To mark 50 years since the assassination of president Kennedy, I repost here a piece that appeared on the blog in January 2011.

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

What of America's most infamous assassin? "One is naturally tempted to ask whether John Wilkes Booth, son of the 'Mad Tragedian,' might have been found insane under existing laws," writes Michael W. Kauffman in American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 353. Wilkes's brother thought madness ran through the male portion of the family. But, in this case, notions of melancholy and madness were closely linked. And diagnosing someone from the the remove of nearly 150 years would certainly be difficult.

Historians often ask why people do the things they do. Is it trickier to answer that question about current figures than about those from ages past? Figuring out the motivations of men and women from long ago, like judging why an unstable young Arizona man went on a shooting spree, can be a tough game. David Hackett Fischer explored motivation in his controversial, argumentative Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970):



But that won't keep Americans from wondering, speculating, and trying to make some sense out of seemingly senseless acts of violence, past or present.

Kevin M. Levin*

[Crossposted from the Civil War Memory blog]

Last week's post on the Civil War Memory blog about the unveiling of three plaques honoringVirginia’s post-Civil War black politicians has me thinking about my old buddy, William Mahone. While Mahone is best remembered as the “Hero of the Crater” his role in launching and leading the state’s most successful third-party political movement has largely been forgotten. In Virginia it was intentionally ignored because what came to be known as the Readjuster Party (1879-83) was bi-racial. The arc from Mahone’s role in preventing a Union breakthrough outside Petersburg that left scores of black Union soldiers massacred on the Crater battlefield to creating an opportunity for the largest number of black Virginians to vote, go to school and serve in positions of local and state government just a few short years later could not be more striking. Could anyone in 1865 anticipate that it would be a former Confederate general who would bring Reconstruction to Virginia?

Is it time to recognize William Mahone publicly in some shape or form? I say yes, if for no other reason than it would help to bring into sharper focus a piece of Virginia’s history that places yesterday’s dedication in its proper context. In other words, post-Civil War Virginia makes absolutely no sense without a reference to Mahone and the Readjuster Party.  It matters, not simply because it’s part of Virginia’s history, but because it has something important to teach us as well. The period following the official years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) did not inevitably lead to Jim Crow. Interracial cooperation was not only possible in the South between 1877 and the turn of the twentieth century but a reality for a few short years in Virginia. Virginia’s Reconstruction was not forced on it by “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” but by legitimate stakeholders, who believed that a brighter future could be forged for both races. Finally, there is something juicy about all of this being introduced by a former Confederate general.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Admittedly, Mahone is not the most likeable person. In fact, in all the years that I researched the man I never caught more than a fleeting glimpse of any emotional life beyond that facial here. (BTW, I still can't picture the man laughing.) We like to be able to empathize with those historical figures we recognize and commemorate. More to the point, I still don’t fully understand why Mahone decided to forge a bi-racial coalition. Was he motivated by lingering bitterness over his railroad going into receivership in the early 1870s – a turn of events that Mahone blamed on Virginia’s Conservative elements. Was Mahone simply thirsty for political power and understood that interracial cooperation offered the best chance of success? Finally, to what extent was he genuinely interested in advancing the cause of the state’s black population? I don’t know, but I suspect that it’s a combination of all three as well as other factors. Mahone was a complicated guy and his motives were not likely pure, but than again, who among our most beloved public servants could make such a claim.

I don’t know what a proper commemoration of Mahone might look like. The city of Petersburg owns Mahone’s postwar home, which now serves as a library and was interestingly enough the scene of a civil rights protest that led to its integration in the 1960s. His boyhood home in Southampton County is owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Perhaps some kind of plaque could be unveiled on the capital grounds in Richmond. The form it takes doesn’t really concern me much.

What matters to me is the act of once again taking ownership of a small piece of history that we no longer have a reason to ignore.

Kevin M. Levin is an Instructor of American history at Gann Academy near Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and is currently writing a book on the history of Confederate camp servants and the myth of the black Confederate soldier. Levin’s essays have appeared online in The New York Times and the Atlantic as well as popular magazines and academic journals. Levin has been blogging at Civil War Memory since November 2005.

Randall Stephens

The Response by Sir William Goscombe John. Unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1923.

