Posted on 10/13/2003 7:07:18 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
When George Ewert , director of the Museum of Mobile, wrote a stinging movie review of the Civil War film "Gods and Generals," he likely did not expect an equally harsh critique from Mayor Mike Dow .
Ewert's review, "Whitewashing the Confederacy (SPLC link)," was not kind to the Ted Turner film.
"'Gods and Generals' is part of a growing movement that seeks to rewrite the history of the American South, downplaying slavery and the economic system that it sustained. In museums, schools and city council chambers, white neo-Confederates are hard at work in an effort to have popular memory trump historical accuracy," the city employee wrote.
And this: "It is cloying and melo dramatic, and its still characters give an endless series of ponderous, stilted speeches about God, man and war."
In turn, Dow was not kind to Ewert, reprimanding the city employee in a Friday letter. The mayor called Ewert's review unnecessarily strongly worded, inflammatory and counterproductive.
"Why, in your very public position with all the local 'Southern Heritage' controversy that city leaders have had to manage and after several years of a hard-fought political calming of this issue, would you inject yourself so strongly and carelessly into this topic in this manner?" the mayor wrote.
"I need for you to use your better judgment and please cease and desist publishing potentially inflammatory articles of this nature without your board chairman's or my awareness and approval. Leave that to others who have less to do."
The city, particularly Dow, has come under fire in the past from Southern heritage groups claiming unfair treatment.
Ewert's review was printed in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report. The Montgomery-based organization's Intelligence Project monitors hate groups and extremist activities.
At the end of the movie review, there is a line that notes Ewert's position with the city.
Mobile City Council President Reggie Copeland also scolded Ewert, saying at last week's council meeting that he "would accept nothing less than a public apology. ... I am very displeased with that gentleman, and I want some action taken."
Copeland made the comments after hearing about the review but before reading it. He later told the Mobile Register that the review was "not as strong as I thought it would have been. ... I just wish he would have kept his mouth shut."
Ewert, contacted last week, declined comment except to say that he would be preparing a statement for Dow. In a letter to Dow dated Oct. 9 -- one day before Dow's letter -- Ewert said the review was written in his capacity as a historian and private individual.
"I regret that anyone may have taken my comments in a 'personal' matter," Ewert wrote. "My intent was not to offend but to offer a legitimate criticism and context for the movie in question, a privilege that should by rights be open to anyone. If, again, there were those who were offended by the movie review, I offer my apologies."
Don't shoot ...:
Area veterinarian Ben George , a Confederate Battle Flag and Confederate-heritage advocate, praised Dow for his response to the review. But George said Ewert did not apologize and should resign or be fired.
"He (Ewert) shot somebody; he said he's going to shoot somebody again," George said.
George in the past has made himself something of a thorn in Dow's side, organizing demonstrations in front of Dow's house, plastering posters criticizing the mayor during the last city election and using other tactics to push his Confederate heritage agenda.
George complained to Dow after reading Ewert's article. "My staff and I have had to deal with an unnecessary and increased fallout as a result of your article," Dow stated in his letter to Ewert.
George compared the situation to the firing of a Mobile police officer, accused of using the n-word and expressing a lack of interest in helping evacuate public housing residents in case of flooding.
Ewert, like the police officer, George said, has proven himself intolerant toward part of Mobile's population, namely Confederate heritage proponents like himself.
George said he and several others planned to speak at Tuesday's City Council meeting about Ewert's comments, along with concerns that Dow has not kept his word on settling previous disputes. But, he said, the speakers may reconsider.
And while we're on the subject, the confederate congress also suspended habeas corpus. It, too, suspended the writ throughout the confederacy, even in areas hundreds of miles from the front lines where what passed for confederate courts operated freely. Would you not agree that Jefferson Davis would have been guilty of the same crime of usurping the constitution that you accuse Lincoln of? Had there been such a thing as a confederate supreme court to make such a ruling, of course.
Yet the Penn family was a slaveholding family.
The Emancipation what? Proclemation, you say? Nope, that missed the cut for the movie, too.
So what?
Exactly!
The Quakers of Pennsylvania sold Indians to slavers that took them to the West Indies. The Quakers also sold whites to the slavers. Just a little addition to you all's arguement.
This again avoids the question of what power the North was trying to excercise over the South that made it want to leave the Union. I would also point out that all governments have an "insatiable appetite for power" and the Confederacy seems to have been no exception, either.
Which illustrates, just as did the North keeping their slaves, that slavery had little to do with the fight.
You make it sound as if the North kept its slaves into the 1950s. Not so. Lincoln's decision to exclude the North from the emancipation proclaimation can be explained in any number of ways including the uncertain presence of Maryland in the Union and the fact that the Northern states were not in revolt. You'll notice, however, that after the war, slavery was banned by Constitutional Amendment in all states. If the Confederacy had been let go or had won, slavery would have continued in the South for an undeterminable period of time, but certainly longer.
Having prevented secession, and, by the barrell of a gun, dragged the South, bleeding, back into the Union; the North absurdly now refers to this as the "United States".
In my experience, most Southerners do not resent the United States being a single nation the way several Freepers do.
Why, do you think, is such a mis-representation called for?
I think there is mis-representation on both sides. To say that slavery wasn't an issue is as absurd as saying that it was the only issue. The desire to reduce the complex a historical events surrounding the Civil War to a single noble cause on one side or the other is not likely to lead anyone to the truth.
.....WITH the consent of the people. Lincoln suspended the h-c without putting to a vote in Congress. The third time Jeff Davis asked Congress to suspend, the disallowed the suspension.
Your name appears at the bottom of your posts as the author. And they are not your statements.
Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware.
"When in September 1862, Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, it was a military move, giving the South four months to stop rebelling, threatening to emancipate their slaves if they continued to fight, promising to leave slavery untouched in states that came over to the North...."
....
"Thus, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863, it declared slaves free in those areas still fighting against the Union (which it listed very carefully) and said nothing about slaves behind Union lines...."
[source --A People's History of the United States - 1492 - Present, by Howard Zinn, page 187]
For Jackson, the war was about repulsing the invaders. For Chamberlain, the war was about freeing the slaves.
If you try to make the movie a cause and effect and a political movie... then you make the movie carry a weight it was not meant to bear.
Even Shaara's novel wasn't about the cause and effects of the Civil War, but how the war effected the soldiers that fought it.
I find that the dividing line between liking the movie and not liking the moving comes down to the dialogue. The first time I watched the movie, I did think it moved slow, but not the other times I watched it... I think just the opposite.
How did Maxwell do this?
For what it showed (and I wrote it did not show everything...) it was accurate to the book.
I acknowledged in my post that it left out the pre-war beginning...I acknowledged that Hancock suffered in the telling (good... because I like Jackson better)
I also said that choices had to be made when telling the story... a movie can't focus on everything...
If your 20-somethings didn't who Jackson was...they were not paying attention or too stupid to realize what they've seen. Don't blame that on the movie.
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