Haunted by Atrocity

by Cloyd, Benjamin G.

  As the attention surrounding Andersonville grew, writer Saul Levitt also found himself captivated during the 1950s by the historical events at the Georgia prison, and by the figure of Henry Wirz in particular. Around 1956, Levitt started the script for what eventually became The Andersonville Trial. Originally conceived as a television program (a one-hour version aired on the CBS show Climax), over time Levitt’s idea grew into a full-length play about the Wirz trial. On December 29, 1959, The Andersonville Trial made its debut on Broadway, and it eventually made its way to London and Andersonville itself. From the outset, Levitt expressed frustration with the reviewers of the show, who inferred a connection between the Wirz trial and the Nuremberg trial. In an interview he tried to explain his motivation for the play. “I didn’t write this play because of a dedication to Civil War events,” Levitt declared, and “I also didn’t write it because I wanted to make a preachment about war criminals linked to the experience of our own time with the trials of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.”70 Given the content of the play, critics could be forgiven for scratching their heads at Levitt’s cantankerous response.

  The Andersonville Trial commences with the beginning of the Wirz trial proceedings, and for the first three-fourths of the script, Levitt recreates the aura of the actual Wirz trial, even accurately keeping the historical identities of most of the important characters. To give the audience a feel for the atrocities committed at Andersonville, Levitt condenses the huge Wirz trial transcript into a few key witnesses who testify about the horrible conditions Andersonville prisoners endured and whether or not Wirz personally killed any of the prisoners. From the outset, Wirz has no illusions about the purpose of these proceedings, exclaiming in the first act that “all that is wanted of me is my life.” Although the outcome of the trial is never in doubt, as the government’s case against him accumulates, in the second act Wirz takes the stand to defend himself. The resulting battle of wits between Wirz and Chipman, the prosecutor, directly reveals the theme of Levitt’s play. In his attempts to defend his actions, Wirz repeatedly states that his duty as an officer in the Confederate army requires him to obey his superiors, in this case John Winder. “One does,” Wirz argues, “as he is ordered.” Even though he watched the suffering of the thousands of Union prisoners, the “situation,” Levitt has Wirz declare, “was General Winder’s responsibility—not mine.” From the perspective of Wirz, the terrible suffering “was to me a military situation.” Chipman, however, refuses to accept Wirz’s argument that following orders absolved him of personal responsibility. “Why did you obey,” Chipman asked Wirz, when “we who are born into the human race are elected to an extraordinary role in the scheme of things. We are endowed with reason and therefore personal responsibility for our acts.” By failing to follow a higher law than that of the chain of command and find some way to ameliorate the suffering of the captives he ruled over, Wirz deserves the death sentence that the play concludes with. As Wirz’s lawyer, Baker, exits the courtroom following the verdict, he tells Chipman that the prosecutor’s faith in human potential is naive given humanity’s inherent weaknesses. “It was a worthy effort,” Baker explains in frustration, “though it hasn’t anything to do with the real world. Men will go on as they are, most of them, subject to fears—and so, subject to powers and authorities. And how are we to change that slavery? When it’s of man’s very nature?” Levitt’s dark conclusion reflected his desire to convey the seductive ease with which personal responsibility could be avoided in the modern bureaucratic world and deny any validity to the idea that following orders constitutes a legitimate defense for atrocity.71

  Levitt’s main theme in The Andersonville Trial, the responsibility of each individual when torn between organizational duty and individual conscience, betrayed his statements to the press. By fictionalizing the proceedings and putting Wirz on the stand, which never happened in the 1865 trial, Levitt clearly wanted to make a statement about human nature and about how people often fail, as did Wirz, when forced to choose between their morals and the demands made on them by institutions. The reason so many critics immediately associated the play with Nuremberg instead of Andersonville involved not only the timing but Levitt’s focus on the question of responsibility, an issue perceived much differently in 1865 than in the 1940s and 1950s. In the actual Wirz proceedings, responsibility applied to Wirz because northerners knew his job entailed dealing with the Union prisoners. The assumption in 1865 was that when Wirz failed, he did so as an aberrant individual motivated by demonic evil. Had he been a better man the atrocities of Andersonville would never have transpired. By the 1940s, when Nazi war criminals explained that they merely followed orders in committing their atrocities, that explanation, although dismissed as untenable, sent shivers down the spine of Levitt and other observers familiar with the same kind of shadowy existence, where, thanks to entrenched bureaucracy and organizational structures, responsibility often took a back seat to conformity and evil became a relative condition inherent in all of humanity. Levitt’s suspicion that “man’s very nature” encourages atrocity came directly from the fearful reality of the Holocaust. Even though his play ultimately focused on the themes of the present, it also revealed the essential connection between Wirz and the Nazis. The only difference between the two tragedies involved the scale of the slaughter, while both confirmed that the belief in man’s innate capacity for good faced a constant challenge from the ability of institutional power to facilitate the darker side of human nature in the modern world. Even the destructive pattern inherent in modern war, however, refused to deter Levitt from exhorting his audience to resist organizational evil and trust their individual morality.

