Counting the Cost

October was the deadliest month for United States forces in Afghanistan since the conflict began in 2001. Over 50% of Americans support a general withdrawal. Amidst financial panic at home, Americans are, more than ever, questioning the war’s long-term goals. This week, President Obama is expected to heed General McChrystal’s (distressingly public) request and send at least 30,000 additional American troops into the war zone.

Perhaps it is fitting that CNN.com ran a piece today on Michael White, a suburban Atlantan who created the now infamous icasualties.org website. White has kept count of all American, coalition, and civilian deaths since the Iraq War began in 2003 (he later began counting the Afghan War dead as well). The piece asserts that “[casualty statistics] are critical to shaping the legacy of wars.” This led me to question the precise correlation between death tolls (raw data, numbers) and civilian perceptions of war.

One of the most palpable factoids surrounding the American Civil War is that it “accounted for more American deaths [620,000+] than all U.S. wars from the Revolution through Vietnam.” Every school child has been exposed to this declaration in some form, and it continues to shape popular opinions of the war. Similarly, many Americans are aware of that iniquitous number – 416,000 – that represents American deaths between 1941 and 1945. Yet the American wars that cost the most (the Civil War and WWII) are viewed as the most worthy. They did eradicate slavery and fascism, or so the story goes. But is there a political element to rationalizing casualties by emphasizing that they solve social issues? Is this essential to a pro-war ideology? What is the common denominator here?

First off, we must bring to light the conspicuous: numbers never tell the entire story. Although a recent thread on h-civwar.org doubted the usefulness of lumping Union and Confederate casualties together (an argument I find abhorrent), the customary figure of Civil War deaths is roughly 620,000 (even if many historians have compellingly argued that it is much higher). That numeral, 620,000, represented 600 deaths per day and 2% of the total American population. Likewise, approximately 416,000 Americans were killed in World War Two at a rate of just over 400 per day. But that number accounted for less than 2% of all casualties between 1939 and 1945 and just .32% of the U.S. population. In the midst of a global, industrial, and, in many places, total conflict, it was but a blip on the human toll radar. American economic might, of course, was far more decisive than American bodies. The point remains, however, that casualties are always relative. Moreover, Americans in the past have tolerated extreme and punctuated killing so long as public opinion holds firm and the ensuing carnage achieves its “political aims,” fabricated or manipulated though they may be.

So, societies, even democracies, tolerate losses in wars that they, for whatever reason, deem worthy. But what of the wars that are viewed as the least worthy? Like Iraq, Afghanistan has been compared to the Vietnam conflict ad nauseum. While I understand that Vietnam is still within the realm of the “remembered past” for many Americans (and thus explains much of its “felt legacy”), its statistical cost was comparatively low. In terms of deaths per day (one way to measure concentrated killing) World War One was fully 10 times deadlier than Vietnam. Korea, another “forgotten war,” was almost twice as deadly. Yet World War One (which has been popularly perceived as “someone else’s victory,” unlike WW II) and Korea (fought to attain a political goal that is no loner deemed urgent) are remembered most today for having been forgotten in American culture, despite their apparent bloodiness and moderate political successes. This then begs the question, “Is there any correlation between casualty lists and popular perceptions and felt history?” Vietnam was “low cost” in terms of American combat losses, or so the data assures me, but it still resonates within American society in tragic, tangible ways. Part of the explanation, I suppose, is not simply its failure to accomplish political ends or the fact that there was no way to sell it as a “victory,” but also the fear that we haven’t fully learned from it.

Clearly, the legacy of Vietnam was shaped less by raw data than by its strategic-political deficiencies and the exhaustion it enacted on American society. While I’m not going to fully engage the current historical debate as to whether Vietnam was ever “winnable,” I do agree that “victory” was unlikely by the time General Abrams replaced General Westmoreland in 1968, despite Abrams’ ostensibly capable counterinsurgency strategy. American public opinion – the most important component – had already turned. Similarly, despite the potential efficacy of McChrystal’s strategy, I suspect that the forthcoming surge will prove but a temporary bailout and that the legacy of Afghanistan – a war without popular support or clear political aims – has already been wrought.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/30/keeper.of.death/index.html

"True Sons" Embody Reconciliatory Spirit at Franklin

Interesting piece from Franklin, Tennessee.

It strikes me as interesting that the story emphasizes the fraternization and "comradeship" that soldiers blue and gray engaged in during the campaign. While I'm certain veteran soldiers felt a multiplicity of emotions by the fall of 1864, its unlikely that a deep sense of comradeship toward the enemy was foremost among them. On a side note, I've spoken with two "real sons" and one "real daughter." Only one of the three, Eileen Shouse, didn't appear to promote a thoroughly reconciliatory version of the war. Shouse, whose father joined the 11th Illinois Infantry in 1861 when he was 16, explained to me that she saw the war as "irrepressible" and America's cultural reverence for Confederate "heroes" as "disappointing." She preferred to embrace the Union memory of the war, reunification and emancipation.

And just to provide a bit of context for this story, Harold Becker's father, Charles, fought at the battle of Franklin in 1864. William A. Stanley, my great-great-great-great grandfather, was also there.

http://www.whitelakebeacon.com/news.php?story_id=20293

Abraham Lincoln: “Great Emancipator,” “Savior of the Union,” “Intellectual”?

Drawing on a 138 year legacy of biographies, monuments, shrines, icons, and ritual observances, Merrill Peterson’s 1994 book Abraham Lincoln in American Memory identifies five different historical representations of the sixteenth president: “Savior of the Union,” “Great Emancipator,” “Man of the People,” “The First American,” and “The Self-Made Man.”

Similarly, by analyzing Gallup Poll responses from 1945 and 2001, sociologists Barry Swartz and Howard Schuman have refined Peterson’s study by examining how those popular representations of Lincoln have changed over time. Their conclusion? Due to the Civil Rights Movement and the New Social History and wave of multipluralism that followed, the “Great Emancipator” image (although represented most conspicuously in monument form by the racist, paternalistic “Emancipation Memorial” pictured above) has unreservedly usurped the “Savior of the Union” and “Man of the People” images which gained currency during the era of reconciliation and the Great Depression, accordingly.

Yet more recent works of scholarship have portrayed Lincoln as an ambitious and capable intellectual, scribe, and pragmatist. The writings of James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, Richard Carwardine, and Douglas Wilson convey, respectively, a man who possessed a deep understanding and command of military strategy, Enlightenment and democratic philosophy, political practicality, and the English language.

Will this “intellectual” Lincoln be the next to find its way into the realm of popular memory? If social imperatives and academic cues (facts of representation) are indicators of the progression of popular understandings of the past (facts of reception), then the answer may be yes. The military bungling, political rigidity, and perceived anti-intellectual bent of the Bush Administration appear to have prompted scholars and non-academics alike to address the utility of language skills and intellectual expression among their political leaders (I think we all know to whom I am referring). Although monuments to “Lincoln the Intellectual” – with Lincoln reading over the writings of Locke, or even the Bible – have not been erected just yet, the imperatives of our recent past (or our modern political leaders) may render them socially necessary.

Chairman Abe?

In a nod to his opposition to the Mexican War, the border city of Juarez, Mexico, erected a towering bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln in one of its public squares. So did Tijuana. Children attending Havana Cuba’s Abraham Lincoln School pass his statue every day. London’s Parliament Square has two monuments to foreign leaders: Nelson Mandela and Lincoln. There are at least four other Lincoln statues in the U.K. alone. Is China next?

Unified Germans compared him to Bismarck. Bolsheviks compared him to Lenin. Efforts to expropriate this historically malleable “secular saint” are nothing new, and there are many ways to construe themes such as nationalism and the relationship between local sovereignty and the dominion of the state. But now the Chinese Foreign Ministry is likening Lincoln to none other than Chairman Mao.

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/those_silver-tongued_foreign_m.php

Men At Work

Writing after the battle of Gettysburg, a Union soldier struggled to relate the curious, unexpected feeling that came over him in the throes of battle. He seemed “full of life” in combat, he claimed, and felt as “vigorous” a feeling as man was capable of experiencing. He, like many soldiers, could not quite articulate this unlikely attraction to the pandemonium and intensity of combat or why, after experiencing the ostensible horrors of battle, he remained in service and even grew to miss it in his old age.

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, a common soldier explains to the disguised Henry that, though his cause may be wrong, his ultimate loyalty is to that of his king and task – being a soldier. Perhaps this is what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. meant by “the soldier’s faith.” Skill and dedication to one’s work are enough to justify the cause and the losses. For a useful soldier they must be. Yet there is a sense of exhilaration in combat some soldiers insist, despite its brutality, and a spiritual quality and even a strange beauty in the death and destruction reaped by war that doesn’t jive with Tennyson’s passive portrayal of soldiers “doing and dying” rather than “reasoning why.”

In his influential work For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, James M. McPherson cites religion, nationalism, ideology, and community pressure as sources of soldier motivation in chapter length detail. Rarely does he discuss this seductive, non-ideological nature of combat and nowhere does he address technical proficiency or simply “being in the zone” as sources of “sustaining motivation.” Granted McPherson looks primarily at volunteer soldiers, but some historians, it appears, have lost sight of the fact that some common soldiers do what they do, enjoy what they do, and often become captivated by what they do simply because they are good at it.

The recent film The Hurt Locker tells the story of an EOD unit on the front lines in Iraq in 2003. Staff Sgt. William James, portrayed in Oscar-caliber fashion by Jeremy Renner, is a skilled solider, and he knows it. He fights because he feels there is no one else as good at what he does as he is, and he may be right. James defuses an explosive device with the grace and knack of a composer conducting an orchestra. He is surgical. He is an artist. He lives to understand bombs. Yet craftsmanship is often not synonymous with orthodoxy. In one particularly riveting scene (there are many) James acts against protocol and removes his bomb-proof suite in order “If I’m gunna die,” he declares, “I’m gunna die comfortable.” Neither renegade nor conformist, hero nor anti-hero, James represents the skill and steadfastness of the professional soldier. He lacks the ideology that the soldiers in McPherson's display so demonstratively.

As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of the film:

"The Hurt Locker" is completely apolitical. It has no opinion on the war in
Iraq, except that there is one, and brave men like James and Sanborn are
necessary, and rookies like Eldridge of course are sometimes terrified. In that
sense, "The Hurt Locker" is arguably the most pro-Army feature to emerge from
the war. Pro-Army, not pro-war.”

“War is a drug,” the film's opening quotation insists (penned by New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges) and, without his drug, James becomes discontent upon "rotating back to the world." Cleaning house gutters and grocery shopping pale in comparison to the exhilaration he feels toward his craft. It is at this point where the film speaks to elements of a topic Civil War historian Eric T. Dean has dealt with quite well: post-traumatic stress disorder. In the case of Sgt. James, some form of the disorder manifests in his inability to readjust back to civilian life and, for the lack of a better term, combat addiction. Yet the drug-like quality of battle – an emotional high all but unachievable in civilian life – does not seduce him any more than he is the master of it. He both acts and is acted upon.

The film’s title is also a colloquial expression for a place of pain. Every time James dismantles a bomb, he keeps a small element of it as a souvenir to remind him of the acumen of his opponents and how close he came to death. He stores these shells, fuses, and wires – things that almost or should have killed him – in a container beneath his bed and revisits them with regularity. This is his hurt locker. This is his war. This is his place of pain. Like all soldiers, James must balance being in a constant state of being aware of danger and simultaneously working to surmount it. He just happens to do it better than some. And therein lies the film’s essence: no ideological speeches, no subtle political commentary, no jingoistic diatribes or waxing poetic on the causes and consequences of the war. These are men at work.

