The Brooklyn Rail

My coworker introduced themself to me as “a queer Jew” (this is in keeping with the circles I usually run in) and then wiped their hand on the woolen trousers of their Confederate uniform (this is not in keeping with the circles I usually run in) before shaking my hand. I was spending the summer at Old Fort Jackson in Savannah, Georgia as a living historian in a 100 percent wool Union uniform, part educator, part powder monkey, tasked with feeding the visitors the veggies of historical information and then presenting them with the dessert of a cannon or musket firing.

Every morning, I saw this coworker in the changing trailer, bobby pinning their kippah (the Jewish cap) to their hair so it wouldn’t move when they tipped their kepi (the army cap) to “the ladies,” who “don’t often give a fort of smelly men like us the honor of a visit.” They may be a smelly man at the fort, but they are nonbinary in civilian life, and were once listening to a podcast that they claimed discussed “leftist oceanography.” They bought a haversack modeled on one found on a Confederate dead at Gettysburg because it “looks kinda like the trans pride flag.”

Two months in, I watched the kippah fly off their head and into the moat after the bobby pins couldn’t withstand a particularly gentlemanly tip of the cap, and then watched them spend five minutes trying to fish it back out using the worm we used to clean the cannon. Perhaps a brush with the divine.

Of all my Confederate coworkers, they checked the most flagrantly unexpected demographic boxes, but they weren’t unique. Out of the seven soldiers at the fort, there was one definite conservative, loosely defined, and one possible conservative who owned a gun but also seemed willing to entertain just about any idea under the sun. The rest were liberals at the very least, and the term leftist was applied to more than just oceanography. We had one other Jewish person on staff, and a person of color, and they both chose to join the ranks of the pretend-Confederates. Apart from me, everyone on staff did.

Only one of the other educators (the person of color) highlighted a specifically rhetorical function to his uniform. It set up expectations of a sanitized taste of the Civil War, which was not at all what he gave. He talked about starvation and fear, mostly. For the rest of the soldiers, their reason for wearing the uniform was simple: the fort was Confederate for all but the final five months of the war. Our job was to do historical interpretation (roughly defined as shaping the mass of facts into something relevant and worth sharing), and my fellow soldiers held—or assumed—that a critical component of this was historical representation. This is to say, they wanted to be what the visitor would have seen at that exact spot in 1864. They were going for verisimilitude, and that necessitated Confederate butternuts and a freakish knowledge of stitch patterns usually not attained by anyone not collecting social security.

To be clear, the fort is not a shrine to the Confederacy. On my first day, my boss walked me around the site, and stressed that “from afar, what we’re doing might look like something that it’s not, but I want to assure you that we’re professionals, and that this isn’t some kind of good ole boys club.” This was something I absolutely found to be true, even if the results weren’t always consistent with my ideal for historical education. Instead of honoring the Confederacy, they wanted to achieve that oft-talked about, half-understood mission: bring history to life.

This ostensibly neutral representation-come-resurrection of “the past,” unfettered by concerns over the modern valences of Confederate iconography, seems to be what a lot of visitors wanted. They came up to us after the programs to applaud what we were doing. “You know,” a visitor said after a program that I did in tandem with a Confederate-dressed colleague, “a lot of folks are trying to take this away, they don’t want us to do this kind of thing no more. Talking about taking statues down and all that, just erasing our history cause they don’t like it.”

“Well,” I said, nodding like a school guidance counselor. “Yeah, it’s a, uh, it’s a delicate topic. And we really try to do it responsibly.” I would say I heard a compliment like this two to eight times a week. The visitors liked our perseverance and, really, our bravery in facing down the PC mob. In the same way, some visitors at my current site in New York’s Hudson Valley are displeased with what they feel is too strong a focus on the “dirty laundry” of the town’s settlers. When asked via survey what they would like less communication about, one member simply said “slavery.” The renaming of buildings originally christened after some of our town’s most prominent early residents and slaveholders provoked an outcry from those who think the town is erasing history.

This is a common talking point among a certain crowd, mostly Facebook-using, mostly right-leaning. They come out of the woodwork when a holiday is reconsidered, a monument is taken down, or a military installation/public school/baseball team changes its name. They say that our collective tolerance for discomfort has gotten too low, or that perhaps the low tolerance of a few is dictating the lives of too many. There’s a rote, mad-libs grievance that history is being “erased” just to eliminate some mental chafing, and that it’s bad for our understanding of our nation’s past. Robert Lee Hodge, a Civil War reenactor and preservationist, most famous for the “Civil Wargasm,” his epic battlefield-to-battlefield road trip chronicled by Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic, takes this stance on the Confederate monuments issue succinctly, measuredly, and well in a 2017 interview with China Central Television; the removal of Confederate monuments, he says, is just a band-aid solution that avoids having a real discussion about race in America. “I don’t glorify these things.” He gestures to a monument behind him. “Well maybe I did as a child. But as you mature you don’t glorify these things, I look at these things with reverence, and some level of respect, but also with questions.”

Hodge’s basic argument, that we learn more by letting reminders to history stand despite discomfort, is what I heard from so many visitors. There’s nothing wrong with this idea in the abstract, though it requires us to ignore some major practical defects i.e. that there are much more nuanced ways to deal with complicated figures with severe moral failings than a statue with a plaque that no one will read, as well as the undeniable fact that just blanket protecting all old monuments (as Hodge seems to be suggesting, and as a law in my home state does) primarily serves to protect monuments to groups and figures traditionally idolized at the expense of the marginalized (so, we’d be ignoring a lot). In context, the argument has another major flaw, and a heavy irony: what these folks laud as uncomfortable history is usually just the opposite.

At the fort, what visitors saw as commendable, non-woke even-handedness was in fact something more like avoidance. We wore uniforms and played drums and burned powder. Basically: we did the fun things. We played dress-up (which I love). We didn’t bring to life the racism that largely motivated the war. How could we? A good-faith effort was made to talk about slavery—each and every educator made it clear that slavery sparked the Civil War—but, usually unintentionally, talk of the South’s so-called peculiar institution was kept on the level of politicians and the richest of the rich and out of the realm of the sweaty, common, relatable soldiers that we were dressed up as. “Those people who had huge plantations and sat up on their porch, sipping mint juleps, that was the elite planter class, accounting for less than five percent of the Southern white population,” said the least condemnatory coworker of mine every day, after his discussion of the congressional balance of power between slave states and free states. It’s true, but it’s not helpful. It gives an out to too many people, living and dead. The visitors didn’t have to think about how those Southern Whites who didn’t own slaves still benefited from the presence of a mudsill class, or, even more challengingly, thought that Black people were only suited to subjugation, even if they were not the ones to own them.¹ Visitors didn’t have to hold simultaneously the notions that there were people a lot like them getting all hot and smelly and firing cannons, and that those same people thought and felt things that we find repugnant.

In other words, what folks read as uncomfortable history has really been made as comfortable for them as is possible without changing any facts. They think that it’s “unbiased” because it doesn’t implicate anyone. The Confederate soldiers get out spotless, because the visceral parts of a visitor’s day at the fort, the parts that are brought to life, don’t include any of the period’s most disturbing elements, which are of course the elements we most need to understand. What is left are morally unchallenging adventure stories.

So, surprise surprise, there are people around the US who are not particularly open to thinking critically about the dark corners of the American past. This is an undeniable problem. But most of them aren’t white supremacists, even though some of their ideas about history come from white supremacy. The devotion to statues and school names is not an active ideological crusade, even as it is the product of one that began over a century ago—regarding the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth was produced by many of the Confederacy’s founding fathers in the Reconstruction years, who insisted that race wasn’t a problem in the South as a way to (among other things) bring federal involvement in the South to an end. At some point in the century-and-a-half after the Civil War, the alluring lie that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery became a deeply felt truth in the minds of many white Southerners. The story of the Civil War became innocent, and many today are uncomfortable when asked to think about the ways in which it’s not.² Regardless of what some on the left say, the chief objection of most Lost Causers today to more accurate tellings of the Civil War doesn’t come from a political/ideological view that slavery should have continued, actually. If it did, why would they go to such lengths to protest that the war wasn’t about slavery? Enough bona fide white supremacists shout their beliefs crystal clear.

Most of my pleased visitors were, in the gentlest sense of the word, fans of the Confederacy (just as the most pissed-off visitors at the site here in the Hudson Valley are fans of the town’s Dutch settlers). They’re not pondering what a fallen state that existed for four years in the nineteenth-century means for America today, which is what most anti-Confederate activists do, or even so much what it meant for the America of fifty years ago, which is the contemplation that Hodge thinks monuments should invite. Rather, they’re swept up in the drama of The Civil War: A Historical Epic, and have been taken by the understandably appealing notion that Confederate soldiers didn’t die to preserve slavery. They came up to me to share stories about battlefield heroics. They marveled at how hot I must be in the uniform. They showed me pictures of the jackets, swords, and (in one case) cannons that they had purchased (“I was wondering if you could take a look at this and let me know if it’s safe to fire, for like the Fourth of July and that kind of thing.”). They asked me questions that they already knew the answers to about where units were on given dates to prove how much sex they have.

