Posted on 01/05/2003 10:03:12 PM PST by kattracks
Almost all who visit Gettysburg, best preserved of all the Civil War battlefields, find it a deeply moving experience. This is truly hallowed ground. Here, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers fought the decisive battle of America's bloodiest war.
From the first clash of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, to Lee's attempt turn the Union flank at Little Round Top on the second day, to Pickett's Charge against the Union center on Seminary Ridge on the third, to Lee's bleeding retreat back over the Potomac as a frustrated Abraham Lincoln wondered why his newest commander, George Meade, had not finished Lee's army with its back to the swollen river -- it is an incredible story, told wonderfully well by the guides at Gettysburg Battlefield.
Now the story of the heroes in Blue and Grey is to be replaced with propaganda. The 1.8 million annual visitors to Gettysburg are to be indoctrinated in the politically correct history of the war.
"Gettysburg to Tell Story of Slavery During War," was the headline The Washington Times put on its story about how the 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." A $95 million visitors center and museum is going up to recast the battle in a new light.
"For the past 100 years," says Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar, "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. ... We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another."
Why the change? Unhappy that so many visitors to Gettysburg are white males, and so few are African-Americans, Latschar called in three historians to study how the Park Service was presenting the battle. The three wise men decided that the interpretive programs at Gettysburg had a "pervasive Southern sympathy." (How one can hear of 15,000 men and boys walking across a mile of open field into cannon and musket fire, in the name of God, country and Gen. Lee, without being put in awe and admiration, escapes me.)
Latschar then visited the Holocaust Museum and was inspired: "Our current museum (at Gettysburg) is absolutely abysmal. It tells no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason."
But one visits the Holocaust Museum to learn about the fate of the Jews under Hitler. One does not go there to learn about Dunkirk or D-Day. And Americans who cherish the battlefields of the Civil War -- Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas -- do not go there to be instructed on the evils of the Confederacy. Moreover, to convert every battlefield into an endless seminar on the evils of slavery and the South is a fine way to turn these sites of national unity into cauldrons of national division.
President Bush should stop the politicization of Gettysburg. To let it happen would be an abuse of office. It would be to permit ground made sacred by the blood of soldiers to be exploited by ideologues to reopen old wounds. The old battlefields will become new battlegrounds of the culture war. Does America really need that?
There are places to argue the great issues of 1861. Did the South have a right to secede? Was the cause of the war slavery, or secession, or Lincoln's refusal to let the South go in peace? Or was it tariffs, or a desire of the South to separate from a North with which it has less and less in common? Did Lincoln fight the Civil War to free the slaves? Or only to restore the Union?
The forums in which to debate these questions are books, editorials, classrooms, columns, seminars, TV shows. But for the Park Service to impose its orthodoxy on these questions and pervert battlefields to indoctrinate visitors in the party line is to dishonor these hallowed grounds.
That slavery is wrong no one today disbelieves. But when the South fired on Fort Sumter, there were eight slave states in the Union, only seven in the Confederacy. It was Lincoln's call to arms to invade the South that pushed North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas out of the Union.
In waging cultural war to abolish the West, Gramsci and his Marxist comrades dictated that all social institutions should be captured to advance the revolution -- from children's classrooms to college seminars. Now, Civil War battlefields are to become indoctrination centers of Political Correctness, unless we stop it.
©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Robert E. LEE gets more screen time than any of the Northern Generals in any of the recent movies. Lets face it Mead and Grant are Boring.
There was no "Gone with the Wind" movie about the North, LOL.
Michael and Jeff Shaara wrotes books about the Southern side of the War, and I don't know of any popular books about the Northern side of the Civil War, are there any?
Slavery was wrong and the story of slavery is a little over exposed, we've had Roots and Amstad, and I don't see them being replayed much on TV, wonder why?
according to a damnyankee colonel, about 25% of LEE's army was BLACK & "were armed and dressed in the same hateful damned gray rags as all the other filthy rebel scum were".
i am NOT holding my breath until they tell the TRUTH!
free dixie,sw
Well Said
the NPS has always served up a pack of damnyankee LIES, designed to deceive the ignorant & naive as to the TRUTH about the south's struggle for independence.
free dixie,sw
CSMC bump.
CSMC bump.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie NOW,sw
CSMC BUMP!
You left out the bookstore and restrooms (some places are a little too crowded to be watering the trees), but otherwise I'm with you.
I don't often approach the Park Service historians when I'm at a battlefield, but I do hobnob with them a bit at conferences and Roundtable events. They mostly strike me as solid-to-outstanding civil war military historians, as having a deep personal interest in the field, and as straight shooters on the political issues. When you get them out of uniform and away from their duty station (e.g. at a civil war conference), they are often fairly scathing about creeping political correctness in the NPS.
IMO, the real threat in NPS revisionism isn't that they'll bollix up Gettysburg, Antietam, or Shiloh. A Jesse Jackson, Jr. approved display or movie in the Visitors Center isn't the end of the world. The threat is that the NPS will, over time, change its recruitment and promotion practices and replace the military historians with social historians. That would be a loss of a very valuable resource. (For one thing, I'd have a much harder time finding Roundtable speakers.)
One already sees a lot more women staffing the battlefields, most of whom don't seem much interested in tactics, terrain, and the details of the fighting. We've had a few as Roundtable speakers when we want to vary our standard shot-and-shell program. The ladies do a perfectly fine job, but they want to talk about camp life, the homefront, care of the wounded, and how the soldiers celebrated Christmas. They go blank if you ask an order of battle or regimental history question. I'll grant that there's room for a bit (a very little bit) of social history at the battlefields, but I'd hate to see the military historians squeezed out, especially since most colleges give military history the back of the hand.
I recall a fairly hilarious rant on this subject from Richard McMurry, who is entertaining to begin with, to the effect that the reason most academic historians hate military history is pure envy. The military historians study something people are actually interested in. They write books that people actually buy and read, get to go to lively conferences, take interesting tours, and get out of the academic ghetto. He may have been right. Perhaps we have a professional historian who would like to comment.
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