Real Blood, Tomato Catsup: Thoughts on the Civil War Sesquicentennial

Tension makes for great history. While attending a roundtable discussion at last week’s Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, I witnessed an exchange between public and academic historians that led me to consider yet again the historian’s task – why we do what we do, and should we be doing it differently? The backdrop for the debate was a discussion on the upcoming Civil War sesquicentennial. When asked what state sesquicentennial commissions could do in 2011 to improve on their performances in 1961 during the centennial celebrations, historian Robert J. Cook said simply, “Well, you couldn’t possibly do any worse.” Tension makes for great history, but at what point should tension give way to consensus, and who should decide, and when? Is it the goal of the professional historian to merely write "history" for a particular (and regrettably small) audience or should we also actively shape public consciousness and privilege certain “memories” of the past, particularly if such memories are tantamount to myth?

I’ve always felt that the great recompense of being a historian of the nineteenth century United States, and of the Civil War in particular, is the strong connection between what we do and the interests of the general public. The discrepency between the academic and the general public is narrower for me than it is for most of my colleagues. Of course, many see this as an unfortunate impediment. Who, after all, would want the general perception of their work to be so often shaped by an array of public groups and individuals, ranging from the uninformed to the self-serving to the overtly political? Unfortunately, many historians I know appear content in their parochialism and detachment from the general public. They shy away from public forums and distance themselves from public history and all “common” imperatives in both explicit and subtle, calculated ways. This is where the “ivory tower” image is spawned and perpetuated.

I, however, view this intimacy between the academic’s task, the public appetite, and current political relevance (perverted though the relationship may often be) as an opportunity. It contemporizes and legitimizes the work of the Civil War historian because the language, ideas, symbols, and legacies of the war still pulsate. In other words, my work matters because people, not just academics, still insist that it matters.

Yet, like all other professional historians, I am forced to address the considerable gap between what is understood to be historically obvious within the academy and the public perception of history – its heritage. I have been fortunate enough to work for three fairly dissimilar public history institutions. Two of them (Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site and Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania National Military Park) privileged interpretations of the Civil War that I felt shortchanged some of its, causes, outcomes, and “uncomfortable” aspects in favor of a narrative containing focusing on the pluck and gallantry of soldiers and generals in which both sides were equally noble in a war somewhat detached from meaning.

In fairness to the National Park Service, however, they are attempting to employ a more inclusive, less Whiggish (and less white) interpretation of the Civil War. Their theme for the Sesquicentennial is “From Civil War to Civil Rights,” which focuses on black struggles for freedom on a historical continuum. Let the backlash begin. The Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy have already formally protested. Several northern states have opted not to set up sesquicentennial commissions and I expect a continued cascade of reaction against what looks to be the NPS’s inevitable retreat from its former position of focusing of the equivalent honor and sacrifice of North and South and downplaying of the war’s causes, namely slavery.

This interpretive about-face speaks to the historical, moral, and political problems (the three are nearly always indissoluble) I have experienced while working in public history. I have heard it all: “Stonewall Jackson was the greatest American who ever lived,” “just as many black soldiers fought for the South than the North,” “the South will rise again,” and, most repugnantly, “the war had nothing to do with slavery.” And these views don’t exist along a North-South binary or a perforated line; folks from New Jersey are nearly as likely to believe them as those from Alabama. I also witnessed both northern and southern-leaning park visitors address how to “celebrate” the cause or exploits of a particular group who you feel was in the moral wrong. I often question the efficacy of “celebrating” any past at all, aside from remembering through education and personal interaction. Furthermore, I question whether scholars have the authority to critique not just history, but also memory and the ways groups and individuals within our society commemorate and manipulate the past. How should I react when individuals make emotional, authentic attachments to the past, even if – as in the case of a Confederate flag bumper sticker on a truck with Michigan license plates – it is a past they have no rightful claim to? Should we, as historians, attempt to convince people that their identity, their very sense of self, is a sham? Is it even a sham if they believe it to be true? There is a cultural pipeline running from the Civil War era to our own, and these are but a few of its complex moral and political problems.

One resolution, it appears, includes comprehensiveness and inclusiveness. Yet inclusivity is not always synonymous with truth. It simply isn't historically honest to give Mississippi Unionists the same interpretive weight as Tennessee Unionists, for example. Inclusion is shaped by exclusion when one is working within a confined interpretive space. Should some of the more brutal yet previously unaddressed aspects of the war, such as guerilla warfare or atrocities committed by white Confederates on black Union soldiers, have a voice in an interpretive center such as Fredericksburg’s even though such events are mostly unconnected to that particular battle? The obvious solution, of course, is site specificity. But when the guerilla front has virtually no interpretive sites and spaces of African-American soldiers and slaves are either underfunded and unvisited (Fort Pillow) or are not commemorated at all (Morris Island), the tribulations of site specificy become evident. Interpretation must be inclusive because our sites of memory are not balanced.

That voices in the South have reacted with hostility toward the National Parks Service’s aim of inclusivity is not surprising. As Tony Horowitz’s "Confederates in the Attic" demonstrates, the Civil War is still being waged, not in southern fields between men armed with muskets and bayonets, but between political factions and private institutions, various racial and socioeconomic communities, and in the press and on statehouse lawns. Race and politics are still deeply intertwined. When Missouri-born Rush Limbaugh plays “Barack the Magic Negro” on his radio broadcast, when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson (who has a undeniable history playing the politics of race) undermines the civility and decorum of his title and calls the President a liar in the halls of Congress, and Representative Geoff Davis refers to the President as “that boy” it is nearly impossible not to summon the political racialization of the Civil War era and beyond.

Furthermore, the concept of secession still holds particular resonance with some conservative voters. In Texas, for instance, politicians have recently found it politically expedient to talk of secession in the face of what they perceive to be gratuitous federal spending and a host of conservative websites, including TexasNationalist.com, TexasSecession.com, and tcrf.com, espouse political rupture from the United States. Utilizing a host of political and ethnic buzzwords such as “political correctness,” “socialism,” and “rightful progeny,” Texassecede.com creates a false narrative of the relationship between Texas and secession (it overstates, for example, the “despotic Mexican government” of the 1820s and 1830s and claims that Texas seceded from the Union in 1861 because of “decades of excessive tariffs”) and then insists that modern Texans give credence and consideration to the idea of secession because of those misrepresentations. In short, the language of “secession” and “state’s rights,” which, in a historical context, has usually been code for the handling of “race issues” at the local level, is still remarkably resonant among particular groups of constituents because it conjures an emotionally appealing, though often false, version of the past. By deleting slavery as not only the cause, but also a cause of the Civil War, Texas secessionists, like the Ku Klux Klan, Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Daughters of the American Revolution and so many others before them, are altering history for their own political uses. This is obviously historically and even morally irresponsible. But is it also irresponsible for professional historians to abide or resist false versions of the past only through published scholarship when published scholarship is so rarely affecting general change in public perception on the ground level?

This tension between task and authority reminds of the Orwellian adage, “He who controls the past controls the future.” Politicians have always understood this, and memory, like politics, is power – nothing more. There is a utilitarian element to mythmaking that cannot be explained away be all the academics in all the universities in all the land. The aim, as it were, should be to sway popular historical perception by wading the moats and grinding in the trenches of the public debate. Seclusion will not save us. When asked how best to combat false versions of the past, Robert Cook, who wrote a remarkable book on the Civil War Centennial, urged the audience to “send them back to the documents.” Whether Geoff Davis does not understand the historical context of his words, or Texassecede.com has not yet grasped that the Civil War was so obviously waged over slavery, how can historians simply send one “back to the documents” who not only has no use for authenticity but in fact strategically alters the past to serve their own ends? It appears the only option is for professional historians to become more active, far more active, in the public realm. As Robert Penn Warren reminded us, the Civil War, like all history and historical struggles, was waged in “real blood . . . not tomato catsup.” The more professional historians are able to heave “real blood” upon politically rendered, overly casual and comfortable, and simplistic, sanitized versions of history, the less room exists for false selectors and hijackers of the past. This, I believe, is a good thing.

Homage to Black Union Heroes

Interesting article on the nation's only African-American "Army Hall" (Charles Sumner Post #25) in Chestertown, MD
http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2003/march-april/homage-to-black-union-heroes.html