There’s a new movie out about what the next civil war might look like. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. I have not seen it and I probably won’t before it drops on Netflix or some other streaming service.
The movie is getting a good deal of attention at a time when many Americans are fearful of increased political division and violence. The movie appears to be doing an effective job of manifesting those fears, though it seems to me that it is just another excuse to blow up iconic monuments and buildings like the Lincoln Memorial and White House.
Contrast that with an event planned at Andersonville National Historic Site, where children will have the opportunity to drill as Civil War soldiers. That’s right. The Civil War’s most notorious prison camp, where close to 13,000 Americans died defending this nation and whose commandant was executed for war crimes, wants to give kids a taste of what life was like for Civil War soldiers.
I have a great deal of respect for the work that National Park Service historians and other employees do to maintain and interpret some of our most important historic sites around the country, but this seems highly inappropriate.
A former park ranger at Andersonville posed the following in response:
I can't imagine Manzanar National Historic Site inviting the public to learn how to march like the Army Military Police guarding the internment camp or a generic "World War II soldier." I'd be surprised if Sand Creek National Monument brought kids in to drill like Colorado militiamen. I doubt anyone would rebuild HMS Jersey, where Americans were imprisoned during the Revolutionary War, so that kids could learn about life as a British sailor. And here the U.S. government encourages children to dress up as guards at the deadliest Confederate prison.
I can’t say whether children will actually be wearing Confederate uniforms, but that’s not really the point here. Union soldiers didn’t drill at Andersonville. They starved. They fell victim to disease. They died.
There is nothing wrong with holding an event to teach the public about the life of the Civil War soldier, but context and place matter. Perhaps this program will reenact Union soldiers, who ‘crossed the line only’ to be shot by Confederate guards.
This is certainly not the worst thing that can happen at a historic site, even at a place like Andersonville. The employees certainly didn’t intend to be insensitive. In fact, I suspect that they would be hard pressed to even explain why someone would take issue with this program.
That said, I can’t help but contrast the public conversation surrounding the movie Civil War, the insistence that it be taken seriously and with all the violence that it portends and our long history of overlooking or making light of the violence of our real civil war.
We don’t need a Hollywood movie to dramatize the dangers and brutal violence of a possible civil war. We could just look more closely and honestly at the one we actually fought not too long ago.
Kevin, thank you for mentioning Manzanar as a latter-day concentration camp -- the very term was used by FDR himself in arguing with his cabinet to start them for my forebears' generations. That argument included Atty Gen Francis Biddle, whose (overruled) legal opinion that to incarcerate American Citizens without due cause was unConstitutional.... Something that it took over 4 decades to affirm!
My dad was a latter-day Andersonville dead-line corollary. In an oral history I conducted in 1990 with him, he related how one night in Manzanar he was unable to sleep. He had just recently arrived in the high-desert country camp, Manzanar, from the lowlands of the San Gabriel Valley where he was in a TB sanitarium -- segregated, for Japanese only.
Dad probably was unaware of the Manzanar Riot -- recently corrected to 'Massacre'. In December 1942 inmates pissed off at conditions marched to the Administration Office. A large crowd walked there but were intercepted and mowed down by the MPs behind machine guns. The troops, who had been continuously egged on by their Sgt to "Hate Japs" didn't hesitate. Two inmates died of their wounds.
Dad had arrived a few months later transferred from Hillcrest, specifically created to house Japanese TB patients uprooted from "civilian" sanitaria. He went to Manzanar because the thin air was to help his lungs recover.
That night, too new to realize the written and unwritten rules, he went on a walk and blundered into the 'dead line" near the barbed wire fence. Immediately a searchlight from the watchtower illuminated him and an order rang down to stop else he be shot at. (Manzanar "residents" were told that the armed towers and barbed wire was to protect THEM from Americans in distant Owens Valley small towns!)
What saved my dad? First, he'd been drafted by the Imperial Japanese Army and was trained in a tommy-gun assault company. The first thing they knew: the enemy (Manchurians) would shine bright light in a night attack so as to burn their retinas, blind them, and blunt the IJA assault. So dad averted his eyes.
Second, as an infantryman, he knew the sounds of rifle hammers being cocked. So he froze.
Third, as an American, he understood English and knew what "Stop or I'll shoot" meant!
Was he mad? Only for the rest of his life.
Throughout the war, about a half-dozen men in the concentration camps were murdered by trigger-happy MPs. One paraplegic was gunned down in his wheelchair for attempting to escape! --into the desert, and the MP was exonerated in a court-martial. (as were they all).
My dad was an easy-going man, a convert to Christianity and was a pacifist even though he tried to enlist in the Army while at Manzanar out of gratitude for all the favors the USA had done him! (I know, a lifetime of pondering results in a very short list of reasons!) Dad was ruled 4-F due to his recent TB and he still tried to get into the war effort. The OSS (CIA's predecessor) finally hired him as a translator.
To bring this back to the CW: The NY Times just published an article on California's slavery reparations effort, focusing on a longtime friend, Don Tamaki. He was a co-instigator of the time war reparations were argued out of the US Government, and the only member of the state's panel that was not African American. He speaks on how this study broadened his insight on bias dating previously to 1882, to realizing 1619 imposed a different legacy of forced incarceration on African Americans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/us/california-reparations-effort.html
An earlier interview out of the SF Japanese American community newspaper is at:
https://www.nichibei.org/2023/02/one-on-one-with-attorney-donald-k-tamaki/
I might view 'Civil War' but likely only after the latest president to create concentration camps (for Latino infants snatched from their parents) is tried and meets Justice. At least FDR did not do this to Nikkei families; 3 of my uncles were under 5 in Jerome, Arkansas. Nearby, another California boy, George, later known as Ensign Sulu of the Enterprise, was also tossed into a tarpaper shack along with his parents.
Which reminds me, I will attend the Jerome-Rohwer Pilgrimage in June. It will honor all who were incarcerated, and this year, special thanks to a 99-year old former local mayor who spent about 30 years preserving the legacy of the inmates and the camps. Nobody involved is wearing any stinkin' uniforms (credit to Alfonso Bedoya), either!
Letters if a young man who died at Andersonville, age 25. https://irishamericancivilwar.com/2024/04/20/andersonville-irish-spotlight-grave-5212-edward-carter-my-hand-trembles-with-joy-the-last-letters-of-a-leitrim-emigrant/