April 10, 2006
What Would Lincoln Do? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST Last evening, I was channel hopping (as is my habit), when I came across the History Channel’s new series Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. My friend Steve Gillon, the History Channel’s resident historian and a former professor at Yale and Oxford, has written a fine companion book for the series, also titled Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, and so I decided to watch for a few minutes to see how the documentary was assembled. The installment that I happened across was on Antietam, the great and bloody Civil War battle that saw Union forces repel a rare Confederate invasion of Northern soil, thus giving Abraham Lincoln an opportunity to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The series’s narrator reminded viewers that in the aftermath of Antietam, Mathew B. Brady, the famous photographer, shocked polite society by displaying photographs of the wounded and dead at his New York studio. (Contrary to popular legend, Brady did not take most of the Civil War photographs credited to him; his staff shot most of them.) As The New York Times noted at the time, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along [our] streets, he has done something very like it.” Popular convention holds that the Vietnam War was the first major American conflict in which the gore and violence of battle were brought home to the American public, and that watching these scenes unfold on television led many Americans to lose their stomach for armed conflict. But this can’t have been so. Brady’s photographs were widely disseminated during and immediately after the Civil War, and work by the historian James McPherson and others has demonstrated that Civil War soldiers frequently wrote home with vivid, graphic accounts of the horrors of battle. In other words, the Civil War generation knew and even witnessed what war looks like. All of this contrasts sharply with the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war. Reporters have been barred from Dover Air Force Base, where most of the dead are flown back to the United States for burial. And a New York Times article this weekend even revealed that some military handlers have inaccurately informed the parents of deceased servicemen that they could not open their children’s caskets and view the remains. (In fact, they do have that right.) At last count, 2,352 American servicemen have died in Iraq, and most Americans have been sheltered from any visual reminder of this fact. When pundits compare Lincoln and George W. Bush, two “wartime Presidents” who are faced with seemingly tough decisions that weigh national security and civil rights against each other, they might do us a favor and extend the comparison. Is it possible that the Vietnam War, which was fought without major restrictions against press coverage and photojournalism, was not the exception to the rule but rather perfectly in step with American tradition? And if so, how can we continue to allow the current administration so much leeway in hiding from the public the real costs of its war in Iraq? What’s the right way to handle with sensitivity and honesty the impact of war—Abraham Lincoln’s way, or George Bush’s? I’m sure readers know my answer to this admittedly rhetorical question. But maybe some of my colleagues will have some thoughts on the matter.
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