Ernest Hemingway didn't mince words.  The author of A Farewell to Arms claimed that World War I "was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."  Seeing the ravages of war up close, he served with distinction as an ambulance driver in Italy.  Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "lost generation," which applied to Hemingway and other wayward souls like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

What accounts for the gap between Hemingway's tone and the gallant, heroic one of war memorials?  Did region have a role to play in war remembrance?  How do we make sense of the conflict now that the last veterans have passed away?

As we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I Don Yerxa has been conducting a series of interviews on the subject in the pages of Historically Speaking.  Watch for other essays, forums, and interviews in the coming months.

Here at Northumbria University my colleague in the History Programme, James McConnel has put together a stellar series of lectures to commemorate the war in the northeast of England.  This region responded in greater numbers, per capita, than any other.  So, the memories of the war take on a special meaning here.  Below is the full list of the lectures and the dates.

Tynemouth World War I Commemoration Project. (Lectures to be held at 6pm at Northumbria University, Sutherland Building, Northumberland Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8JF).

9 October 2013
Professor Sir Hew Strachan, All Souls College Oxford
"The Ideas of War, 1914"

12 November 2013
Emeritus Professor Martin Pugh, Newcastle University
"Women and the First World War: Emancipation or Domesticity?"

3 December 2013
John Lewis-Stempel
"Six Weeks: The Life and Death of Junior Officers on the Western Front"

British Empire Union poster, 1918. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

21 January 2014
Emeritus Professor John Derry, Newcastle University
"Hindenberg and Luddendorf: A Brilliant Parnership?"

18 February 2014
Dr Edward Madigan, CWGC
"The Better Part of Valour: British Understandings of Courage during the First World War"

4 March 2014
Professor Gary Sheffield, University of Birmingham
"Douglas Haig, the First World War, and the British People"

8 April 2014
Professor Andrew Lambert, King’s College London
"The War at Sea from the July Crisis to the eve of Jutland"

8 May 2014
Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College London
"'Sharp Shooting Pains that Make Me Shout Out': A History of Disability and the First World War"

For more, click here.

Eric Schultz

I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful. 

The 150th commemoration included a retelling of the battle and featured first-person accounts.

Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town.

As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history.

For example, there were lots (and lots) of folks taking tours of the battlefield, often led by certified National Park Service guides.  To walk in the footsteps of soldiers and view the battle lines redefines history in a whole new way for many.  Likewise some of the largest groups could be found on Little Round Top, where Col. Joshua Chamberlain made his famous stand--a tribute not only to Chamberlain and his troops, but to the power of Hollywood and films like Gettysburg, capable of creating historical celebrities. 

There were plenty of other visitors taking self-guided tours, some with maps and some with iPods, and some with their noses pressed to air-conditioned windows as they followed along a self-guided auto tour.  There were individuals, couples and families, the latter often gathered around a monument while Dad took pictures and the youngest played surreptitiously on a Gameboy.  (Years later. . . Dad: “Remember when we took that great trip to Gettysburg?” Son: “Um, I think.”)  There’s no telling how many monuments and battlefield scenes were “Instagramed” that weekend, speaking of interesting new ways to access history.

At one event, a young Marine sat next to me.  He’d served three tours in Iraq and was now, in his words, “doing time” as an instructor.  He said he’d driven over from Quantico for the weekend, spent all day on his mountain bike touring the battlefield, went to every event he could attend, and planned to do the same for every 150th Civil War celebration he was able.  He was clearly and enthusiastically engaged in accessing history.

The bookstores were full, and, I’m told, did a landmark business in souvenirs and (I hope) books.  There were certainly plenty of people in hotel lobbies, restaurants and under trees reading as they tried to absorb and understand events.  At the same time, souvenirs are ever-important and, for that matter, first cousin to “relic hunting,” a time-honored (if not always honorable) way of accessing history.  Gettysburg’s famous copse of trees, perhaps the most sacred spot place on the battlefield because it represented the “high tide of the Confederacy” where Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s men were finally turned back, had to be fenced in as early as 1887 because so many souvenir hunters were cutting branches to make walking sticks.

A view of the battlefield, including tents of some of the reenactors, from the cupola of the new Seminary Ridge Museum.

