Chadwick, Bruce. The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. x + 366 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $15.00.
Historian and educator Bruce Chadwick is direct about his reasons for writing his 2001 book, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film. He sees a massive disconnect between historical accuracy and film representation when it comes to the Civil War, a belief he concisely sums up in the introduction:
“The foundation for Hollywood’s unreal reel Civil War, a moonlight-and-magnolias saga that featured trees dripping with Spanish moss, gentlemen drinking mint juleps on the veranda, women prettifying themselves for the ball and countless soldiers becoming instant heroes, was laid in cinema’s infancy, the silent-movie era, and carried on through the 1930s” (p. 6)
On the heels of this declaration, Chadwick must - and does - spend the bulk of his book grappling with his core historiographical question: Why? Why have filmmakers, (and novelists and playwrights before them), creatively catered to the Lost Cause myth, (which he calls the Plantation Myth), of the wronged South, the bullying North, the villainous abolitionist and the enslaved people who are supposedly content with their state of ‘benign’ bondage? To understand the ‘why’, Chadwick spends chapter after chapter analyzing the prejudices, tastes and cinematic content of the Progressive Era, citing silent films as the foundational inspiration and source of recycled storylines for future Civil War movies.
Chadwick writes for both the film aficionado who might be familiar with cinema’s history of playing fast and loose with the facts, and also for the student of history still learning about the relationship between historical representation and public opinion. With a main text that is 298 pages, a bibliography that is 16 pages and 42 images, Chadwick goes into painstaking detail with film descriptions, historical counterpoints and critical responses. Although he has written other books about the Civil War era, this is his first foray into film history, which might explain his repetitious use of phrases like ‘moonlight-and-magnolias’ when describing the aesthetic of films that seek to cast the South and its infrastructure of slavery in a benevolent light. He also dissects film plots with the precision of a pointillist artist, a tactic that some critics find overdone. But, Chadwick is also an educator, with credentials that include film lecturer at Rutgers University and history professor at New Jersey City University. This background might explain why his introduction doubles as an outline for the remainder of the book as he lists seven main Civil War historical distortions that begin in Silent Era cinema and infiltrate films for years to come. He both directly and indirectly refers to these distortions throughout the book:
Southerners who started the war were always portrayed as heroic underdogs.
Films ignored the intricacies of the slavery issue
Films about Lincoln always presented him as saintly
Slaves were typically shown as helpful mammies, obliging butlers, smiling carriage-drivers, joyful cotton-pickers and tap-dancing entertainers
Southern white women tended to be presented as stereotypically frail and delicate creatures who sometimes fell openly in love with Union soldiers
Most Southerners in Civil War sagas are shown as wealthy slaveholders.
Most Civil War movies in the silent era ended the same way; with soldiers and civilians from North and South reconciling and establishing a once-again united country.
(p. 9)
Using this list, Chadwick creates a kind of psychological profile of Hollywood filmmakers and movie-goers, finding that, “the tragedy is not only that history is rewritten and transformed, but that a nation’s people absorb and believe the history that is presented in novels and movies instead of the actual history” (p. 5). He ardently believes that this tragedy has made it impossible for many Americans to confront to reasons behind the start of the Civil War.
When Chadwick looks at why these seven ‘distortions’ worked from a box office perspective, he realizes that movies had a specific function in the Progressive Era, to play a role in the reunification of white Northerners and white Southerners. Besides a few modern-day exceptions such as television’s Roots (1977) and North and South (1985), he has discovered a pattern of an almost cult-like devotion to the Plantation Myth that played up the idea that the South fought for a life that was noble and chivalric. However, in the desire to service this myth, Chadwick recognizes that the films of the Progressive Era set a damaging and ahistorical standard of romanticism for whites and racism for everyone else. Insulting caricatures became so entrenched in silent films that transitioning those stereotypes to sound movies and televised sagas was almost effortless. For Chadwick, films made Americans believe “that they could be reunited after the end of the Civil War - but reunited in their whiteness” (p. 15). Filmmakers in cinema’s earliest days wanted to play a role in that one-sided reunion, hence their dedication to rewriting history in each movie.
