Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Summer Perritt (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. Jill Ogline Titus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6534-4, 264 pp., paper, $27.95. Jill Ogline Titus’s Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town looks at the evolving memory and meaning of the Battle of Gettysburg during the 1960s Civil War centennial. Titus uses a Cold War framework to understand the battle’s political and cultural uses, arguing that Gettysburg’s “multifaceted identity as an idea, a landscape, and a living community” rendered the small town a useful tool in the fight for and against Black civil rights (2). To craft her narrative, Titus closely reads an impressive array of primary sources such as speeches, newspaper articles, monument dedications, and photographs to demonstrate that historical actors across the board attempted to use the Gettysburg centennial to serve their own contemporary interests. These attempts took the shape of three key narratives: a Lost Cause version of the War that white Southerners used to push back against civil rights agendas, a counter-narrative that suggested the fight for civil rights was the best way to honor the legacy of the Civil War and its fallen heroes, and finally, a Cold War perspective that capitalized on reconciliationist narratives of the War to promote American exceptionalism and democracy abroad. The first part of Titus’s work looks at the historical uses of Gettysburg leading up to the centennial. In the aftermath of the Civil War, tourism quickly became a mainstay for the town, as both white and Black tourists flocked to the site with their own understandings of the battle and its importance in crafting a larger American identity. As the decades passed, however, this understanding quickly became entrenched in contemporary struggles over white supremacy, Black disenfranchisement, and segregation. Beginning in the 1920s, Gettysburg became the key site for Ku Klux Klan activity, and in 1925 it played host to a two-day rally that attracted between twenty and twenty-five thousand attendees. Titus estimates that the Klan’s use of the battlefield [End Page 117] stood as a symbolic gesture intended to reinforce the idea that members of the hate group saw themselves as “modern-day defenders of patriotism and American heritage” and provided a throughline between the battles of the Civil War and what members saw as the ongoing fight for white supremacy (13). In the 1930s, the National Park Service took over management of the battlefield and officially moved Gettysburg into the orbit of Confederate memory, rendering the battle the “High Watermark of the Confederacy” (17). But Titus takes multiple angles into account, examining interpretations of the Gettysburg centennial from the perspective of civil rights workers, politicians, centennial planning-committee members, and local residents, both Black and white. As such, she explores how Black Gettysburgians actively contested white memory of the battle and its contemporary uses. They capitalized on the battlefield’s public status and used it for gatherings, picnics, and exercise. They decorated the graves of Black soldiers on Memorial Day and even refused to participate in commemorative events that portrayed racist reconciliationist narratives of the war. As Titus points out, the years leading up the centennial saw Gettysburg as a contested site where people across the nation came to debate issues of race, citizenship, and belonging. The middle chapters of Gettysburg 1963 explore the pageantry of the centennial and expertly flesh out the varied uses of the battle in a Cold War and civil rights context. A speech made by Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence during the 1961 Memorial Day celebration, for instance, insisted on the Civil War’s importance as a didactic moment in American history, providing a warning to foreign nations that Americans did not shy away from armed conflict when they believed their right to self-determination could be violated. Other politicians and centennial speakers emphasized reconciliation as the major legacy of the Civil War...