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 Erin Krutko Devlin (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) As Jill Ogline Titus reminds readers in Gettysburg 1963, newspaper coverage of the Civil War centennial was distributed alongside stories about the burgeoning Black freedom struggle and debates about Cold War politics and policies. Gettysburg 1963 strives to help readers understand how these threads of American cultural and political life converged on the Gettysburg battlefield, illuminating a contested landscape in which commemorative rhetoric was shaped by a desire to forge a memory of 1863 that could be mobilized in service of a wide range of social and political aims one hundred years later. Titus notes that formal commemorative bodies, such as the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, often sought to mobilize a reconciliation-ist vision of the war that emphasized military valor, technological progress, and reunification, which served the broader purpose of reanimating American patriotism and encouraging heritage tourism in the midst of the Cold War. Yet Titus also notes that this narrative was never unchallenged in the commemorative activity surrounding the centennial. She illustrates how an emancipatory memory of the war as a “new birth of freedom” sought to frame the conflict through the lens of racial justice during the civil rights movement, while Lost Cause rhetoric was mobilized to recast resistance to desegregation as the preservation of states’ rights. As Titus demonstrates, both of these alternative strands of memory also sought to tether their memorial claims to the politics of the Cold War, with those promoting an emancipationist vision arguing that the failure to address racial injustice undercut the nation’s position as a beacon of democracy, and those promoting the Lost Cause narrative contending that opposition to civil rights legislation served as a bulwark against government overreach and totalitarianism. Titus argues that these divergent and diverse approaches to memorializing Gettysburg meant that commemorative activities at the battlefield in 1963 “were employed simultaneously to champion racial equality, legitimize midcentury anti-government sentiments and activities, and strengthen the U.S. position internationally” (5). Gettysburg 1963 is focused on official commemorative activity— speeches, pageants, exhibits, and battlefield reenactments—but Titus evocatively notes that participants and visitors exposed to these divergent [End Page 274] interpretations of the war were not passive spectators. “Participants,” she writes, “did not simply absorb the commemoration’s messaging wholesale, but rather made decisions about where and how to participate (and what ideas to embrace) that ensured a variety of different takeaways about the connections between 1863 and 1963” (84). Indeed, Titus concludes that the divergent commemorative narratives presented during the centennial substantially disrupted the reconciliationist rhetoric promoted by the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission and Gettysburg National Military Park in 1963, with both emancipationist and Lost Cause narratives rising in prominence in the years that followed. Titus explores public reception of these competing strands of memory most directly in her discussion of audience attendance at or reaction to various pageants, roundtables, and public addresses. She is particularly attentive to local participation in commemorative activities on the battlefield’s national stage. Indeed, Gettysburg 1963 examines how national debate about the meaning and memory of the Civil War battle played out locally in the community of Gettysburg itself and nearby Gettysburg College, where Titus currently serves as associate director of the Civil War Institute. Titus notes that local residents had a particular stake in the way the centennial was positioned in relation to heritage tourism and were invested in debates about the appropriate balance between commercialization and battlefield preservation as they sought to harness the economic potential of the centennial. Titus also demonstrates how the borough struggled with its own history of racial segregation and discrimination. The international attention focused on Gettysburg in 1963 provided the local Black community with the leverage needed to push white business owners toward the meaningful desegregation of public accommodations. Gettysburg 1963 will resonate most powerfully for...