  But there was a hidden danger in the morality tales woven by both Levitt and Kantor. For these authors, whether they admitted it or not, the compelling connection between the Holocaust and Civil War prisons gave their work its contemporary appeal. The conflation of World War II with the Civil War provided a dramatic canvas on which to explore important universal themes and question the nature of modern humanity. There is an important distinction, however, between atrocity and genocide. As horrible as Civil War prisons were, they were not Nazi concentration camps. The ahistorical repackaging of Andersonville as a World War II–style tragedy revealed the seductive mythmaking power of the new objective memory. Eloquently blurring the specifics of the past in a universalized lament about human failings generated profits and defused controversy. Americans, as always, preferred artfully constructed meaning to honest, more painful, reality.

  Despite the pessimistic nature of the subject of Andersonville, or more probably, because of it, by 1960, the literary achievements of Levitt and Kantor showed that, almost one hundred years after their existence, the interest in remembering Civil War prisons persisted. Although the period following World War I brought the passing of the generations so consumed with the divisive memories of Civil War prisons as part of the identity politics of sectional and racial justification, a new generation of Americans, led most prominently by Hesseltine, Kantor, and Levitt, endeavored to redefine the perception of the prisons. They did so because, amazingly enough, the tragedy of Civil War prisons took on even greater relevance in the context of the destructive wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Traditionally the historical record of Civil War prisons divided Americans, but Hesseltine, Kantor, Levitt, and many others hoped that, in the modern world, avoiding future Andersonvilles or Dachaus could be possible if Americans were united through a usable interpretation of the prison camps. The excitement of placing the history of Civil War prisons in its proper context, and the resulting potential for human progress, was unmistakable. There was an urgency with which these intellectuals applied new scientific explanations, reminded readers of the need for vigilance against evil, and rejected the concept that just following orders excused atrocity in any form. The emergence of the new objective memory of Civil War prison was not without its flaws, however. In an environment dominated by the shadow of contempora
ry brutality, as Americans compared the atrocities of different wars the question of the important connection between racism and prison suffering during the Civil War remained sadly overlooked. And the fixation on the pattern of atrocity encouraged the widespread adoption of the belief that modern war inevitably brought a devastation for which no one was really to blame. Excusing both the Union and Confederacy as equally guilty allowed Americans to continue to avoid the daunting task of honestly and more accurately assessing the responsibility for the tragedy of Civil War prisons. Objective memory possessed increasing attraction for Americans by 1960—it was profitable and also helped validate America’s claim to a position of moral leadership in the world. But even a successful illusion is still an illusion. Although the widespread destruction of the wars of the early twentieth century inspired the creation of a new remembrance of Civil War prisons, the emphasis of objective memory on shallow consensus, though understandable in its challenge to the divisive sectional memories, ensured that its promised goal of helping humanity start to learn from its past mistakes remained out of reach.

  6

  “Better to Take Advantage of Outsiders’ Curiosity”

  THE CONSUMPTION OF OBJECTIVE MEMORY, 1960–PRESENT

  From 1960 through the early twenty-first century, the view that both the Union and the Confederacy shared a generalized measure of responsibility for prisoners’ suffering and that both deserved criticism for their equalized failings became even more firmly entrenched. Instead of leading to the disappearance of the once heated prison controversy, however, the widespread acceptance of objective memory actually increased the attention that Americans paid to the subject of Civil War prisons. The diminished passions removed blame from the prison tragedy, and as the old stigma of deliberate atrocity faded, Andersonville in particular became the focal point of an accelerating trend during these decades—turning Civil War prison sites into tourist attractions. The success of the emerging tourist interest in southwest Georgia indicated that remembering Civil War prisons possessed commercial potential. And the enduring interest in the Civil War continued to thrive in American popular culture, as new prison histories, more prisoner accounts, and even movies about or featuring Civil War prison camps appeared. The proliferation of these products resulted from two paradoxical, yet inevitably intertwined, motives inherent to the American culture of capitalism. The commercialization of Civil War prisons transformed suffering, like any other raw material, into a profitable commodity stripped of its most controversial elements, but the avid consumption of objective memory also testified to an ongoing, unsatisfied curiosity in American society to understand more fully how such atrocities could ever have been possible.

  The commercialization of Civil War prisons did not begin in the early 1960s, but the celebration of the Civil War Centennial represented a unique opportunity to turn memories of the conflict into profit. Initial enthusiasm for this commemoration ran high. Columnist Celestine Sibley feigned disbelief at the “great numbers of citizens who are as freshly, urgently, imperatively engrossed in some phase of That War as if it were day-after-tomorrow’s nuclear threat.”1 A. B. Moore, executive director of the Alabama Civil War Centennial Commission, explained that naturally Americans anticipated their chance to relive the war, which, after all, remained “the great national adventure.” Remembering “the sterling qualities” of the Civil War generation and cherishing “our great traditions” also provided an additional benefit, Moore believed—it protected the United States from “communist brain-washers.”2 Participation in the Civil War Centennial equated, at least for Moore, to a stand against the Communist Soviet Union. As a display of unity, the centennial offered North and South a chance to reconfirm the bonds of sectional reconciliation in the crucible of the Cold War.

