Posted on 12/22/2002 7:56:45 AM PST by GeneD
GETTYSBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - The U.S. National Park Service has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery.
Nowhere is the project more striking than at Gettysburg, site of the largest battle ever fought on American soil, where plans are going ahead to build a new visitors center and museum at a cost of $95 million that will completely change the way the conflict is presented to visitors.
"For the past 100 years, we've been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here," said Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar.
"We want to change the perception so that Gettysburg becomes known internationally as the place of a 'new rebirth of freedom,"' he said, quoting President Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" made on Nov. 19, 1863, five months after the battle.
"We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another," Latschar said.
The project seems particularly relevant following the furor over Republican Sen. Trent Lott's recent remarks seeming to endorse racial segregation, which forced many Americans to revisit one of the uglier chapters of the nation's history.
When it opens in 2006, the new museum will offer visitors a narrative of the entire Civil War, putting the battle into its larger historical context. Latschar said he was inspired by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., which sets out to tell a story rather than to display historical artifacts behind glass cases.
"Our current museum is absolutely abysmal. It tells no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason," Latschar said.
It is also failing to preserve the 700,000 items in its collection, including 350,000 maps, documents and photographs, many of which were rotting away or crumbling into dust until they were put into temporary storage.
FEW BLACKS VISIT
Around 1.8 million people visit Gettysburg every year. Latschar said a disproportionate number were men and the park attracts very few black visitors.
In 1998, he invited three prominent historians to examine the site. Their conclusion: that Gettysburg's interpretive programs had a "pervasive southern sympathy."
The same was true at most if not all of the 28 Civil War sites operated by the National Parks Service. A report to Congress delivered in March 2000 found that only nine did an adequate job of addressing slavery in their exhibits.
Another six, including Gettysburg, gave it a cursory mention. The rest did not mention it at all. Most parks are now trying to correct the situation.
Park rangers and licensed guides at Gettysburg and other sites have already changed their presentations in line with the new policy. Now, park authorities are taking a look at brochures, handouts and roadside signs.
According to Dwight Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service, the South had tremendous success in promoting its "lost cause" theory.
The theory rested on three propositions: that the war was fought over "states' rights" and not over slavery; that there was no dishonor in defeat since the Confederacy lost only because it was overwhelmed by the richer north; and that slavery was a benign institution and most slaves were content with their lot and faithful to their masters.
"Much of the public conversation today about the Civil War and its meaning for contemporary society is shaped by structured forgetting and wishful thinking" he said.
Thank you for your courteous post. I generally agree with your assessment, and would differ with you in my appreciation of Marxists only in this, that I think that modern Marxists are not so much "tunnel-visioned" in their approach, as supremely wilful and focused on their task-at-hand of justifying and building a Marxian superstate.
Marx no doubt thought of himself as a voice in the wilderness, but I think he might be horrified by the tendentiousness and unwillingness even to think about anything that doesn't "build socialism" by vilifying its alternatives that seems so to occupy his self-selected heirs and interpreters.
Their baleful influence on American affairs is now a matter of public record, and their repudiation and turfing-out is a matter for the intellectual community. This will be very difficult, I think, because, in my view, they are not so much a school, as the followers of Duns Scotus were, or even a cult, as they are a conspiracy against the human race.
On Gettysburg visitation - how many repeat visitors are interested in the military aspects rather than the social interpretation? How many blacks go to non-battle related national parks?
Excellent question. Answer: very few.
So, the whole "blacks don't go so we have to make things nicer for them" is a red herring. No matter how PC and revisionist they make things, blacks are not going to be going to national parks or Civil War battlefields in any greater numbers than they are now. That's their choice as to what kinds of recreation appeals to them; it has nothing to do with a lack of PC groveling on the part of the Park Service.
Of course, there are those who say that the lack of blacks in national parks and campgrounds is itself de facto evidence of "white racism", rather than simple differences in black preferences for how they spend their recreation time. Everything is about white racism, you see.
Never mind that on a visit to the Sequoia National Park in California that I took a few years ago, the vast majority of the people stopping to admire the giant redwood Sequoia trees were foreigners - Germans, French, Japanese, Israelis, etc. Does the lack of Americans at these sites mean that the Park Service is deliberately discouraging native Americans from coming, or is it rather that Americans take these giant trees more for granten, than do foreign tourists?
I see it more as an effort to split the GOP on regional lines, although I see how the issues could be used to sow division between Southerners and Republicans recently arrived from the North.