Before Chadwick dives into film history, he, ever the educator, examines the history of how the Civil War was treated during the Reconstruction Era and what reunification looked like. He titles his chapters with brusque, no-nonsense headings that help clarify his position. For instance, in Chapter One, “I Wish I was in the Land of Cotton: America Rewrites History”, readers are told about the glorification of Lee, the South’s Commander General who died in 1870. Lee, as well as other Confederate Generals such as Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, were all featured on best-selling lithographs, or prints that could be quickly made and sold mass market. Chadwick introduces a surprising fact here, that the lithographs of Southern heroes were most often made in the North by “printers who realized that they could make huge profits in the new, nostalgic Southern market” (p. 20). After Chadwick mentions the profitability of images of Confederate icons, he shifts his focus to both literary and migration trends. While former soldiers from both sides were publishing memoirs, northern-based magazines and newspapers had “their staffs swollen by hundreds of well-educated young Southern writers eager to live in New York, Boston, Chicago and other Northern cities” (p. 23). For Chadwick, these marketing facts make it clear that Northerners were already receptive to elements of the Plantation Myth.
Referenced throughout the book, Chadwick describes the Plantation Myth as a story that depicts “a heroic soldier/planter who gives his life for the Cause, marauding Union soldiers who pillage and destroy, widow who works herself into the grave to save the planation and raise her daughter as a virtuous Southern woman who can marry properly, and a slave who loves his owners and gives them his life’s savings because if they are happy, he is happy” (p. 46). With this definition, Chadwick creates a kind of entertainment family tree, starting with such novels as Four Oakes by Elizabeth Ballamy (1867), and short stories such as “Captain Luce’s Enemy” published in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine (1873). This lays the groundwork for what audiences were open to seeing in movies. For anyone familiar with film history texts, Chadwick’s decision to take the time to examine the predecessors of film is refreshing, as all too often films are treated as stand-alone storytelling vehicles that set trends with a flash-in-the-pan uniqueness. In doing his due diligence, Chadwick links the success of the Plantation Myth from one form of entertainment to another, saving a reader the homework. Another prime example is when he breaks down the plot of the popular 1886 play Held by the Enemy, which featured a spy for the Confederacy falling in love with a Northern damsel. The spy eventually moves to the South to live in an agrarian region that is depicted as a paradise even amid the war. That in itself was a key component of the Plantation Myth, the idea that the South was a bucolic eden compared to the grime of the urbanized North. Chadwick makes it clear that what is most important was that the “critical and financial success of the Civil War stage dramas came about at the same time the film industry was searching from commercially successful plays” (p. 35). If the Plantation Myth worked in every other genre of storytelling, why not a new medium that optimized visuals?
In Chapter Two “Lights…Camera…Action: Moonlight and Magnolias”, Chadwick begins the first of many film breakdowns. He describes the opening scene of The Battle, a 1911 Civil War film where an eager Confederate soldier says goodbye to his proud parents, kisses his sweetheart and marches off to do his noble duty. Chadwick takes a break from describing plot to marvel at the speed with which the American film industry was developing, counting over ten thousand movie theaters by 1910. But he also emphasizes that movies had a universal appeal as they were “readily accessible to all classes, becoming especially popular with the wave of immigrants” (p. 38). Because of films’ burgeoning popularity and accessibility, Chadwick flatly blames them for perpetuating racism via the Plantation Myth. With the depiction of genteel slave owners, beautiful Southern belles, happily enslaved African Americans and maniac abolitionist as staples of the Civil War storylines, racism found a pretty face for its existence. What is more, Chadwick asserts that immigrants identified with the Southern Army underdogs, who were usually depicted as “malnourished but fighting against incredible odds in the outmanned and outgunned Confederate Army” (p. 39). (On an interesting side note, America’s love of the ‘outmanned and outgunned’ underdog has even found its way into the lyrics of “Right Hand Man”, a song from the 2015 Broadway musical Hamilton). But this ‘underdog’ status was fictional, as even Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson is noted as saying that, “the South had several opportunities to win the war” (p. 77). This, however, did not matter to audiences who wanted to cheer on the Davids against the Goliaths.
Only after exploring the origins of the Plantation Myth does Chadwick introduce the director whose name is synonymous with silent films: D.W. Griffith. A Kentucky native, his father was Jacob “Roaring Jake”, a Confederate soldier who fed his son melodramatic war stories that emphasized the nobility of the ‘Lost Cause’ and his belief that African-Americans were not mentally equipped for freedom. Chadwick makes no secret that, to him, such an upbringing made Griffith forever look at the Old South with a dewy-eyed mystique. Griffith’s early films included a series of movies about Nan, a young girl who spies for the South and was hailed as “a wholesome Dixie orphan whose patriotism led her to espionage” (p. 41). (This is something else that Chadwick does not shy away from noting, how ironic it was that a region that seceded could refer to itself as ‘patriotic’). Unlike other books that cover Griffith’s life - such as The Mirage Factory by Gary Krist (Broadway Books, 2018) and A History of Narrative Film, 5th Edition edited by David A. Cook (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016) - Chadwick takes his time building up to Griffith’s iconic film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). While this film cannot be overlooked when examining the portrayal of the Plantation Myth in cinema or when looking at technological achievements in film, Chadwick makes it clear that Griffith’s earlier films were key in indulging the appetite of Progressive Era audiences. The aforementioned Rebel heroine Nan, for example, was not just popular in the South, but among Northern theater-goers as well. In addition, her role as a spy was the beginning of another type of female character that went beyond the ‘sweetheart’ role. Asides from the ‘spy’ role, Chadwick notes that women only occupied two other roles in Silent Era films, that of mother and lover. He uses these categories when talking about female characters to emphasize that heroines were never abolitionists, for abolitionists were often depicted in Civil War films as the enemy instigators.
Chadwick makes it clear that Griffith’s early films also established tropes that would endure in the coming years. Both His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled - two films made and released in 1911 - have staple slave characters that either sacrifice for the family who has enslaved them or who come to the family’s rescue in some way. In The Trust, the enslaved person, (a white actor in black face), hides the southern family from Union troops in the his cabin, while in His Trust Fulfilled, that same enslaved man digs up money he has saved throughout the war and bestows it on the family when they learn the master of the house has died in battle. These are the myths that Chadwick finds the most disturbing for they allowed audiences to nostalgically look at slavery as a mutually-beneficial institution, believing that, “in every Southern home there is an old trusted body servant whose faithful devotion to his master and his master’s family was extreme to the extent of laying down his life” (p. 46). This delusion allowed white audiences to disregard the truth about slavery and feel justified about the continued social degradation and political ostracism of Black Americans.
To round out his analysis, Chadwick dug up contemporary critiques of Griffith as well. While some reviewers scoffed at the sentimentality of Griffith’s films, others, such as film critic William Everson, believed that his Southerners acted too impartial towards Union soldiers. Yet, despite these criticisms, either Chadwick doesn’t find or he has simply failed to mention anyone criticizing the superficial treatment of Black Americans. This is especially alarming as Chadwick himself notes that racism was rampant throughout America during these years. As the nation neared the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Chadwick repeats the word ‘reconciliation’ throughout his chapters and within the description of films, pushing his theme that films were vehicles of rapprochement between white Americans. As a result, that filmmakers didn’t care what stereotypes or caricatures that were popularizing.
Chadwick does an admirable job of not making Griffith the lone architect of Silent Era movies or the cinematic Plantation Myth. He introduces an often overlooked filmmaker, Thomas Ince, not only to round out the cast of directors, but to show how people, like Ince, who grew up in the North, still believed the pro-Southern novels and plays regarding the Civil War. Chadwick holds up Ince’s Cinderella (1913), as a prime example of the Plantation Myth film. (Note: on IMBD.com/the International Movie Database, the film is called Southern Cinderella). In the reimagined fairy tale, Cinderella is a Southern girl who is banished to the slave quarters by her wicked stepmother after her father joins the Confederate army. The Mammy of the house - a robust caregiver, and staple in the cinematic Civil War oeuvre - doubles as the fairy godmother while Prince Charming is a Union soldier who falls in love with Cinderella and the pastoral South. All in all, the story provides what white audiences craved, the Civil War film formula complete with “women swooning for good-looking men in uniform, and a loving and happy and very overweight Mammy” (p. 47). Again, while the nation was embroiled in Jim Crow laws and violence, movies were perpetuating a myth of happy enslaved peoples and of a mutually beneficial slave-to-owner relationship.
To fully answer his historiographical ‘why’ question, Chadwick looks at what filmmakers omitted from their stories. In Chapter Four, “South of the Mason-Dixon Line: Political Distortions”, Chadwick notices that most silent films begin after the bombing of Fort Sumter so that the catalyst of southern aggression is avoided. On top of this, most films do not feature famous generals as main characters for the simple reason that, featuring prominent generals would force storylines to delve into each man’s reason for joining the war. Generals like Grant and Lee had bit parts, with Grant often being shown unkempt and in the process of pardoning spies. Lee, meanwhile, would not be a central character until the film Gettysburg (1993). For Chadwick, this is an intentional decision, as any “historically accurate movie about Lee would have shown him as a staunch Unionist (Mexican War hero and commandant of West Point), who joined the Confederate army after much soul-searching” (p. 75). In essence, it would have been impossible to address Lee’s supposed ‘soul-searching’ without scrutinizing the brutality of slavery and the fact that, glamorization aside, Confederate officers made a decision to betray their country. Confederates could also not be seen as starting the war or else it would ruin the underdog mystique. By presenting the Confederacy as the underdog, filmmakers could avoid a plethora of issues such “slavery, evangelical religion, miscegenation on plantations, ill-education Southern children, disease, poor Southern economic planning, quarrels over the territories and the Southern split in Democratic Party, rebel guerrilla raiders in Missouri and Kansas, the uproar over the Dred Scott decision, the Missouri Compromise and the fractured election of 1860” (p. 70). This was not a terrain that filmmakers wanted to explore, especially as, again, the allure of reunification was all the more paramount against the backdrop of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War.
To understand why the Plantation Myth had such a tenacious grasp on the world of film, Chadwick also looks at the popularity of such stereotypes as Sambo and the Mammy figure. He explores the world of vaudeville where such characters first appeared during the Gilded Age, stressing that, because of their acceptance, movie directors felt comfortable adapting them to screen. But it was more than that. Audiences of the Silent Era did not want social justice or historically accurate films because such truths didn’t compliment a country mired in Jim Crow racism. Any such movie would have “engendered sympathy for African Americans and ruined the political efforts of North and South in the 1900-1915 period to hold them down in the workplace and social world” (p. 89). In order for the Plantation Myth to remain popular, it needed to - and did - preserve the segregationist view that the rules of antebellum America worked and would continue to work if left in place.
By the time Chadwick arrives at the blockbuster of the Progressive Era, Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, he has provided a foundational understanding as to why such a film was more than a technical wonderment, (full of facial closeups and continuity editing); it was the story that audiences had already been flocking to see, only on an epic scale. Again, Chadwick is careful to cite the fact that Griffith - like many of his contemporary filmmakers - relied on a novel for the story, in this case Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman. Chadwick also reinforces that The Clansman was a book that relied heavily on a narrative that was already incredibly popular, the story of loved ones torn apart by the war and reunited later by ignoring why the war was fought in the first place. In the two-part story, two sets of brothers - one from the North and one from the South - fight in the war, with the second part of the book taking place during the Reconstruction years.
Chadwick infiltrates the psyche of the Silent Era when he points out that, despite Griffith’s reputation and despite the fact that Civil War stories were already popular film adaptations, the Hollywood establishment wasn’t sure if audiences would sit through a lengthy film. He goes on to paint Griffith as the daredevil auteur that other historians have painted him as, describing him as a bold visionary who would not give up on his dream of creating an epic Civil War film that paid homage to the South. Chadwick, however, takes Griffith’s ‘vision’ to task as being the botched remembrance of a young man who grew up amid Plantation Myth falsehoods, citing how “even apart from issues of race and rape, Birth of a Nation was guilty of dreadful distortions and assumptions about history and people, and these made it a dangerous movie” (p. 113). By calling it a ‘dangerous movie’, Chadwick establishes himself as a historian who has no qualms about passing judgement, and not falling back on the ‘he was a man of his time’ adage. There is a sense that Chadwick longs to chide Griffith and tell him that he should know better, despite the fact that Griffith went to his grave insisting he did not understand why some saw Birth of a Nation as a racist film.
For people who have not seen the film, Chadwick provides a hearty description over the course of three chapters, but steps away throughout each to repudiate Griffith’s scenes that grossly misrepresent history. For instance, Chadwick provides a film still of a scene from Birth of a Nation where Black poll workers are preventing whites from voting, and juxtaposes that image with background information such as the fact that formally enslaved people did not engage in voter intimidation, and that, when it came to corruption, the “worst was by the white governor of South Carolina, Franklin Moses Jr., who, between 1872 and 1874, as legislator and governor, reportedly looted the state treasury and took bribes to use his influence to pass legislation” (p. 116). Chadwick repeats this type of counter argument later in the book, balancing a still of actors in KKK garb with a succinct recounting of the number of Blacks that were murdered by the KKK throughout the Reconstruction years. In pairing publicity stills that falsify information and glamorize KKK terrorist acts with actual history, Chadwick is helping readers debunk the Plantation Myth. By doing this, he also seems to be emphasizing that Progressive Era audiences were either incapable or unwilling to separate fact from cinematic fiction on their own.
Chadwick tackles other fictions as well, such as a common misconception that President Woodrow Wilson was an ardent support of the film. Chadwick takes time to root through history, describing how author Thomas Dixon had been a classmate of Woodrow Wilson’s, and that Dixon had the idea that acquiring a complimentary quote from the president would help promote the film, whose length and cost still filled financiers with trepidation. According to Chadwick, Dixon called the White House and asked Wilson to preview the movie and, if he liked it, to lend a quote that filmmakers could use for advertising purposes. Wilson agreed to view the film, thus making Birth of a Nation the first film ever screened for a president at the White House.
According to Dixon, as the credits rolled, Wilson declared that the film “was like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true” (p. 122). Dixon relayed this to Griffith who then passed it on to the public relations department. Once Wilson saw the quote in newspaper ads, he issued a press release denying he ever said it, but the words were already out there. Chadwick shows how mangled this affair was by going a step further and describing how Griffith also took liberties with Wilson’s book, History of the American People, a five-volume treatise he claims was a vital historical source in the making of Birth of a Nation. Chadwick plays a compare-contrast game with Wilson’s text and Griffith’s quotes, proving that Griffith cherrypicked parts of Wilson’s sentences and used them out of contact. A prime example is a scene where Griffith supposedly quotes Wilson’s books with a title card that describes Black legislatures “as men who could not so much write their names and who knew none of the uses of authority except its insolence” (p. 123). By showing how Griffith was willing to distort the words of a contemporary, Chadwick deftly builds his argument that history was purposefully being remembered wrong in order to play up the idea that life was better when Black citizens were enslaved persons barred from civic participation. It’s telling that this back and forth between Griffith, Dixon and Wilson takes up most of Chapter Seven, “The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth?”. The question mark in the chapter’s title also announces Chadwick’s shadow of doubt that he intentionally casts over the filmmaker’s intentions and legacy.