  That chance was not free from controversy, however. The necessity of avoiding the entanglement of objective Civil War memory with the rising tide of the Civil Rights Movement complicated the celebration for white southerners, at least some of whom, according to Atlanta Constitution journalist Harold Martin, “worried about the centennial” as a potentially “foolish thing.” Stirring “the old bones of a lost war” might reopen the “old wounds” of racial controversy by upsetting the dynamics of a Jim Crow South in which white southerners had long since refused to acknowledge, let alone accept, the validity of the emancipationist memory of the Civil War.3 Careful planning would be required. Despite the discomforting aspects of the centennial, a sense of excitement permeated the preparations. With so many Americans willing to express their patriotism by joining in the ceremonies, important Civil War locations prepared for a surge of visitors. Although tourism, especially at Andersonville, where the national government owned the prison site, predated the centennial activities, the long-time interest of Union veterans and the attention generated by MacKinlay Kantor’s novel ensured that visitors inspired by the centennial would find the prison grounds of interest. By 1959, as plans commenced for the national festivities, it became clear that, especially in Georgia, the story of Civil War prisons deserved a place of prominence.

  In part that recognition stemmed from the direction of the national Civil War Centennial Commission, which in January 1959 created the Committee on Historical Activities to make recommendations about how to effectively promote the centennial and encourage participation across the country. The committee reported that each individual state should set up its own Civil War Centennial Commission, which would help stimulate local interest and involvement and in the process allow for a more thorough recreation of Civil War events in each state. The committee also pushed for the publication of a national series of official guides to the war that would focus on “topics that need to be investigated,” including “prisoners of war.”4Instead of avoiding the subject, the Civil War Centennial Commission declared that the horrors of Civil War prisons, now objectively reinterpreted to fit the needs of American consensus, merited inclusion in the celebration. With these national guidelines in mind, Georgia rushed to prepare for its role in the centennial.

  Led by its first chairman, Peter Zack Geer, the Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission emphasized a “grass roots” approach to commemorating the war in Georgia that between 1961 and 1965 encouraged the retelling of “the thousands of true stories of heroism.” In the process, Geer, the future lieutenant governor of Georgia, hoped that “each story will endear itself in the hearts and minds of every Georgian.”5 From the outset, Andersonville featured prominently as one of the most important of Georgia’s Civil War sites, as the prison appeared in almost every catalog of crucial war locations compiled by various centennial committees.6 The Georgia Civil War Centennial Education Committee organized a list of ways, including field trips, to involve the children of Georgia in the events so that they might learn, in keeping with the climate of patriotism, “the need for adjustment from the Old South to the New.” The Education Committee’s register of approved “educational field trips” rated Andersonville as the fourth most important site to visit, behind only the battlegrounds of Sherman’s 1864 campaign for Atlanta.7 Radio advertisements frequently mentioned the chance for Americans to come to Georgia during the centennial to visit not only Atlanta but Andersonville too.8 Instead of demonstrating embarrassment over Andersonville’s infamous past, the citizens of Georgia responded to the centennial commission’s lead and welcomed the prospect of featuring the controversial prison site as a part of the commemoration.

  Although sentiments of patriotism and education certainly fueled the embrace of Andersonville by Georgians during the centennial, some pragmatic observers believed that the success of the occasion and the effectiveness of the centennial committee would be best measured in dollars and cents. In 1959, Bill Corley, the commission’s director of promotion, declared that “if we don’t sell a dollar’s worth of souvenirs to each tourist who comes into the state, we’re missing an opportunity.”9 On July 23, 1960, Milt Berk of Business Boosters, Inc., solicited Geer, informing him of Business Bo
osters’ ability to manufacture some “80,000” promotional items. Selling these “gimmicks” emblazoned with the logos of the various flags of the Confederacy would generate interest among collectors as well as advertise the events of the centennial.10 Although the products of Business Boosters never received official sanction from Georgia governor S. Ernest Vandiver and the Georgia Civil War Centennial Commission, a host of souvenir items, including tumblers, ashtrays, flags, cufflinks, cigarette lighters, key rings, bags, and cushions appeared during the centennial.11 Walt Barber, head of Walt Barber Advertising Specialties and adviserto the centennial commission, explained why so many types of products were necessary. Georgia “expects to bring forty or fifty million visitors to our state,” he stated, and “the tourists will spend money—forty to fifty million on souvenirs alone.”12 Although few, if any, state-sponsored products specifically bore the name or image of Andersonville, the idea that the celebration’s purpose centered as much on tourism and souvenir consumption as on the proper remembrance of history dominated Georgia’s centennial proceedings and eventually made an impact on the residents of Andersonville.