This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America by Nina Silber (review)

An hour from my university sits the Jefferson Davis Memorial State Historic Site, made a state park during the Depression-era administration of Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge. The monument on the grounds tells less about the Confederacy’s demise and more about the Talmadge administration’s use of the Civil War. According to the historical marker there, Confederate president Jefferson Davis was “the revered leader of the Lost Cause,” and when he was captured at this spot, “his hopes for a new nation, in which each state would exercise without interference its cherished ‘Constitutional rights,’ [were] forever dead.”

Nina Silber’s new book, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America, does a masterful job of describing the political and cultural uses of the Civil War in the 1930s and 1940s by southern white bigots like Talmadge and by a variety of national interest groups. Georgia, for example, was the home of Margaret Mitchell and the setting of the film Gone With the Wind (1939), which became a theater for the negotiation of “the present-day politics of white supremacy” (p. 5). Such politics were evident across the South and across the country, but were rivaled by several other agendas with an interest in the Civil War’s legacy in the early twentieth century.

Advocates of the New Deal and the officials who helped craft its policies, for example, emphasized the memory of Abraham Lincoln to justify the program’s heavy federal hand, but they denuded Lincoln of the racial consequences of emancipation, realizing that they would only stoke demands for African American civil rights and alienate much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic base—those same white southerners who flocked to see Gone With the Wind and the Jefferson Davis capture site. But Silber’s analysis goes further. Because of the economic devastation that affected so many white people, politicians and cultural critics began appropriating antebellum slavery to equate it with the suffering of interwar whites. Among those making the case were white American communists and labor activists, who “spoke the language of bondage during the Depression years”—wage slavery or “white” slavery—to indict a broken economic system (p. 72).

Precisely because of the real historical resonance of the racial consequences of the Civil War, however, and in response to the rhetorical appropriation of slavery, emphasis on Lincoln and the Civil War during the time of both Jim Crow and rampant economic devastation was also a stakes game for the black leaders of the burgeoning civil rights effort. For them, Lincoln and radical figures like John Brown created a legacy that civil rights advocates of the 1930s inherited and continued. And that inheritance was undeniably racial. The NAACP was beginning its long fight for desegregated schools and stumping for a federal antilynching law, and both the Civil War and Reconstruction served as useful analogues for the group’s actions.

Silber moves seamlessly from political memory to cultural memory, and the cultural memory she discusses spans a wide gamut of film and literature: from D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930) to John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); and from Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to Shirley Temple’s The Littlest Rebel (1935). Silber covers the poetry of Carl Sandburg and the photography of Dorothea Lange, all in an effort to track a history of memory that was itself an overtly contested space. The nuanced portrait moves deftly between race and class issues, political screeds and bestselling novels, pinpointing the lived memory of the Civil War for a variety of interwar and World War II–era groups while simultaneously tracking the evolution of those images over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. This War Ain’t Over is a necessary addition to the historiographies of both the...