Entertaining History: The Civil War in Literature, Film, and Song Edited by Chris Mackowski, published by Southern Illinois University Press (2020) $26.50 paperback.
One of the more annoying questions on Civil War social media is “After Gods and Generals, will Hollywood ever make a Civil War film again.” Gods and Generals was a lousy movie that grossed less than 13 million dollars at the box office and got terrible reviews as an embarrassing 21st Century attempt by Ron Maxwell to revive the Lost Cause vision of Southern white glory. Invariably someone will respond that “political correctness” blocks anyone from ever making a new Civil War film.
I want to scream at my screen every time I see this nonsense. Months after Gods and Generals failed, the film Cold Mountain, which begins with the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg and follows Jude Law through his Odyssey back to Nicole Kidman through a lawless South, brought in $173 million in ticket sales. Robert Redford’s small film, The Conspirator (2010) on Mary Surrat got a similar box office to Gods and Generals without the expense of big battle reenactments. 2016’s Free State of Jones told the story of Confederate deserters and escaped slaves uniting to fight the Confederacy and took in 25 million dollars. 2019’s Harriet, about Harriet Tubman from slavery to her role in the Civil War, brought in 43 million dollars.
Then there are the two blockbusters. Christmas 2019 was dominated by Little Women, a tale written during Reconstruction and set during the Civil War Era. This story of the Civil War homefront brought in 206 million dollars at the box office. And in 2012, the film Lincoln took in $275 million and was talked about not just in movie reviews but on the news and in public affairs shows. I won’t even go into the many other films dealing with major features of the war, like slavery. 12 Years a Slave was among the best received historical dramas of the last decade, and it brought in 187 million dollars to boot!
Yet you would imagine from the cranky old men who dominate a few social media sites that the Civil War has been blacklisted! CANCELLED!!!
One of the most useful aspects of the twenty-five short essays in Entertaining History: The Civil War in Literature, Film, and Song is revealing the breath of impact the war has had on American arts and popular culture. The corpus goes well beyond Gods and Generals. The authors discuss everything from cycloramas and memoirs created in the 19th Century and still popular today, to films like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Box Office $116 million and more accurate than Gods and Generals). Some of the pieces are deep dives on a particular movie or book, others are stories of the authors personal encounter with a work. As in any collection of writing from nineteen authors, the success of the essays vary. Here are a sampling of those I liked:
-Nick Sacco warns us against an over-correction on Ulysses S. Grant. The general-turned-president had been underestimated for the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century. Post-Civil Rights Movement, he has been re-imagined into an unambiguous hero of the struggle for human equality. Sacco suggests using Grant’s well-written memoirs to take the measure of the man, while remembering that autobiography is always self-serving even when written by an honest man, but a man nonetheless. He also talks about the danger to the public historian of hero worship. Sacco works at Grant’s home in Missouri. It is tempting to become the “defense attorney” for the man who lived there, he writes, which can lead “to sloppy narratives that flatten the complexity of the past.”
-Chris Mackowski reminds us of the “Ken Burn’s Effect” on the public’s interest in the Civil War. While some historians deride the accuracy of Burns’ The Civil War, the nine-part PBS documentary drew in 40 million viewers. By contrast, Game of Thrones typically had 15 to 17.5 million watching. The facts of pre-streaming TV watching meant that most people who viewed The Civil War, did so on the same nights and it became “water cooler talk” for two weeks in 1990. The series was seminal in propelling the Civil War to the forefront of American historical consciousness particularly for the Boomer generation.
Mackowski’s companion essay on The Civil War’s lead storyteller, Shelby Foote, offers some interesting tidbits about the novelist’s life. For example, Foote’s three volume, 2934 page, history of the war was only selling about 4,500 copies a year before the Burns miniseries came out. Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative was favorably reviewed in the New York Times and The New Republic, but, if not exactly obscure, it was hardly a bestseller. When the Burn’s documentary aired, Foote’s book sold four hundred thousand copies in six months. I kept expecting Mackowski’s essay on Foote to touch more on the “Shelby Foote Effect” on popular understanding of the Civil War. It only did so glancingly. After 1990, Foote was elevated to the role once held by Bruce Catton, the American Civil War Oracle. The fact that his lovingly crafted stories of the war elided over the African American story and that his hero, Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave dealer and Ku Kluxer, was emblematic of Black oppression, created a misperception of the Confederate cause that anyone who attended a Civil War Roundtable meeting in the 1990s is intimately familiar with.
-Leaving no Ken Burns stone unturned, there is even a chapter on the documentary’s theme music, Ashokan Farewell. Composed by Jay Unger and performed with Molly Mason and Fiddle Fever, the instrumental piece is heard during 10% of the running time of the series! Jay Unger was another figure propelled to a sort of stardom by the series. I had seen him when he was on the trad music circuit in Upstate New York, playing at college coffeehouses and folk festivals where he might be heard by a few dozen to a few thousand people. But even today, if you are over 55 and you hear Ashokan Farewell you are almost certain to recognize it.
-Chris Barr, who worked for the National Park Service at Andersonville National Historic Site describes how a novel, a play, and movies impacted the way the Park Service interpreted the site for many years. The novel Andersonville, written in the wake of World War II, made the prison camp into the American Auschwitz in many readers’ minds, and this was reflected in park interpretation.
-Books about the war get a lot of attention. There is no Faulkner here, but novels like Cold Mountain and The Red Badge of Courage are featured, as are histories like Battle Cry of Freedom and the volumes of Bruce Catton. An article I really enjoyed was one on the Time-Life Civil War series. With silver pearl covers the twenty eight volumes contain great photos of civil war relics and sites, as well as beautiful reproductions of period paintings. Subscribers could be forgiven for spending more time on the illustrations than on the text.
As you would expect, movies and TV series like North and South get a lot of space in the book. Both Gone With the Wind and Twelve Years a Slave receive major treatment. Three Lincoln films, one historical and the other two fantastical, are included, as are both Glory and Gettysburg. There is plenty to chew on in this section.
Overall the book itself is entertaining and well-written. The essays are short, so if you don’t care about a particular book or movie, you can just jump to the next one. There are, inevitably, a lot of Civil War cultural works that are left out. No Robert Penn Warren or William Faulkner, for example. Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize three years ago is absent, as is Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award winner The Underground Railroad. Poetry is entirely missing, even though the war was the subject of some of Walt Whitman’s greatest works. But this short book could never try to be comprehensive. The overall effect of the book is to raise awareness of the continued popularity of the Civil War as a theme for artists and of the welcome reception of many in the public to these works.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
