Planned Commemorations: Unexpected Consequences

Anniversaries are teachable moments to engage the public in dialogue about the past, but for public historians they can be a mixed blessing. Anniversaries focus public attention on history. Journalists write articles for the media; films and publications are produced; local events are planned; and tourism funding, sponsorships, and grants can attract much-needed new resources for public history projects. A growing literature on historical memory and commemorations has significantly increased academic understanding and analysis of past efforts and how anniversaries affect public understanding of historical events. Public historians, however, not only study past events but are also asked to help shape and direct current anniversaries as participants rather than observers, as promoters rather than critics, as mediators rather than experts. As historians we may focus on national impact, political process, and the past, but the public we work with is often more interested in local stories, personal meanings, and connections to present-day issues. The resulting commemorations often produce unexpected consequences despite the best intentions to plan carefully, involve historians, and educate public audiences with the best scholarship available.

The 150th anniversary of the American Civil War presents both opportunities and pitfalls. On the one hand there are opportunities to engage the public in the kind of open—albeit contested—discourse that makes history relevant and important to people’s lives. At the same time, academic and public historians both face the challenge of how to encourage active public participation and personal perspectives while still maintaining high standards of historical accuracy and documentation.

Commemorations are almost always fraught with conflict. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, John Bodnar’s analysis of twentieth-century commemorations, identifies the inherent conflict that exists between the official and vernacular versions of historical anniversaries. In the contest among historians, reenactors, enthusiasts, marketers, and educators over issues of politics, race, regionalism, and local pride, Bodnar proposes that public memory emerges at the intersection of official and unofficial commemorative activities, with sometimes unexpected outcomes. He notes that when national officials in the 1960s and 1970s tried to achieve political goals through central control of events and promoted messages that focused on national consensus, they met with only partial success. Instead, he explains that ordinary citizens, “generally demonstrated a preoccupation with a past that had been formulated and discussed locally and still held meaning for them in the present.”¹

Many will agree that the previous anniversaries of the Civil War—the fiftieth and, especially, the Centennial of the 1960s—did little to advance the public’s historical understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath. David Blight’s Race and Reunion, covering the war’s fiftieth anniversary and Robert Cook’s Troubled Commemorations on the 1960s centennial, both outline the ways in which the political and social issues of the early and mid-twentieth century shaped these anniversaries and resulted in historical narratives that emphasized unity, consensus, and nationhood at the expense of a racially inclusive history.²

In 1913, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, the United States was emerging as a world power. Abandoning the earlier, more personal and local ceremonies associated with grieving that had centered on cemeteries, memorials, and battlefields, the fiftieth anniversary stressed reunion and renewed national loyalty necessary to support an emerging industrial world power. But reconciliation of white Union and Confederate veterans, instead, ushered in an era of intensified Jim Crow segregation and racial violence against African Americans in the form of lynchings and riots.

In the late 1950s, the official national commission for the centennial set out goals that continued to focus on consensus and patriotism as a defense against the cold war threat of Communism. As the civil rights movement unfolded during the 1960s, the contemporary public debate about race and civil rights was excluded from anniversary events to maintain an illusion of national consensus that accommodated southern concerns and excluded African American perspectives and participation. Rather than uniting the nation, however, its legacy of Lost Cause romanticism only deepened racial and regional divides. The decentralized grassroots efforts of the American Revolution Bicentennial that followed in the 1970s were, in...