The response of the GOP has followed the advice of Christopher Caldwell, an editor of the neocon Weekly Standard, who wrote that article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1998 that I refer to frequently, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP". Caldwell basically argued that the GOP needed to purge its Southern image that the DemonRats were laboring hard to put on it. I would strongly urge anyone who is interested in these issues and in national politics more generally, to look up and read Caldwell's article. I have sometimes wondered whether it was an advocacy piece, or whether it was more an all-hands read-and-heed notice from the Wall Street Wing of the GOP, to the faithful (mostly not Southerners) who read The Atlantic Monthly. If Caldwell had been speaking to Southerners, instead of about them (thank yuu ver'a much, Mr. Caldwell, fo' yo' cuttisy), he'd have published a similar article in Southern Living or some other publication widely read in the South, or in leading regional papers. He didn't.
Guess we know now what the GOP strategy to do that will be. Adios, Trent.
If I were Tom DeLay or another Southerner involved in political leadership, I would be deeply unhappy and somewhat apprehensive about how Dubya moved on Trent Lott. Lott opened the door, to be sure, but it sure illuminated with a lightning-flash what Dubya really thinks about Southern conservatives in the Party, viz., that they are a liability and a drag. He wants them to vote for him, but otherwise to shut the hell up, stay out of sight, and speak only when spoken to. That attitude, I think, is there. And I furthermore think that it comes as easily as second nature to a born-and-bred royalist like George W. Bush, or to neoconservatives like Caldwell and his boss, Bill Kristol.
It would seem to me, then, that it's time for Southern conservatives to make medicine together in their own caucus of the GOP, and to decide now to act in concert the way the DemonRats do, and to insist that a) the GOP move against 'Rat assets in media (the current bill allowing more conglomeration and monopolization of media is a perfect example of something that needs to be turned inside out into a weapon against the 'Rat mass media), and b) not take Southerners for granted and c) finally begin to engage in serious political and intellectual competition against the 'Rat Leftist intellectual opinion factory (which includes both "defunding the Left" and finding a way to purge faculties of committed Marxists and liberal political activists), and stop rolling over for the Democrats every 10 minutes. In the last two years, Bush has rolled over at least half a dozen times on issues that were important to Southern conservative Republicans without even so much as a whimper.
And if that won't do it, we're all in serious trouble, even the Northerners who don't think so yet.
If you will search on posts by GOPcapitalist, I believe it was he, who posted some very interesting material about McPherson and his playmates at Pacifica, here on FR.
You might also communicate with him directly, a pleasant chore, and let him point you to his materials. He really did a job in digging up McPherson's lovely credentials.
Sorry, N-S, but I won't accept a homework assignment of digging through your post. A fair reading of your posted quotations from Southern secessionist orators supports multiple motives, rather than McPherson's "it was slavery and nothing but slavery" mantra, which is a polemical lie -- polemical, in that McPherson is attempting to attach a moral stigma to every Southern leader and soldier, and by extension -- more importantly -- to every Southerner now living, who has not slavishly grasped the knees and kissed the ring of the triumphalist faction and the Power they serve.
Correct. Lincoln introduced the emancipation theme as a rationale for the war, by equating abolition and emancipation with the freedom of people to govern themselves: "government of the people, by the people, and for the people".
Reflection on Lincoln's address will reveal that, in fact, he was warring against the Peoples of the Southern States to bind on them a Union they no longer wanted; his achievement of reunification by force, was actually the overthrow of the "government of the people" that he had proclaimed as his guiding principle and object in view.
The Northern battle cry was "Save the Union".
Correct again. The Northern purpose, after Fort Sumter, was the restoration of the Union by force.
Politicians drove those young men to kill each other and now politicians are playing politics on their graves.
That is wrong.
Well worth quoting. I agree wholeheartedly. Bump to the top, as remedial reading for WhiskeyPapa and Non-Sequitur.
No one is suggesting that, so I don't see what the problem is.
Walt
Maybe, it was staffed by 'illegal'...ex-slaves with false 'green cards'?
/sarcasm
| State | L | B | B | D | Elec Vote | Total Votes | Lincoln | Breckinridge | Bell | Douglas | Smith | Write-in | |||||||||
| R | SD | CU | D | Cast | Republican | Southern Democrat | Constitutional Union | Democrat | Union | ||||||||||||
| Alabama | 1 | 2 | 3 | 9 | 90,122 | 0 | 0.00% | 48,669 | 54.00% | 27,835 | 30.89% | 13,618 | 15.11% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Arkansas | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 54,152 | 0 | 0.00% | 28,732 | 53.06% | 20,063 | 37.05% | 5,357 | 9.89% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| California | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 119,827 | 38,733 | 32.32% | 33,969 | 28.35% | 9,111 | 7.60% | 37,999 | 31.71% | 0 | 0.00% | 15 | 0.01% | |||
| Connecticut | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 74,819 | 43,488 | 58.12% | 14,372 | 19.21% | 1,528 | 2.04% | 15,431 | 20.62% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Delaware | 3 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 16,115 | 3,822 | 23.72% | 7,339 | 45.54% | 3,888 | 24.13% | 1,066 | 6.61% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Florida | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 13,301 | 0 | 0.00% | 8,277 | 62.23% | 4,801 | 36.10% | 223 | 1.68% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Georgia | 1 | 2 | 3 | 10 | 106,717 | 0 | 0.00% | 52,176 | 48.89% | 42,960 | 40.26% | 11,581 | 10.85% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Illinois | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 11 | 339,666 | 172,171 | 50.69% | 2,331 | 0.69% | 4,914 | 1.45% | 160,215 | 47.17% | 35 | 0.01% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Indiana | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 13 | 272,143 | 139,033 | 51.09% | 12,295 | 4.52% | 5,306 | 1.95% | 115,509 | 42.44% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Iowa | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 128,739 | 70,302 | 54.61% | 1,035 | 0.80% | 1,763 | 1.37% | 55,639 | 43.22% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Kentucky | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 146,216 | 1,364 | 0.93% | 53,143 | 36.35% | 66,058 | 45.18% | 25,651 | 17.54% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Louisiana | 1 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 50,510 | 0 | 0.00% | 22,681 | 44.90% | 20,204 | 40.00% | 7,625 | 15.10% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Maine | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 8 | 100,918 | 62,811 | 62.24% | 6,368 | 6.31% | 2,046 | 2.03% | 29,693 | 29.42% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Maryland | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 8 | 92,502 | 2,294 | 2.48% | 42,482 | 45.93% | 41,760 | 45.14% | 5,966 | 6.45% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Massachusetts | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 13 | 169,876 | 106,684 | 62.80% | 6,163 | 3.63% | 22,331 | 13.15% | 34,370 | 20.23% | 0 | 0.00% | 328 | 0.19% | |||
| Michigan | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 154,758 | 88,481 | 57.17% | 805 | 0.52% | 415 | 0.27% | 65,057 | 42.04% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Minnesota | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 34,804 | 22,069 | 63.41% | 748 | 2.15% | 50 | 0.14% | 11,920 | 34.25% | 0 | 0.00% | 17 | 0.05% | |||
| Mississippi | 1 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 69,095 | 0 | 0.00% | 40,768 | 59.00% | 25,045 | 36.25% | 3,282 | 4.75% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Missouri | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 9 | 165,563 | 17,028 | 10.28% | 31,362 | 18.94% | 58,372 | 35.26% | 58,801 | 35.52% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| New Hampshire | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 65,943 | 37,519 | 56.90% | 2,125 | 3.22% | 412 | 0.62% | 25,887 | 39.26% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| New Jersey | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | 121,215 | 58,346 | 48.13% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | 62,869 | 51.87% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| New York | 1 | 2 | 35 | 675,156 | 362,646 | 53.71% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | 312,510 | 46.29% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||||
| North Carolina | 1 | 2 | 3 | 10 | 96,712 | 0 | 0.00% | 48,846 | 50.51% | 45,129 | 46.66% | 2,737 | 2.83% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Ohio | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 23 | 442,866 | 231,709 | 52.32% | 11,406 | 2.58% | 12,194 | 2.75% | 187,421 | 42.32% | 136 | 0.03% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Oregon | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 14,758 | 5,329 | 36.11% | 5,075 | 34.39% | 218 | 1.48% | 4,136 | 28.03% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Pennsylvania | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 27 | 476,442 | 268,030 | 56.26% | 178,871 | 37.54% | 12,776 | 2.68% | 16,765 | 3.52% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Rhode Island | 1 | 2 | 4 | 19,951 | 12,244 | 61.37% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | 7,707 | 38.63% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||||
| South Carolina | 1 | 8 | N/A | ||||||||||||||||||
| Tennessee | 2 | 1 | 3 | 12 | 146,106 | 0 | 0.00% | 65,097 | 44.55% | 69,728 | 47.72% | 11,281 | 7.72% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Texas | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 62,855 | 0 | 0.00% | 47,454 | 75.50% | 15,383 | 24.47% | 18 | 0.03% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | ||||
| Vermont | 1 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 44,644 | 33,808 | 75.73% | 218 | 0.49% | 1,969 | 4.41% | 8,649 | 19.37% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Virginia | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 15 | 166,891 | 1,887 | 1.13% | 74,325 | 44.54% | 74,481 | 44.63% | 16,198 | 9.71% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Wisconsin | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 152,179 | 86,110 | 56.58% | 887 | 0.58% | 161 | 0.11% | 65,021 | 42.73% | 0 | 0.00% | 0 | 0.00% | |||
| Total | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 180 | 72 | 39 | 12 | 4,685,561 | 1,865,908 | 39.82% | 848,019 | 18.10% | 590,901 | 12.61% | 1,380,202 | 29.46% | 171 | 0.00% | 360 | 0.01% |
Look at the electoral vote. Of course Lincoln got no southern electoral votes. We knew that.
