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What I’m Reading Now 23

Posted July 21, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father by Francis J. Bremer

I Just Finished Reading: Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer by Michael A. Elliott published by the University of Chicago Press (2007)

Last week I read The Last Stand, Nathaniel Philbrick’s new popular history on Custer and Sitting Bull. This week I dug out a book I’ve have for several years, Custerology, which looks at popular remembrances of Custer and the Last Stand.

Back in the day, I edited a newsletter for Civil War buffs in Nassau County. I got to know people who devoted significant financial and time resources to studying and reliving the Civil War. I saw the subculture of Civil War living historians (“re-enactors” to the uninitiated) and got to know folks similar to the non-academic historians who people Custerology. These are folks who throw themselves into their hobby and travel thousands of miles every year to participate in it. Part of what they love is that not all is known, or can be known, about Custer’s final battle.

Interest and controversy swirled around Custer from the minute the first reports of his death hit the East. They continue to this day.

Author Michael Elliot says that the “historical commemoration of Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn has been a medium through which the United States expresses its collective ambivalence about its relationship with the indigenous people who have lived within its borders.” Elliot says that while we sometimes think of the perceptions held by Americans today of Westward expansion as either being one of “glorious expansion” or “ruthless exploitation”, in fact it is discussed with both appreciation and regret by the same people. While the emphasis may change over time, this has been true for decades.

Look at this clip from the Errol Flynn film on Custer, They Died With Their Boots On, made more than 70 years ago:

They Died With Their Boots On

Adventure, high spirits, and a recognition of profound loss all wrapped up in a ball of racial superiority and nationalism in a country whose Civil War had ended just 11 years before the battle.

Custer led a relatively small force at the Little Bighorn. An even smaller part of that force, just over 200 men, were with him at the “last stand”, so why was he built into a name that almost every American knows? Politics played a part.

He was a Democrat and a hero of both the Indian wars and the Civil War at a time when Democrats were associated with pro-Confederate treason. There were rumors that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1876. When he was killed, the Democratic newspapers built him into an elegant superhero. President Grant, on the other hand, called the Little Bighorn “a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary.” Ever since then, says Elliot, “for every person ready to proclaim Custer a hero, there has been another ready to label him a fool.”

But for Republicans and Democrats alike, Custer was a necessary factor in the manufacture of an American ideology. Custer’s supporters understood his role in the mythic creation of the white Republic. Gen. Edward Godfrey, a Little Bighorn survivor and leader of the 7th Cavalry veterans, said in 1926 that the conquest of the Plains Indians was part of “the struggle of the white civilization for supremacy” in North America.

Custer’s defeat made him a particularly important focus because commemoration of loss helps to bind a racial group together. Elliot writes:

The memorialization of the Southern Confederacy and of the Texans’ defeat at the Alamo has offered venues for the articulation of a white identity that claimed distinction from the larger United States, even as it considers itself to be a purer form of American Patriotism.

The Alamo and Confederacy, along with the Last Stand, “suggest something of the symbolic power of defeat” in forming white identity. The “militarily vanquished can acquire an aura of authority that victors lack… Custer’s spectacular defeat has enabled an uncritical veneration by generations of whites, for it has relieved them of the guilt that accompanies the memories of the colonization of American Indians.” This, Elliot write, derives “from a collective desire on the part of white Americans to see their historical conquest of North America as a defensive, rather than offensive, history-a reaction to the threat of nature’s savagery compelled by the the unstoppable machine of progress instead of the result of calculated choices.” The fact that the destruction of many Indian nations was planned by individual men for specific purposes of state or private interest could be covered up with the notion that Custer, and all whites, were merely agents of unstoppable forces of history.

General Phil Sheridan, the author of many of these policies, understood that the Indians were not simply part of a historical machine. He wrote of their violent resistance:

We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this, and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less?

The Custerologists, like the Civil War buffs, don’t like issues of national morality and race relations intruding on the good fun of studying their subject. They give a brief acknowledgment of the factors behind the war, but then quickly move on to military maneuvers and the proper thread counts of cavalry uniforms. Elliot writes of them that “they embody an approach to history that values authentic, tangible details…to the near exclusion of the political contexts of both the past and the present. That exclusion has consequences for how one thinks, or does not think, about contemporary tribal peoples.”

But certainly the Custerologist approach is not that of the general public. The public has been as interested in the Indian side as it has been in Custer. We all know Custer, but we also all know Sitting Bull.

After the battle, Sitting Bull went on tour with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where he was a featured attraction. Sitting Bull also did a lecture tour in which he tried to explain the paths to good relations between whites and Indians. Unfortunately he spoke in his own language, and his translator, knowing what the public wanted, presented an account of the killing of Custer when Sitting Bull was in fact talking diplomacy. An Indian who was educated in the East heard one of these speeches in Philly. At the end, the translator invited the white audience to “meet the man who killed Custer.” The Indian, Standing Little Bear, was amazed when the crowd joyfully lined up. He later wrote:

It made me wonder what sort of people the whites were anyway. Perhaps they were glad to have Custer killed and really pleased to shake hands with the man who killed him.

One wonders what Standing Little Bear would have made of this clip from the Vietnam era film Little Big Man:

Little Big Man

This BBC documentary has the appearance of being more accurate, but let’s face it, we really don’t know much about the last hour of the battle. Maybe, as Elliot says, competing and blended myths are always more accurate:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

22. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Littlebighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick

21. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island by Vincent Cannato

20. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

19. Roger Williams: The Church and the State by Edmund Morgan.

18. Night by Elie Weisel.

17. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.

16. Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer.

15. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson by Eve LaPlante.

14. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson.

13. Einstein by Walter Isaacson

12. The Possessed by Elif Batuman.

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew