The Continuing War

THE CONTINUING WAR By Robert Dykstra Some ten years ago, as a second lieutenant posted to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, I first became aware that the Civil War was a controversial matter. The catalytic agents, in my case, were equally fresh young college graduates from Vanderbilt, Tulane, and other Southern schools who sought to convince their new Northern comrades-in-arms that the South—by every right—should have won the War Between the States. These somewhat forceful testimonials to Confederate persistence surprised an unprepared Midwesterner like myself, and even seemed less than important in the scheme of things—facing, as we all then were, armed conflict in our own day. The experience has since stuck in my mind as a contrast between Southern emotional involvement in the 1861-1865 conflict as against relative Northern detachment. My recent discovery of a slightly faded, but complete, file of the Bulletin of the "Society for Correct Civil War Information" therefore came as a shock. The curious little publication is not without interest in the annals of the Civil War impact on American popular thought. A total of seventytwo numbers appeared between 1935 and 1941. Its sponsoring organization remains altogether mysterious, but some clues are to be gleaned from the Bulletin itself. According to information from one issue, the Society owed its inception to Charles Edward Russell, who, from its formation until his death in 1941, served as its "chairman for New York State." Like apparently most of those active in the association, Mr. Russell possessed close Union antecedents, his father having been an abolitionist newspaper editor during the 1860's and an uncompromising foe of the South. The younger Russell, according to his entry in Who's Who, was a wellknown journalist, author, lecturer, and unsuccessful Socialist candidate for office. President of the Society was Mrs. Helen Stewart Claassen of Tallahassee , Florida, whose father had been sergeant-major of the 31st Ohio Infantry ( Chickamauga, Sherman's March to the Sea), and whose mother had been a hospital nurse with the famous U.S. Christian Com430 mission. Secretary, and guiding genius of the Bulletin, was Mrs. Claassen 's sister, Miss Lucy S. Stewart of Evanston, Illinois, who passed away just last year. The mimeographed little publication was financed wholly by the two sisters "as a tribute to the memory of our father." The first number of the Bulletin appeared on October 19, 1935. Its message was explicitly set forth: unmitigated opposition to all who would in any way seek to undermine "pride in the heritage left ... by the Union soldiers, who conquered the most powerful enemies our Nation has known." In tones worthy of the most vitriolic Southern fireeater or Republican Radical, it zeroed in on such diverse targets as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, distinguished Southern educator Francis Pendleton Gaines, and the poet Edgar Lee Masters. Subsequent issues denounced various members of Congress, any number of national periodicals, the U.S. Military Academy, the Sons of Confederate Veterans , Gone With the Wind (both book and movie), and well-known writers MacKinlay Kantor, Carl Sandburg, and Robert E. Sherwood, among others. The Bulletin's effort was essentially two-fold; rebuking (without respect to section) any who dared cast a deflationary dart at the wartime North and simultaneously maintaining a constant invective—which varied from venomous to merely waspish—trained on the nineteenth century South. Tipped off by informants throughout the country, Miss Stewart denounced in the Bulletin all those deemed guilty of error, to which copies were then dispatched in hopes of eliciting retractions. Not surprisingly, the Bulletin soon gravitated to a number of special preoccupations . "With the exception of General W. T. Sherman," wrote Miss Stewart grimly, "probably no person connected with the Civil War is more misrepresented than Robert E. Lee. With Lee, however, the misrepresentations always distort the truth in his favor, while the misrepresentations of Sherman are defamatory." Over the six-year period of its life, therefore , the Bulletin expended much of itself defending "Uncle Billy" and sparring with "Ol Marse Robert." A second favorite campaign was waged against use of the descriptive phrase "War Between the States." In this connection the National Geographic Magazine...