They didn’t want to think about slavery, and we didn’t do a good job at forcing them to in a substantive way. What they did think about was what time the cannon would go off. They planned their trips around it. Historical tourists across the country believe that they want uncomfortable history, when what they actually want is something that’s technically true and totally toothless, uncomfortable only insofar as being something that woke moralists take issue with. What they want is a way of getting close to the stories that they love without anyone ruining their fun with an excess of challenging ideas that take them out of the historical fantasy.

What customers pay for at sites like Fort Jackson, then, is an aesthetic experience more than it is a historical one. A fan of history going to a historic site and seeing a guide dressed in period garb firing a cannon or working a loom gets the same feeling as a Lord of the Rings fan touring New Zealand. Their relationship to historical figures is, for all practical purposes, the same as their relationship to fictitious characters, the time period their fantasy setting. As such, the rejection of “new” versions of American history is a pop cultural phenomenon. This doesn’t mean it’s a good thing that so many people are willing to adopt an uncritical stance towards the past; it’s definitely a bad thing. Because of it, many can’t recognize the myriad racial problems that America has been saddled with because we never righted the (often unacknowledged) wrongs of the past, never properly set the broken bones before they healed crooked—the failure of Reconstruction is but one example. But it does mean it is a different thing from how the phenomenon is usually portrayed. The relevant verb isn’t upholding or contemplating; it’s consuming.

Faulkner said that Pickett’s Charge, the Gettysburg assault at which the Cause was Lost, captured the imagination of “every Southern boy fourteen years old” in his time. Judging by my experience in the schools of Virginia, North Florida, and Georgia, this isn’t as universal as it once was, but my resume speaks to the powerful grip that the Civil War still holds on folks.³ I think of all the visitors who wanted to talk battlefield heroics with me, even though there wasn’t any combat at the site. I think of Charles Dew, a brilliant historian whose class on the Old South I was fortunate enough to take, who wrote that he was gifted a .22-caliber rifle and a copy of Lee’s Lieutenants when he himself was a fourteen-year-old boy in Jim Crow-era Florida. He loved the Civil War, and his “focus was on the battlefield and Lee’s valiant men, who had fought so long and so hard,” his thoughts occupied hardly at all by the causes of the war.⁴ I think of Ty Seidule, Civil War historian and author of the excellent Robert E. Lee and Me, who grew up reading Meet Robert E. Lee and whose first adult book was Gone with the Wind. Reading about Rhett, Scarlett, Ashley, et al., he “experienced the escapist rush, the euphoria that comes with reading.”⁵ In his early days as a college professor, he was “seduced” by the “smell of gunpowder” into focusing near-exclusively on the “great captains of military history.”⁶

The specific appeal of the Civil War certainly varies from person to person, but there’s something to be said for its immediacy and tangibility in America. For those who live in the former Confederacy, the battlefields where those “great captains” fought are backyards. Growing up, the rubble of mills from the Civil War was a fixture of family hikes around Atlanta; I knew how far along I was in my jogging route from historical markers describing troop movements. For those children who grow up with the incalculably large corpus of articles, books, movies, and shows related to the Civil War (most of which, until recently, offered an offensively sanitized version of the conflict) it’s easy to play in the Civil War, and as adults it’s easy to play as well, if not as a reenactor then by making a game of seeing the sights and memorizing the details. The battles were far larger and better documented than those of the American Revolution (Mathew Brady’s photography is still compelling), and they were certainly more local than those of America’s twentieth-century conflicts. On top of this all, it’s easy for people to find an underdog in the ragtag, rural South, which never had the numbers or the industry but fought anyway. There are still many Southerners who feel that the region is looked down upon by the rest of the country; I know I bristle when a Yankee puts on a Southern accent to index stupidity and backwardness. Many then like to hold on to the disappearing shreds of the glorious against-all-odds past that’s been sewn together for them. I do not. I’ll note, though, that the two most insistent States’ Rights-ers I met were both from Ohio. (“Well of course,” one of them said to me after, “it was really about states rights.” He cackled in a hee hee hee sort of way. “But you’re probably not allowed to say that, don’t worry, I won’t make you.”) Rooting for the South can have a forbidden fruit quality, but it’s just one of many things that make consuming the Civil War fun for people. When the diaries and photographs and battlefields are right there, it’s easy to become a fan of those great captains.

