A Late Encounter with the Civil War

Notes

95 Notes Preface 1. What to call the anniversaries is a potential cause of confusion. Most are familiar with “centennial,” but less so with its two relatives. I have used identifiers interchangeably: semicentennial and 50th anniversary , centennial and 100th anniversary, and sesquicentennial and 150th anniversary. 2. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire ,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. 3. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 4. As if to assert that the past is never dead but rather is intellectual property, the Faulkner Foundation of Oxford, Mississippi, has recently sued sony Pictures over what the Foundation alleges is a copyright infringement : the lead character in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris (2011) not only misquotes the line but does so without permission. 5. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001); American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011). Chapter 1. Remembering the Civil War in the Era of Race Suicide 1. “Love and Marriage,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn; music Jimmy Van Heusen. Recorded by Frank Sinatra, Capitol Records, 1955. 2. Blood transfusions had been attempted for years, usually with fatal results for the recipients, but blood types were not known until 1901 when Dr. Karl Landsteiner established the first three human blood 96 Notes to Chapter One groups, and it was not until six years later, in 1907, that transfusions using typed and cross-matched blood were successfully performed. 3. Tom Buchanan has author and title confused, but Fitzgerald refers to Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White WorldSupremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922). 4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner ’s Sons, 1925). Edmund Morris, in his Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2002), describes his subject similarly, save for the sinister connotations Fitzgerald uses: “His tanned skin stretched over his jutting jaw. His teeth gleamed through thick, half-parted lips. His neck, too squat for a standing collar, merged with weight-lifter shoulders, sloping two full inches to the tip of his biceps, and his chest pushed apart the lapels of his frock coat. He tugged at his watch chain with short, nervous fingers, shifting his small, square-toed shoes. Here, palpably, was a man of expansive force” (17). 5. Theodore Roosevelt, “On American Motherhood,” speech given on March 13, 1905, www.nationalcenter.org/TRooseveltMotherhood .html (accessed June 8, 2012). Edmund Morris writes in Theodore Rex that during a stop in “Iowa’s fecund fields” in 1903, President Roosevelt was cheered by “women in faded Mother Hubbard gowns . . . their arms bursting with progeny” under a banner that proclaimed: “NO ‘RACE SUICIDE’ HERE, TEDDY!” (224). 6. Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and The Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 24–25; Theodore Roosevelt, “The Expansion of White Races” address at the Celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., June 18, 1909, www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images /research/speeches/trwhiteraces.pdf (accessed June 8, 2012). 7. Robert Grant, Unleavened Bread (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900). 8. David Starr Jordan and Harvey Ernest Jordan, War’s Aftermath: A Preliminary Study of the Eugenics of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914). 9. An example of the transformation of the theme of race or blood into romance and sex springs from Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House in October 1901. The dinner was not “advanced” by the Roosevelt administration, nor was news of it disseminated until the daily schedule was released to the press well after the dinner had ended. Southern newspapers ratcheted the theme up Notes to Chapter One 97 from cordial dinner to sexual outrage. Edmund Morris, in Theodore Rex, reports: “Some of the more sensational sheets expressed sexual disgust at the idea of Edith Roosevelt [the President’s wife] and Washington touching thighs, so to speak, under the table” (55). 10. As an example of the powerful contradictoriness inherent in race and blood thinking, consider that David Starr Jordan, in The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1916), wrote: “We know that the actual blood in the actual...