Look at the POPULAR vote. Excepting Virginia (and those 1,887 votes could be from the counties of Virginia that eventually went to West Virginia) Lincoln received NOT ONE popular vote for President!!! And you think the Democrats feel that Bush stole the 2000 election from Gore because Gore got more popular votes than Bush. How would you feel if you were in the South in 1860 and a President was elected that NOT A SINGLE southern voter voted for!! Not one. I would not be pleased. I might even try to secede!
Thank you for your post. It's nice to have someone who's been properly trained come in and work with the new Black Republicans, the self-appointed successors of Thad Stevens and Ben "Beast" Butler, who are prosecuting the Marxist revision of the Civil War in these threads by extolling James McPherson and other "red diaper" historians.
I would point out that you contradict yourself, or appear to, when you write that "....that the issues have been decided and with enough blood. The union remains. The struggle of dual federalism continues, and likely will forever." The issues haven't been decided, if the struggle continues.
We may have chosen this government, as you say, but the South does not have its rights. Its people receive no respect, its symbols are banned, its speechways and folkways ridiculed, no matter how innocent. Southerners have been demonized often enough, and over widely enough separated issues and causes, to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that they are now the official national whipping boy.
You acknowledge the South's contributions to America's success -- but Northerners fastidiously do not, and jealously watch out for signs of any relaxation of hostility and contempt toward the South that they expect from their fellows.
The North got the development, the money, the prosperity, the success. Southerners were allowed to bleed in American wars and to come home to the Civil Rights Movement, obloquy, demonization, and Crow Jim. What Northern state is required to seek permission, every single time, from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department before it can hold elections?
Southern states and municipalities cannot hold elections. This is a central fact of life under the Northern model of federalism. It's true, you can't blink it. You can argue for the Civil Rights Act of 1965, you can adduce historical reasons why it was true and good -- but you can't sweep under the rug the enormity of the fact that the South cannot hold elections. That power is reserved to the Executive Branch now. That fact alone is the elephant in the living room. The South is not like the North. The North is free; the South is not. Period.
"White supremacy" wasn't formulated as a political idea and program until after Reconstruction.
Get back to your AOL quote-box of die-cut quotes, Wlat. You embarrass yourself when you try to think freestyle.
Go on back to DU, Wlat.
I'd point you to Keith's post above......about slavery being a sort of first-among-equals issue, but that the deeper controversy was over what I call the Hamiltonian hustle laid on by the Federalists, who propagandized their model so well in the early Republic, precisely because they enjoyed a monopoly of printing presses. Antifederalists like George Mason were in the majority of American opinion, but the Federalists used the power of the press to convince them that they were the minority -- and by that civic fraud hung the Civil War, and all manner of later unhappiness that has ensued from the encroaching central power's deeper and deeper invasion of the People's rights.
Slavery was the issue of the moment, but there had been others, and if there had never been a slave on the North American continent, something like the Civil War would have eventually happened sooner or later.
To understand this long struggle, you have to look at who the Hamiltonians were, and are now, and appreciate their drive to overreach the common People, and make them their meat and drink.
Worth re-reading. BTTT.
Hello, x, good to see you again.
You make a good point, and the question then is to distinguishing root causes from proximate causes or triggers. I was merely riposting that Lincoln's election was the triggering event.
It would be interesting to speculate on the likely course of secessionism had Douglas managed to hold the National Democracy together to turn back Lincoln's challenge for national leadership. Keep in mind that Canadian secessionism has now been held at bay for 40 years, or about as long as Clay and others kept it at bay in the U.S., and the Quebec separatists now seem no stronger, and indeed weaker in some ways, than they have been in the past.
I'm not offering Canada as a perfect proxy, merely making a point about this "historical inevitability" that people talk about, who've been catechized by followers of Toynbee and Marx.
Point well made -- and a socialist touchstone. In fact, it was what Barry Commoner's quixotic 1980 presidential campaign was all about, with all the Fabians in the Democratic movement hissing at Commoner to shut the hell up, he was giving it all away.
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