Richard Slotkin

For those who think politics and war do not or should not mix will find their attitudes corrected and enlightened by Slotkin's scholarly and readable book . It is amazing that with such disharmony and growing lack of trust and cooperation between President Lincoln and his most important general, McClellan, that the North was able to get anything done. McClellan is shown to have a robust antagonism and paranoia greater towards his President, the Republican Radicals, and policies than his show more disregard for the South. What brought Davis and Lee to Antietam is largely motivated by the timing of events around them that provoked the need to bring the war to the North. How this translated onto the battlefield is done masterfully in very understandable way by Slotkin.

QUOTES: (pages 402-403) “Lincoln, like Lee, risked what he could not afford to lose, to gain objectives that were, as he saw them, essential to winning the war. His appointment of McClellan, after Pope's disaster, outraged nearly all of his cabinet and the most powerful leaders of his party in Congress. His issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the subsequent firing of McClellan threatened to split the coalition of War Democrats, moderate and Radical Republicans that sustained his administration and the war effort, at a time when his own prestige and public standing were at a low point. Lincoln also ran the risk of an open breach with General McClellan, at a moment when the general's prestige was enhanced by victory, while his civilian partisans were calling for a 'dictatorship' and his staff muttering threats of a military coup. Even if those threats were just talk, a public declaration by McClellan that he opposed the president's policy would have created a constitutional crisis and undermined the president's authority as commander in chief while the nation was in the midst of revolution and civil war.
Like Lee, Lincoln judged his opponents accurately enough to escape actual defeat.”

(page 414) “Ultimately, Then, The Emancipation Proclamation and the strategic program that went with it would lead to Union victory. But only with benefit of hindsight does Antietam mark the turning point of the Civil War. The Proclamation's military benefits would not be felt for many months, it's political effect was problematic, and it's influence on diplomacy helpful but not decisive.
After the crisis of the summer---after the Confederate offenses were checked at Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville; after emancipation was proclaimed and habeas corpus suspended, after the fall election ended without a complete reversal of Lincoln's political fortunes---after all that nothing was really settled. All that was accomplished by the Battle of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation was to explode the illusion and the hope of compromise that had hitherto limited the violence and social disruption of the conflict, and push the Civil War past the point of no return. The crucial battles were still to be fought and the ultimate result was still very much in doubt.” show less

In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones published an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Jones observed how fascist dictators were skilfully manipulating their nation’s myths to rally their populations. By contrast, the United States seemed culturally adrift – its mythic heroes discredited by a generation of cynical writers and ‘debunking biographers’. Bemoaning this trend, Jones called for a show more ‘patriotic renaissance’, encouraging its writers and historians to unearth ‘thrilling anecdotes’ from their nation’s past. ‘The only way to conquer an alien mythology’, Jones wrote, ‘is to have a better mythology of your own.’

A response came, fittingly enough, from Hollywood, America’s myth-making capital. Yet while Gone with the Wind (1939) was hugely popular, critics worried that the myths it promoted were more likely to encourage American-style fascism than fortify democracy. Drenched in nostalgia for the slave-owning South, the film invoked the ‘Lost Cause’ myth of the Civil War, romanticising the Confederacy’s role as a noble effort to preserve a virtuous way of life rather than a violent rebellion to maintain slavery. Many implored the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, not to make it. The Jewish actor Hyman Meyer wrote that such a film would ‘be welcomed by the Fascists ... of this country’, including the Ku Klux Klan. Sure enough, it quickly became a favourite among Germany’s Nazi elite.

It was also popular with southern segregationists (and, it should be said, the filmgoing public). During the 1950s, Gone with the Wind’s Lost Cause mythology was invoked to energise a ‘massive resistance’ to the civil rights movement. More recently, as Richard Slotkin notes in A Great Disorder, the Lost Cause myth has been embraced by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on 6 January, many did so waving Confederate flags. At a 2020 campaign rally in Colorado, Trump criticised that year’s Academy Awards by asking his supporters: ‘Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back, please?’

Read the full review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/great-disorder-richard-slotkin-revie...

Sam Collings-Wells is Junior Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge. show less

A really thought provoking American History book that studies the roots of our current divisions in politics today. It is based on the different interpretation of several historical myths including the founding myth, the frontier myth, the lost cause myth and others that MAGA folks and the right are in my opinion are reading incorrectly. In a sense MAGA has taken up the South's side we are still fighting the Civil War.

Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation argues that Western movies comment on an ideology of “bonanza economics and regeneration through savage war” that is the essence of the Frontier Myth. Along the way, he offers insightful analyses of such movies as “High Noon,” “The Searchers,” and “The Wild Bunch.” I wish he would put out a second edition that could deal more fully with films of the post-Vietnam era. Since Gunfighter Nation is already over 800 pages, perhaps he should show more extend the series to a fourth volume.
In an October 5 opinion piece in the New York Times, Slotkin applies the Frontier Myth to the Harris and Trump campaigns. He struggles to make the theory fit the facts, but it is worth a read. show less