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.
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.
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!
This upsets me deeply. My 4xggf was a prisoner of both Andersonville and Libby prisons. I hope you don't mind if I post his bio here to show what these men went through. I cry for him every time I think of it. I heard the stories from my great grandmother who heard the stories from her great grandmother (Isaac's wife).
"(III) Isaac B. Palmer, son of William (2) and Elizabeth (Ferris) Palmer, was born July 15, 1820, in Greenwich township, Connecticut, where he engaged in the oyster business. In 1861, that being the first year of the Civil War, he enlisted in Company C, Twenty-eighth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers, for a term of nine months, and served thirteen, reenlisting in the Sixth Connecticut Regiment. While in the latter command he was taken prisoner and spent ten and a half months in captivity. At the time of his capture he weighed from one hundred and forty-five to one hundred and fifty pounds, but when released his weight had been so reduced by privation as not to exceed ninety pounds. On his return home he again engaged in the oyster business. In politics he was first a Democrat, but later became a Republican. He married Armenia Jones, born in 1829, in Poundridge, daughter of Ebenezer and Maria (Dixon) Jones. Mr. Palmer died in December, 1888." -From Encyclopedia of Connecticut Biography, genealogical-memorial: representative citizens. Vol. 10. Pages 161-162. Boston, MA: American Historical Society, 1917. " (The book has dates and info that differ from other records. Isaac was enlisted in Company H of the 28th Regiment, not Company C. His death records show his birth date to be 15 Jul 1822 and his death date to be 2 Nov 1889.)
Well, the flyer Kevin reproduced doesn't actually say they are going to have kids dress as Confederate Soldiers but the image certainly suggests that. As Kevin observes, I don't have any issues with the National Park Service doing activities to teach contemporary citizens about the daily lives of Civil War soldiers. I don't think this activity is broadly appropriate at Andersonville unless the focus is on the lives of the men held there. And, if were being done else where I am not comfortable with the implied suggestion that it is okay to come and be a Confederate solder. Although the daily lives of men in the Confederate States armies would not have been a great deal different from the lives of men in the United States armies.
But I am not entirely comfortable with idea of saying no to dressing as a Confederate. Not when German veterans are present at D-day observances and Japanese veterans at Pearl harbor observances. I'm not necessarily comfortable with either of these practices but I'm also not sure I am opposed.
I think this event at Andersonville ranks with a fund raiser I remember conducted by a Missouri County historical society during the sesquicentennial. That organization raffled off, a night in a slave cabin. I think both are inappropriate but at the sometime I think both have teaching value if done right. I know the event in Missouri was not done 'right."
My friend and fellow historian Evan Kutzler once worked at Andersonville as a park ranger. I quoted him in the post. He just posted this piece, which he wrote five years ago. It turns out that this event will fall on the anniversary of the first Decoration Day at Andersonville in 1869:
Government "shutdowns," of various kinds, hurt people and some of the suffering at Andersonville in 1868 and 1869 was the product of laying off federal employees. It was also a factor—among many—leading to the first Decoration Day at Andersonville in 1869.
At the beginning of 1868, two hundred freedpeople lived at Andersonville and were engaged in landscaping a new Andersonville National Cemetery that never saw use. These monthly government jobs paid lower than local contracts negotiated by the Freedman's Bureau, but working at Andersonville had its benefits: it was not plantation work; there was a school nearby; and since summer 1865, it had been a safe place for families. However, the new cemetery plan went against government instructions to minimize costs and, when the Quartermaster General discovered its scale and cost, most of these laborers lost their jobs. Most chose to stay at Andersonville anyway.
Violence was never far off. The freedpeople at Andersonville participated in peaceful elections in November 1867 and April 1868, but that July white county authorities sanctioned—and participated in—a raid that evicted scores of men, women, and children from their homes at gunpoint. Those who remained or returned took caution, armed themselves, and posted sentries to ward off night raids by disguised men on horseback. Despite threats of being fired, the remaining cemetery workers organized a "Grant Club" and that September marched through the streets of the Andersonville town. Making good on his threat, the cemetery superintendent, a Democrat, fired them but then rehired them later that afternoon. The workers got revenge in 1869 when they reported that the superintendent had been illegally renting out government mules. All in all, the Andersonville march in September 1868 could have been much worse. In Camilla, at the southern end of the same congressional district, marchers protested the ousting of twenty-eight black representatives from the Georgia State assembly. White men shot dozens down. Still, things were getting worse at Andersonville. Elections that November were a mess. At the beginning of 1869, the Ku Klux Klan drove off a northern minister with a death threat. It remained a dangerous time.
It was with this recent experience that black students at Sumter School, preparing for spring examination exercises, learned that white Georgians were planning to decorate the graves of Confederate guards on Tuesday, April 27, 1869. These rebel graves were adjacent to Union graves and on the other side of a small wooden fence. Students reached the cemetery at 7:30 a.m., approximately twenty minutes before sunrise in an era before Daylight Savings. Preempting the Confederate mourners, students spreads oak leaves and flowers on the 13,000 Union graves and the graves of Confederate guards. “The ladies and gentlemen who came during the day from Macon and Americus covered their soldiers’ graves with beautiful bouquets,” a northern teacher wrote, “but had none for the martyred sons of the Union.”
