Goodwin, Gettysburg and the Narcissism of the Left

So historian Doris Kearns Goodwin used her keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 150^th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg to talk about, well, Doris Kearns Goodwin.

She reminisced about working for LBJ during the Civil Rights era, about chumming around with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. She lamented that “Still, we await our first female president,” and she exulted in the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decisions.

Doris Kearns Goodwin (AP Photo)

The audience apparently was bewildered and unhappy. After all, they came to commemorate heroism and sacrifice and courage. If they’d wanted a self-congratulatory discourse on modern liberal pieties, they could have stayed home and turned on the news.

Yet they shouldn’t have been shocked. Goodwin is no outlier. Her speech was a useful, if extreme example of the narcissism of modern “progressives” and the insidious way it taints even the most somber occasions. She, an intelligent, professional historian, had surveyed the battle of Gettysburg and decided there was nothing in the story that reflected her interests and preoccupations. So why talk about it?

It’s nothing new. Multiculturalism has balkanized the culture, devaluing shared heritage and raising grievance group membership above any notion of “Americanness.” So we all become bored high school boys with stunted historical imaginations. “What do I care about what some guys did 150 years ago? They didn’t look like me or think like me.” Sadly, those who really do care for and honor the past facilitate the fragmentation out of desperation to make history “relevant” and accessible.

Years ago, I started the process of becoming a licensed tour guide at Gettysburg National Military Park. Licensed guides are the only ones allowed to conduct tours of the battlefield, and they go through both written and oral exams. I scored high on the written test, but my first son came along before I could take the oral part and caused a realignment of my priorities.

Success in guiding, as in any educational endeavor, requires engaging the audience and presenting the subject matter in a way they find entertaining and relevant. “Oh, you’re from Cleveland? Well when we get to Cemetery Ridge we’ll walk out to the position of the 8th Ohio, a Cleveland regiment. They played a big part in the repulse of Pickett’s Charge.”

But it became clear as I studied and talked with working guides that knowing the battle well enough to sprinkle the tour with “local interest” stories wasn’t enough. “You have to be able to make it interesting to women and minorities,” one guide told me, as though women and minorities were incapable of appreciating what happened at Gettysburg. (That was 15 years ago. It’s not hard to imagine today’s guides telling prospective colleagues to make it “interesting to transgendered pro-abortion activists.”)

But let’s give it a try. Local women cared for the wounded and fed the troops (the battle’s only civilian casualty, Jennie Wade, was killed while baking bread). African Americans were servants and laborers who helped carry the wounded and bury the dead. The Army of the Potomac didn’t yet include any black regiments. In 1863, since farm work was still a job Americans would do, there weren’t many illegal aliens in rural Pennsylvania. Not a whole lot to work with.

On the other hand, 172, 000 men fought at Gettysburg. From the innumerable stories of courage and heroism, cowardice, tragedy, brutality and kindness by men on both sides, guides select a handful to tell on any given 2-hour tour.

One of the most harrowing is that of the 9^th Massachusetts Battery, under command of Captain John Bigelow, a Harvard undergrad (imagine that). On July 2, with the Union line broken and rebels charging on two sides, the battery covered the retreat of other units by “retiring by prolonge and fire,” using the recoil of their cannon and long ropes pulled by their few remaining horses to slowly retreat over 250 yards while under withering fire. Having accomplished that risky, difficult maneuver, the exhausted battery was ordered to a make a stand at the Trostle Farm. One corporal later wrote, “the blood run all over me[.] I was Sweting and the Powder of handling the Cartrige and Smoke blacked my face ....”

Bigelow recalled that, “...the enemy opened a fearful musketry fire, men and horses were falling like hail... Sergeant after Sergt., was struck down, horses were plunging and laying about all around...” Fighting hand to hand in places, keeping up a deadly fire of canister, the battery held half an hour – enough time for the Union line to reform behind it. By then, Bigelow had been shot twice and his few remaining guns were being overrun. He told his bugler, Charles Reed, to get out with the rest of the unit and leave him. Reed would not. He got Bigelow onto his wounded horse and rode beside him, keeping his Captain on the horse as they rode slowly through sheets of rifle fire. Reed would receive the Medal of Honor for his actions.

On July 2, the Union line was saved by many sacrifices like that of the 9^th Massachusetts. Military history is not for everyone, but any visitor to Gettysburg who remains unmoved by such stories is civically and culturally dead. No anecdote about a feisty proto-feminist or the Underground Railroad can change that.

Kearns Goodwin’s appalling Gettysburg speech makes clear that the result of the modern liberal fetish of inclusiveness is exclusion and tribalism. If you can look at the vast panoply of the battle without recognizing yourself just a little in the terror, confusion, determination, gallantry and honor of those men, your society has failed you, and them.

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