Even as Chadwick moves on from Silent Era films, he consistently returns to the themes that were established in that timeframe. If his initial historiography question was ‘why’ films felt a need to play the role of unifier, the remainder of the book looks at the ‘how’; how did the Plantation Myth endure? Again, he does this by moving between film assessment to historical happenings. For instance, after analyzing Jim Crow Supreme Court cases - such as 1877’s Hall v. DeCuir that ruled that states could impose segregation on public transit - he goes on to look at post-Silent Era influential figures, such as writer Margaret Mitchell, whose love of Thomas Dixon’s novel and Griffith’s film inspired her bestselling Gone with the Wind, another movie that would wax poetic about genteel southern life and disparage against Reconstruction. What remains constant is Chadwick’s insistence that films were part of the act of reconciliation, and that, well into the 1950s, Civil War dramas still signified “the need of soldiers from both the North and South to remain together” (p. 246). Even as Chadwick analyzes other genres such as Westerns, he finds a theme of white northern and white southern soldiers finding peace together, so long as that peace excludes Black citizens and Indigenous people.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Chadwick spends forty-eight pages on Gone with the Wind, discussing how the juggernaut book and film helped to “quash seven decades of Northern attacks upon and ridicule of the South that had forced, and kept, Southerners on the defensive” (p 212). What Chadwick is saying is that GWTW was seen as the South’s literary and cinematic revenge as its popularity eclipsed stereotypes about backwoods Southerners and white trash racists. The movie especially gave the region a veneer of glamor mixed with nostalgia. But even as GWTW won public acclaim, Chadwick brings up little known facts, such as the film and book had its own dissenters, both in the 1930s and in decades to come. At the time of its release, organizations such as the New York Film Critics were so turned off by the racism that the group awarded Wuthering Heights the New York Film Critics Award for ‘Best Film’ in 1939. Still, criticism of the film was marginal at the time of its release, and it wouldn’t be until the 1980s and 1990s that more scholarly critiques of GWTW were voiced by such historians as Don Boyle who called the Black roles “deplorable falsifications. Not true to southern experience” (p. 221). The mere fact that Chadwick felt the need to cite film criticisms of GWTW fifty odd years after its release, however, shows the enduring power of the Plantation Myth, and the responsibility modern-day historians have felt to discredit the dogged storyline.
In the handful of reviews found for The Reel Civil War, there are some critics who find Chadwick’s repetitious references to the Plantation Myth to be a downside of his writing. However, when a historian is chronicling a consistent theme over fifty years of cinematic storytelling, the repetition is helpful. Others cast doubt on his scholarship. For instance, a 2001 Kirkus Review critique claims that, “even interesting observations (such as those on the mythologizing within the miniseries Roots) are deadened by seemingly hasty composition” (Kirkus Review, 2001). Meanwhile, in a Publisher’s Weekly critique from the same year, reviewers believe that, “few scholars are likely to take his pragmatic approach to heart” (Publisher’s Weekly, 2001). However, since that review goes on to anticipate Chadwick’s book being a wake-up call regarding the relationship between Civil War remembrance and cinema, it can be argued it is commenting more on America’s Civil War amnesia than it is on Chadwick’s writing.
When examining any accusations of repetition, perhaps it is not Chadwick who is redundant, but filmmakers’ storylines that mimic one another. In addition, Chadwick can also hardly be accused of hasty composition with the time he spends looking at how motifs from the Silent Era stretch into such genres as Western of the Cold War Era, finding that most “of the Civil War films of the 1950s and 1960s that were westerns were still pro-Southern; they followed the time-tested pattern of noble and scrappy underdogs versus monolithic federals” (p. 260). Chadwick’s argument hinges on the fact that Civil War films were able to continue their false narratives for years because, to the financially savvy minds of Hollywood, they worked. Recognizing that economics trumps historical accuracy is a linchpin behind Chadwick’s entire thesis.