Decoration Days were much bigger in the following years and involved thousands of people making their way to Andersonville. Yet the first Decoration Day at Andersonville stands out because it was performed after a year of firings, protests, threats and violence. It was also an act that could be interpreted in several ways. Was it an act of forgiveness? Was it an assertion of moral superiority? Was it a continuation of subtle subversion perfected under slavery but still applicable in the violence and recent backsliding of Reconstruction? Perhaps it meant different things to the forty-five or so students who participated.
Bravo for calling out this grotesque perversion of what can actually be an honorable method of sharing and building Civil War memory: reenactments. I've never beeen to one, but I'm a close correspondent on Civil War memory matters with Erik Curren, a scholarly impersonator of General Grant. Erik has a Ph.D. in English and, as I say, he brings scholarly scrupulousness to his portrayal.
(As to that movie, if I'm correctly informed, it doesn't bother with attempting, in fiction, to base itself on any coherent political grounding. It just seeks to inflict a random sense of horror. Well, there's a certain category of American that might include some who need to see the movie to motivate them to think twice. I'm talking about swaggering, goofball special-ops wannabes in their special-ops costumes and with their big ol' intimidating war weaponry. But maybe their number is now actually small, with many of them already in jail because of their 1/6 betrayals of America. And maybe most of the rest will recognize that they have a nice couch, a nice TV, and a nice fridge with beer in it, and will just stop the violence-threatening self-beclowning.)
Reenacting is low hanging fruit for historic sites and museums. It appeals to a certain subset of audience segments that you can always count on to show up if big boom booms are involved. It gooses your visitation numbers and for some managers, that's all that matters.
Yet they'll overlook the institutional posture that doing this conveys to potential visitors and non-visitors. It's a threshold barrier that repels potential audiences. It tells them that yeah, this place tolerates fat old racists waving Confederate flags. (May or may not be true, but that's the impression it gives.) Imagine trying to woo non-white audiences with this program and the way it's presented.
Exploring the lives of Civil War soldiers, US and CS, is a legitimate experience for sites to offer. Using this method can do it, but they tend to overlook all the other things it does in terms of saying who you are and who you want as an audience. To do this in this day and age is just ... unbelievable.
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/
This upsets me deeply. My 4xggf was a prisoner of both Andersonville and Libby prisons. I hope you don't mind if I post his bio here to show what these men went through. I cry for him every time I think of it. I heard the stories from my great grandmother who heard the stories from her great grandmother (Isaac's wife).
"(III) Isaac B. Palmer, son of William (2) and Elizabeth (Ferris) Palmer, was born July 15, 1820, in Greenwich township, Connecticut, where he engaged in the oyster business. In 1861, that being the first year of the Civil War, he enlisted in Company C, Twenty-eighth Regiment, Connecticut Volunteers, for a term of nine months, and served thirteen, reenlisting in the Sixth Connecticut Regiment. While in the latter command he was taken prisoner and spent ten and a half months in captivity. At the time of his capture he weighed from one hundred and forty-five to one hundred and fifty pounds, but when released his weight had been so reduced by privation as not to exceed ninety pounds. On his return home he again engaged in the oyster business. In politics he was first a Democrat, but later became a Republican. He married Armenia Jones, born in 1829, in Poundridge, daughter of Ebenezer and Maria (Dixon) Jones. Mr. Palmer died in December, 1888." -From Encyclopedia of Connecticut Biography, genealogical-memorial: representative citizens. Vol. 10. Pages 161-162. Boston, MA: American Historical Society, 1917. " (The book has dates and info that differ from other records. Isaac was enlisted in Company H of the 28th Regiment, not Company C. His death records show his birth date to be 15 Jul 1822 and his death date to be 2 Nov 1889.)
Well, the flyer Kevin reproduced doesn't actually say they are going to have kids dress as Confederate Soldiers but the image certainly suggests that. As Kevin observes, I don't have any issues with the National Park Service doing activities to teach contemporary citizens about the daily lives of Civil War soldiers. I don't think this activity is broadly appropriate at Andersonville unless the focus is on the lives of the men held there. And, if were being done else where I am not comfortable with the implied suggestion that it is okay to come and be a Confederate solder. Although the daily lives of men in the Confederate States armies would not have been a great deal different from the lives of men in the United States armies.
But I am not entirely comfortable with idea of saying no to dressing as a Confederate. Not when German veterans are present at D-day observances and Japanese veterans at Pearl harbor observances. I'm not necessarily comfortable with either of these practices but I'm also not sure I am opposed.
I think this event at Andersonville ranks with a fund raiser I remember conducted by a Missouri County historical society during the sesquicentennial. That organization raffled off, a night in a slave cabin. I think both are inappropriate but at the sometime I think both have teaching value if done right. I know the event in Missouri was not done 'right."
