enjoy reading in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Carroll, had a piece published on July 31st talking about culling his burgeoning library, but instead of discussing the books that were being jettisoned, he gave a little synopsis of some of those books that survived the cut. I was pleased to see a Civil War-related title among the survivors. He wrote:

"The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara. This is just a stunning book, a historical novel that reads like a work of history. It's about the battle of Gettysburg, not exactly unmined territory, but the deft and compassionate prose makes this a must-read anyway.


Michael Shaara's son, Jeff Shaara, tried to duplicate his father's techniques in a string of historical books. Alas, like father not like son. Stick with the original; accept no substitutes.

Sure, anyone can talk up a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and remain on safe ground, but it’s the warning at the end that will save you some grief, and possibly money. Carroll’s summary is spot on. Ironically (sadly?), Jeff Shaara’s sequels and prequels, not to mention the movie rights, made a lot more money than Killer Angels, without ever replicating the gripping narrative or approximating the literary merit of the old man’s work. I was interested to learn that Killer Angels enjoyed no commercial success during the author’s lifetime, and that he was shocked when it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975.

There is a very interesting biography of Michael Shaara, penned by his son, here. Did you know he had more than 70 short stories published in the 1950s, and that two of them were produced as television dramas? Me either.

As a disclaimer, I should mention that I’ve never read a single one of Jeff Shaara’s books from start to finish. I have sat in the bookstore and read passages, and I read lots of reviews. And I queried people I knew had read them. I do not begrudge him his success. If anyone should be able to cash in on the name of an author and his work, it should be that author’s offspring. I give Jeff Shaara credit for actually writing the books, and fully acknowledge that people read his novels and enjoy them.

Am I qualifed to criticize? Well, I just recently put up posts on the baseball Giants, and the 49ers, and drew Civil War connections in both cases. That's no mean feat.

Bill Walsh, 1931-2007 : "The Genius"

“Here’s my game plan.” This is what Bill Walsh reportedly told a friend of his upon giving him a copy of Carl von Clausewitz’s, On War. According to Daniel Brown of the San Jose Mercury News, Bill Walsh read anything that might help him win more football games. Brown continued, “Walsh read extensively about the Civil War. Though the details of the carnage depressed him, he found the military strategy fascinating. 'The goal is to attack the other side with clean, sharp blows while you're moving faster than the opposition. That was Wellington. That was von Clausewitz,' he once said. 'I don't relate football to warfare other than in those dynamics, but the military axioms of von Clausewitz about people under stress, about the individual soldier, make it the best book on football.'"

I had heard and read that Walsh was a Civil War buff, and that he incorporated anecdotes about generals from various wars in his talks (big on Patton, for example). I wrote letters to try to get him to attend a local Civil War Round Table, to no avail. I had to satisfy myself with watching his teams rack up victory after victory every Sunday. And man oh man, it was satisfying, and remains satisfying in memory.

The passing of Bill Walsh on Monday morning was an emotional blow for 49ers fans, the Stanford community, and serious fans of the NFL everywhere, to say nothing of his family, associates, and friends in the wider spectrum of his rich life. Thanks for all the memories, Mr. Walsh. I will take pleasure in them for the rest of my days.

For anyone interested, there are dozens of fascinating articles in today's (July 31) SF Chronicle and SJ Mercury News by the beat writers who covered the 49ers, and who knew and followed Walsh closely throughout his remarkable career. There are some great stories and lots of personal insights into this intriguing man.

People from all over the country left condolences on the Chronicle’s web site the last couple days. I like this one, from Philip Poulos of Dallas, and I know my misguided Cowboys friends will appreciate it too:

Now you can out-coach Landry once again. Rest in Peace.

North versus South

I went to the ballgame on Friday the 13th. The Dodgers were in town to, unfortunately, sweep the Giants again (the woman in this photo was sitting a couple rows ahead of me). The Giants-Dodgers games are among the few all season where, without fail, fights break out in the stands. I’m always impressed by the courage, or poor judgement, of certain Dodgers fans who wear their full regalia in the Giants ballpark, then stand up and taunt the crowd. It invites a lot of abuse, and the police presence at L. A. games is much higher in order to respond to the inevitable fisticuffs. But it's better now than it used to be.

There’s a North/South tension in California that dates, to some degree, back to the Civil War or earlier (even if Southern Californians are unaware of it). San Francisco’s Union Square, reportedly the scene of pro-Union speeches, took its name during that period, but there were no such squares way down in the City of Angels. Edwin Vose Sumner, sent west to relieve Albert Sydney Johnston, was on the job following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and he knew where to find the trouble-makers. Forget the Indians – all of a sudden there were other hostiles to worry about! To wit:

HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE PACIFIC,
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., April 30,
1861.


Lieut.-Col. E.D. TOWNSEND, Assistant Adjutant-General, Headquarters Army:


SIR: I have the honor to report that I have found it necessary to withdraw the troops from Fort Mojave and place them at Los Angeles. There is more danger of disaffection at this place than any other in the State. There are a number of influential men there who are decided Secessionists, and if we should have any difficulty it will commence there. Fort Mojave is represented as an entirely useless post. There are no hostile Indians near it, and there is no traveling whatever on the road it is intended to protect.


Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
E.V. SUMNER,
Brigadier-General, U.S. Army, Commanding.

Sumner, who would receive wounds in the Seven Days Campaign, and at Antietam, and die of a heart attack at about the half-way point of the war, never gets credit for saving Los Angeles for the Union, though it's possible that eventually he will be blamed for it. . . For more on California and the lead-up to the war, head on over to Drew Wagenhoffer's excellent blog, Civil War Books & Authors, where the latest entry -- I just noticed -- is a very useful review of The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, by Leonard L. Richards. Drew writes that, "Although clearly futile, effort was also made by pro-Southern politicians (with the support of influential Mexican landowners in Southern California) to divide the state in half." I've seen this book around, and am definitely going to pick up a copy.

Stay tuned: in the coming days, more on my recent sojourn in Arkansas, where you can buy accessories like these for your car.