Some ways of accessing the history of Gettysburg are clearly unwelcome.  The National Park Service has long held that the battlefield ought to be unblemished so that visitors can use "grounded imagination" to experience the battle.  When businessman Thomas Ottenstein erected a 307-foot galvanized steel viewing tower--“a classroom in the sky”--near the battlefield in 1974, it was enjoyed by many but seen by others as an abomination.  The structure lasted 21 years until the National Park Service seized it under eminent domain and knocked it down with explosive charges.

In Sacred Ground, Edward Tabor Linenthal describes the long, often controversial history of the Gettysburg battlefield as veterans attempted to access their own history.  Beginning in the 1870s, Pennsylvania chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) held reunions at Gettysburg.  With the dismantling of Reconstruction, Union troops were joined by Confederate veterans.  Combined groups tended to emphasize valor on both sides, as veterans like Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles proclaimed at the 25th reunion in 1888, "To-day there are no victors, no vanquished.  As Americans we may all claim a common share . . . in the new America born on this battlefield." 

Not everyone agreed.  Addressing a chapter of the GAR that same year, Bvt. Brig. General J.P.S. Gobin angrily declared that he was "tired of this gush and pretense for the glorification of the veteran simply because he wore a gray uniform with a Southern flag printed on his badge.  That badge meant treason and rebellion in 1861, and what it meant then it means now. . . ."   Others felt that in the rush to reconcile North and South, the plight of blacks and the issue of slavery were lost.

At the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913, enough time had passed that 55,000 Union and Confederate veterans converged on Gettysburg for a four-day celebration.  Festivities included 6,500 tents, 173 kitchens, stores filled with pennants and flags, and a handful of fistfights.  Nonetheless, the event emphasized collective heroism and healing, and featured the ideology of the Lost Cause that had developed in the postwar South.  Capt. Bennett H. Young, commander of the United Confederate Veterans now accessed a kind of combined history by saying, "It was not Southern valor nor Northern valor.  It was, thank God, American valor." There was a famous handshake near the copse of trees when 300 veterans of Pickett and Pettigrew’s charge and defense met.  Four years later Virginia became the first former Confederate state to erect a monument on the battlefield.

At the 75th in 1938, 1,400 Union and 500 Confederate--average age 94--were still hearty enough to gather at Gettysburg for the "Last Reunion of the Blue and the Gray."  But something interesting happened with the passing of the last veterans of the Civil War in the 1940s: A kind of enthusiastic “subculture” arose as a way to continue accessing history.  Civil War Roundtables (discussion groups begun in Chicago), relic hunters and collectors, war-gamers and, of course, reenactors emerged--the latter being among the most controversial.  Dressed in authentic period clothing and intent on recreating the battle experience in every way, reenactors were among the most visible visitors during my time at the Park.  I found General and Mrs. Lee escaping the heat in my hotel lobby, for example.  There were fields of tents spread around the park and soldiers at every turn.

Frankly, reenactment doesn’t seem like much fun to me.  I was hot enough in shorts, and much of the time I saw the troops, clothed in wool, standing at attention in the hot sun.  (Not to mention, I gave up sleeping in pup tents when my son graduated from Cub Scouts.)  And there is certainly a school of thought that abhors reenactors as much as it does galvanized steel “classrooms in the sky.”  Popular Civil War historian Bruce Catton was especially critical of battle enactments which, he said, "require us to reproduce, for the enjoyment of attendant spectators, a tin shadow-picture of something which involved death and agony for the original participants."

Despite the heat, guided tours of the battlefield and monument were in full swing throughout the 150th.

However, the view is entirely different among reenactors, who staged two large-scale battles during the 150th commemoration.  One participant wrote passionately afterwards, “The horror of the Civil War hit me then, in ways that history books and Ken Burns’ films never had.  I was watching real people, all of them Americans, killing each other.  I knew it wasn’t real, but I also knew that if it had been, I would have fallen on the ground and sobbed.”

It’s pretty hard to say that that’s not accessing history.

235,000 visited Gettysburg during the commemoration; they read, walked, drove, toured, listened, visited museums, bought souvenirs, took thousands of digital pictures, camped, mountain-biked and reenacted, accessing history in all sorts of interesting ways; one new film even uses drones to illustrate the battle. As with most things Gettysburg, however, it may be best to look to Abraham Lincoln for the final word: How we preserve and interpret the battle’s meaning--and by implication, find ways to make and keep it accessible--should be, he said, all part of the "great task remaining before us."