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Epilogue CLIMAX AND HARBINGER A Life as a Common Cause The stage directions of Orson Welles’s 1932 play The Marching Song described “a great unearthly light fall[ing] full upon” the “transfigured” protagonist . The play investigates one man’s life through conflicting recollections to explore how myth can permanently obscure the truth. While Welles used an almost identical method in Citizen Kane, his 1941 cinematic masterpiece, the script explains that the unearthly light falls not on Charles Foster Kane but on “THE SWORD OF THE LORD AND OF GIDEON!”: the abolitionist John Brown.1 While the enigmatic Kane will forever be his greatest creation, Welles first explored the creation of conflicting and contradictory myths through Brown. As many film historians and biographers have noted, The Marching Song articulated one of Welles’s “lifelong obsessions,” the distortion of memory and myth.2 He observed many of these qualities in Brown, “an enigmatic public [figure] who is not really a three-dimensional personality , but a mask, a name, a voice, a cobweb of legends.”3 Exploring Brown through conflicting sounds and images, The Marching Song utilized contrasting screen projections of newspaper headlines from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, offstage singing of “John Brown’s Body,” and other media underscoring the mystery of a man’s life and its meaning.4 For Welles, Brown captured a series of irresolvable myths. In this vein, the abolitionist has stubbornly remained in the nation’s consciousness into the new millennium. We continue to discuss Brown because of the intertwining fates of righteous violence, racial equality, and societal change. In Brown, Americans have long located a fractured reflection of our very John Brown is a symbol; a symbol of tragic futility, of unleashed human emotion, of misguided fervor. But [he] is also a living part of the folklore of the American people. —Bert Loewenberg, 1941 182 Epilogue understanding of our past: its glorious moments of transformation, its horrific betrayals of principle, and the lessons it holds for our own lives. Since his time in Kansas, Brown has powerfully inspired this ongoing argument. Considering these qualities, the use of Brown’s memory will likely never be exhausted; his body will continue a-mouldering, and the abolitionist will continue to be manipulated and misused. By following Brown’s more recent manifestations, particularly through two wildly different icons of contemporary black America, the artist Kara Walker and President Barack Obama, it is possible to underscore the difficulty of laying Brown to rest. In their art and writing, Walker and Obama underscore Brown’s living relevance and his potent symbolism. The abolitionist continues to allow Americans to wrestle with the meaning of the past, the state of the present, and the shape of the county’s future. Following Brown from the 1950s to 2010, we are reminded of how furiously this figure resists the divisions that are typically applied to American history. He is not bound by the antebellum era where he lived and died or by the Civil War in which his name became the marching cry of the Union army. Throughout Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and beyond, Brown resists periodization; any end date obscures his place in American memory. With a rifle and a fervent belief in American freedom, Brown transformed himself into a symbol on the Kansas prairies and became a martyr of interracial radicalism in Virginia in 1859. Embracing the principles and means of his Revolutionary War forebears, Brown tried to force Americans to honor the commitments of the nation’s founding documents . He failed in that mission. Although many have argued that the civil war that quickly followed his execution was his legacy, from the moment of his death, Brown became the property of Americans of all faiths, colors, and political leanings. As Stephen Vincent Benét observed, with Brown “moldering in the grave,” his life became “a common cause.”5 While a dizzying range of Americans have found in Brown the symbol of their own cause, at no time has the man been able to unite his countrymen. Each generation has reinterpreted Brown according to the divisive politics of its time. That volatile persistence has created anything but consensus. By the 1950s, there was as little accord as ever about the man and his deeds. Whereas the first fifty years of his memory were dominated by hagiographies of Brown as an idealized (and often peaceful) martyr of freedom, Brown’s place in the popular imagination suffered after World War...

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