It can also be argued that Chadwick is showing how entrenched the Plantation Myth was so readers will understand how revolutionary the 1970s character of Kunta Kinte was. Chapter Thirteen, “Kunta Kinte’s Civl War”, chronicles the adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots to the world of cinema, prophesying a change in movie trends. After listing television series of the era that had Black actors billed as top stars, Chadwick segues into the logistics of Roots, walking readers through the acquirement of the rights, Haley’s involvement in the screenplay and the fact that forty percent of the crew were Black. Chadwick uses these statistics to demonstrate how, finally, onscreen and offscreen rules of Silent Era cinema had been broken. He also returns to analyzing the marketing tactics, this time highlighting how the network ABC was so intent on ensuring a large audience, that it “produced thousands of Roots study guides, which were shipped free to teachers all over America” (p. 267). While Chadwick began The Reel Civl War: Mythmaking in American Film” with an introduction that talked about Black characters appearing on film ‘stripped of their humanity’, he tries to end his text on an uplifting note, almost promising that the Plantation Myth is destined to be expunged from cinema’s mindset.
Even after taking Chadwick’s lengthy research into consideration, he seems like an unlikely champion of the study of silent film. As an author, he has written books about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the Underground Railroad. Yet, whenever tackling these subjects, he goes for the deeper cuts, the B-Side of the album, so to speak, coming at familiar stories from a different angle. For George Washington, he wrote The General and Mrs. Washington: The Untold Story of a Marriage and a Revolution, using domesticity to peel away the layers of a man known for his military and presidential career. To examine the birth of America, he tackled the intertwining lives of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in Triumvirate: The Story of the Unlikely Alliance that Saved the Constitution and United the Nation. Asides from The Reel Civil War, he revisited the era in 2011 with 1858: Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See, using the book to focus on the year that saw the promotion of the idea of “King Cotton” and witnessed Lincoln making his ‘House Divided’ speech.
In The Reel Civil War, Chadwick continues a trend he started with his earlier works: his secondary sources are as extensive as his primary. In addition to analyzing movies, Chadwick’s sources run the gamut of film advertisements used during the Progressive Era, to books such as The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory and History by Gabor S. Boritt and The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth by Edward D.C. Campbell. As if recognizing that film is not his natural habitat, Chadwick’s sources create a balanced approach of both historian and film critic.
It is perhaps Chadwick’s tendency towards repetition and his exhaustive research approach that has made his book required reading at the university level. In 2013, Bowdoin College included the text as required reading for the course“The Civil War in Film”. At Swarthmore College, the course “The American Civil War” assigned the book alongside a viewing of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In the Swarthmore course, it is worth noting that the book was assigned along with other texts that examine how America has approached memorializing the Civil War. These text pairings included Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic and Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Republic of Suffering, books that take the studying of the Civil War beyond the rudimentary memorization of dates and generals. The book was also assigned reading in a 2015 “Topics in Civil War and Reconstruction” course at North Carolina State University as part of a pop culture analysis overview. Regardless of the specifics of each assignment, it becomes clear that Chadwick’s book seems to find its way into courses that seek to reexamine the aftermath of the Civil War, and how it has lived in the nation’s memory.
It is telling that Chadwick included a quote from historian Jill Lepore in his introduction: “How wars are remembered can be just as important as how they were fought and described” (p. 5). He sought to answer the nagging question regarding why the Plantation Myth has shaped America’s cinematic memory of the Civil War. To find an answer, he had to examine not just Civil War films of each era, but how audiences embraced these storylines. The fact that it took until p. 263 of his book to find a narrative that didn’t echo the storylines of the Silent Era exemplifies the charisma of the romanticized Plantation Myth. Taken in that light, the book serves as both a warning and a reminder that rewriting history for entertainment purposes is its own Faustian bargain, one that trades reality for box office profits, and history for myth.
Reviews Citied
The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Cinema. Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2001. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bruce-chadwick/the-reel-civil-war/
The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Cinema. Publisher’s Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-375-40918-9