And now, at battlefields, in museums, at homesteads, and in the country’s classrooms, some liberals want to take it away, and that makes these fans angry. Even for those of us who find the Confederate flag repellent, the emotional engine here is relatable. As a white male teen who was very into reading David Foster Wallace, I remember feeling attacked when one of my college friends said he was a domestic abuser and an author existing solely for white males. If I were simply thinking about it, the remark might strike me as kind of reductive but harmless. But in the moment, I was somewhere in the emotional zone of kinda pissed. It felt like I was being called a rube, or worse, someone who was part of The Problem, just for enjoying something. If I were a woman, it would be interesting and different and not a problem if I were really into Murakami or whatever problematic dude, I thought spitefully while blushing and laughing and trying to draw attention to the Jhumpa Lahiri and the Alice Munro on my shelf, contorting my waifish body to hide the Thomas Pynchon from view.

It sucks. Being told that the things that we like are somehow bad and wrong sucks. It places us into an uncomfortable position of self-reflection. Why was this the thing that I resonated with? What does that say about me? It creates guilt over something that feels out of our control; we typically don’t make a choice to like a movie or a book or even a person (and when we do to, say, impress a hot intellectual, the process of getting it to be a not-choice is hard and long). The comments feel not just accusatory, they feel persecutory. We are angry to be implicated in an evil by proxy of a story we identify with, perhaps because anger is easier than shame.

When people hear about changes to museums or public parks or history curricula, these are the emotions in play. They’re pleased when they’re offered a non-woke treatment of their historical figure of choice, and pissed if we attempt something that they experience as a character assassination—not just of the historical figure, but of themselves. This is happening everywhere as historians and laypeople alike continue to pull skeletons out of the national closet for those white people who didn’t already know. From slavery to the slaughter of Indigenous people to the exploitation of lower-class workers, there isn’t one historic site in America that isn’t grappling with some form of original sin, and invariably there are visitors who bristle. I think often of a review left by a visitor to Monticello, recounted in this 2019 Washington Post article on the site’s attempts to address slavery. They said that “for someone like [themself], going to Monticello is like an Elvis fan going to Graceland. Then to have the tour guide essentially make constant references to what a bad person he really was just ruined it for me.”

In the day-to-day of historical education, history fans’ rejection of “woke” history is less often Kirk Lyons defending the Aryan Nation and more often me reading DFW. That doesn’t mean that it’s any less powerful. Think about the vitriol with which gamers reacted to arguments that their entertainment of choice was misogynistic during Gamergate. For the history fans, it’s the same. All of this evaluating of the story is a party foul committed by some fringe group of overeducated assholes who need to bitch about everything with reckless disregard for everyone else’s vibe.

In the coming years, a slew of people will be faced with a story that runs contrary to the one they enjoy, be it in classrooms or at historic sites. They will feel that guilty and persecuted feeling that I experienced when my friend told me that the books I loved were just for the whites. It’s a feeling that doesn’t come from politics, even if many might ascribe it to that. The emotion doesn’t come from discomfort with the notion that Black people shouldn’t be held in bondage, or that Indigenous people shouldn’t have been slaughtered; the emotion comes from an understanding that these things were wrong. It’s a personal shame. That is uncomfortable learning, and it’s far more involved—and far more necessary—than anything a statue of a slaveholder with a contextualizing plaque can give us. For now, it’s often far too easy to separate the human stories that people want to hear from the atrocities that came with them. Perhaps that’s the limits of making history fun; no matter how demographically predisposed a historical interpreter or teacher may be to a healthily woke critique of the topic they’re teaching about (by virtue of, say, their queer Jewishness), a discussion of heavy topics that seeks primarily to entertain history fans is bound to fail, either by glossing over the most upsetting parts entirely or by failing to integrate them into the engaging parts (often the “fun” parts) that bring history to life. I’m not advocating reenactments of atrocities, but I am saying that we need to commit to integrating the atrocities into the most tangible, felt parts of our work—bringing out reproduction manacles or narrating accounts of the early violence of colonization engages readers’ sensory imagination really effectively. The more we do this, the more we take the wonderful chance of making fans of history productively upset. Until our canonical stories have the drama and the accountability inextricably linked, the “uncomfortable history” that so many fans of history flock to will remain all too anodyne.

1. For a thorough treatment of the place slavery had in soldiers’ thoughts and feelings, I look to James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades.
2. Telling examples of this phenomenon can be found in “Why Confederate Lies Live On,” Clint Smith’s journalistic piece on Confederate memory for The Atlantic.
3. Connor Williams, head of the Naming Commission responsible for renaming US military installations christened after Confederates, recently wrote “Treason Made Odious Again,” an excellent piece touching upon the softening of Confederate apologists in recent years, for the Journal of the Civil War Era.
4. Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 1.
5. Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me, 27.
6. Seidule, 180.