The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning

5. Civil War Battlefields for Future Generations: The Relationship between Battlefield Preservation and Popular Culture

83 83 5 Civil War Battlefields for Future Generations The Relationship between Battlefield Preservation and Popular Culture Susan Chase Hall In 2007 noted author, economist, actor, and pop icon Ben Stein stood before an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He did not look out onto a crowd of uninterested students and discuss the science of volcanoes or call out for “Bueller” in his famous monotone. Instead, he enthusiastically addressed the importance of battlefield preservation as a powerful educational tool. He stood as a spokesperson for the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT), a private nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of Civil War battlefields . At the unveiling of the CWPT’s report on the most endangered Civil War battlefields, Stein announced, “Our children’s children will be able to walk these sacred fields and just have a hint of an idea of the sacrifice it took to build this glorious nation.” Stein highlighted the concepts and rhetoric central to the CWPT’s mission—battlefields are sacred, physical, and authentic artifacts of the Civil War, documenting where soldiers sacrificed their lives for the nation’s future. If preserved, they can give future generations of Americans direct access to the Civil War and its legacy.1 Stein’s presence at the CWPT’s press conference suggests a certain rapport between battlefield preservation and popular culture. However, popular culture has a long, complicated relationship with Civil War sites. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, preservation served as a reactionary tool 84 Susan Chase Hall against modernity, popular culture, and change. Its national resurgence in the latter decades of the twentieth century indicated a similar relationship. When the CWPT was established in 1999, however, the organization took a new, proactive approach to popular culture, using it, ironically, as a tool to help mobilize the masses in support of historic preservation. This budding relationship between former foes was not without setbacks, pitfalls, and concerns , however. The nation’s popular trends had a deeply contentious history with battlefield preservation that could not be easily shaken. Historian Timothy Smith describes the 1890s as the “golden age” of battlefield preservation. Congress and Civil War veterans targeted the battlefields of Antietam, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga, and Vicksburg for preservation and interpretation, introducing them as “natural,” undisturbed reminders of a glorified Civil War past. They promoted battlefields as physical embodiments of historical memory—visibly documenting the Civil War, its heroic soldiers, and their gallant military maneuvers. In other words, the preserved sites acted as patriotic memorializations of the Civil War.2 Although focusing on the past, battlefield preservation responded specifically to the uncertainties of the modern industrial society that developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Americans were excited by the increase in mass production, mass consumption, and mass entertainment. To some, however, modernity threatened life as they knew it, ushering in an increasingly foreign and urban population. Preservationists argued that people were not just faceless masses crowded into the urban environs of factories, tenements, and nickelodeons . According to historian Mary Abroe, battlefield sites counteracted modernity by announcing “to industrial America the power of individualism in shaping history.” In commenting on the early preservation efforts at Antietam, a New York Post writer exclaimed, “The increase of population and the march of material progress have not disturbed Antietam . . . which today looks about as it did in 1862.” Yet Marguerite Shaffer’s examination of tourism and nationalism in See America First finds selectivity and exclusivity in the preservation and presentation of the nation’s historic sites—attracting Civil War veterans and the nation’s elite. Preservationists’ motivations rested on a romantic theory of nationalism that excluded the working class, immigrants, and urban hubs.3 Nearly 100 years later, Civil War battlefields experienced a second wave of preservation. This resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s resulted, in part, from Civil War Battlefields for Future Generations 85 the conflict over teaching standards and historical memory known by scholars as the Culture Wars. Historians Gary Nash and Edward Linenthal, among others, define the Culture Wars as a heated conflict between conservatives and liberals, as well as academics and the public, over history, political correctness, and memory. Debates included who has a right to determine what the public learns, why, and how. In October 1994 Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, argued that Americans had developed a case of “historical amnesia”—forgetting their roots...