Amazing. Unbelievable. Erasure pretending to be remembrance...
My friend and fellow historian Evan Kutzler once worked at Andersonville as a park ranger. I quoted him in the post. He just posted this piece, which he wrote five years ago. It turns out that this event will fall on the anniversary of the first Decoration Day at Andersonville in 1869:
Government "shutdowns," of various kinds, hurt people and some of the suffering at Andersonville in 1868 and 1869 was the product of laying off federal employees. It was also a factor—among many—leading to the first Decoration Day at Andersonville in 1869.
At the beginning of 1868, two hundred freedpeople lived at Andersonville and were engaged in landscaping a new Andersonville National Cemetery that never saw use. These monthly government jobs paid lower than local contracts negotiated by the Freedman's Bureau, but working at Andersonville had its benefits: it was not plantation work; there was a school nearby; and since summer 1865, it had been a safe place for families. However, the new cemetery plan went against government instructions to minimize costs and, when the Quartermaster General discovered its scale and cost, most of these laborers lost their jobs. Most chose to stay at Andersonville anyway.
Violence was never far off. The freedpeople at Andersonville participated in peaceful elections in November 1867 and April 1868, but that July white county authorities sanctioned—and participated in—a raid that evicted scores of men, women, and children from their homes at gunpoint. Those who remained or returned took caution, armed themselves, and posted sentries to ward off night raids by disguised men on horseback. Despite threats of being fired, the remaining cemetery workers organized a "Grant Club" and that September marched through the streets of the Andersonville town. Making good on his threat, the cemetery superintendent, a Democrat, fired them but then rehired them later that afternoon. The workers got revenge in 1869 when they reported that the superintendent had been illegally renting out government mules. All in all, the Andersonville march in September 1868 could have been much worse. In Camilla, at the southern end of the same congressional district, marchers protested the ousting of twenty-eight black representatives from the Georgia State assembly. White men shot dozens down. Still, things were getting worse at Andersonville. Elections that November were a mess. At the beginning of 1869, the Ku Klux Klan drove off a northern minister with a death threat. It remained a dangerous time.
It was with this recent experience that black students at Sumter School, preparing for spring examination exercises, learned that white Georgians were planning to decorate the graves of Confederate guards on Tuesday, April 27, 1869. These rebel graves were adjacent to Union graves and on the other side of a small wooden fence. Students reached the cemetery at 7:30 a.m., approximately twenty minutes before sunrise in an era before Daylight Savings. Preempting the Confederate mourners, students spreads oak leaves and flowers on the 13,000 Union graves and the graves of Confederate guards. “The ladies and gentlemen who came during the day from Macon and Americus covered their soldiers’ graves with beautiful bouquets,” a northern teacher wrote, “but had none for the martyred sons of the Union.”
Decoration Days were much bigger in the following years and involved thousands of people making their way to Andersonville. Yet the first Decoration Day at Andersonville stands out because it was performed after a year of firings, protests, threats and violence. It was also an act that could be interpreted in several ways. Was it an act of forgiveness? Was it an assertion of moral superiority? Was it a continuation of subtle subversion perfected under slavery but still applicable in the violence and recent backsliding of Reconstruction? Perhaps it meant different things to the forty-five or so students who participated.
Bravo for calling out this grotesque perversion of what can actually be an honorable method of sharing and building Civil War memory: reenactments. I've never beeen to one, but I'm a close correspondent on Civil War memory matters with Erik Curren, a scholarly impersonator of General Grant. Erik has a Ph.D. in English and, as I say, he brings scholarly scrupulousness to his portrayal.
https://usgrant200.com/historic-interpreters/erik-curren/
(As to that movie, if I'm correctly informed, it doesn't bother with attempting, in fiction, to base itself on any coherent political grounding. It just seeks to inflict a random sense of horror. Well, there's a certain category of American that might include some who need to see the movie to motivate them to think twice. I'm talking about swaggering, goofball special-ops wannabes in their special-ops costumes and with their big ol' intimidating war weaponry. But maybe their number is now actually small, with many of them already in jail because of their 1/6 betrayals of America. And maybe most of the rest will recognize that they have a nice couch, a nice TV, and a nice fridge with beer in it, and will just stop the violence-threatening self-beclowning.)
Reenacting is low hanging fruit for historic sites and museums. It appeals to a certain subset of audience segments that you can always count on to show up if big boom booms are involved. It gooses your visitation numbers and for some managers, that's all that matters.
Yet they'll overlook the institutional posture that doing this conveys to potential visitors and non-visitors. It's a threshold barrier that repels potential audiences. It tells them that yeah, this place tolerates fat old racists waving Confederate flags. (May or may not be true, but that's the impression it gives.) Imagine trying to woo non-white audiences with this program and the way it's presented.
Exploring the lives of Civil War soldiers, US and CS, is a legitimate experience for sites to offer. Using this method can do it, but they tend to overlook all the other things it does in terms of saying who you are and who you want as an audience. To do this in this day and age is just ... unbelievable.