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Article Excerpt
In August 1899 two Philadelphians sponsored a watermelon-eating contest at a park in Pennsylvania. Offering a prize of $2.50 "to the colored gentleman" who could devour a watermelon in the shortest possible time, the hosts recruited eight black males. A large crowd gathered around the line of contestants, each of whom received a Georgia watermelon cut into slices. According to a newspaper account, the competitors who tore into the melons "were in bliss" because "they were eating their own favorite fruit, with a prize in view." In just four minutes a Virginian named George Smockes finished his last slice to claim the prize. "Some of the spectators laughed at the funny spectacle until they cried," the paper reported. Such racially demeaning amusement was hardly unusual near the turn of the twentieth century. At great fairs and amusement parks, symbols of the eras new commercial leisure, "coon dunks," hitting the "coon" with a baseball, watermelon-eating contests, or performing "darkeys" were common. In a nascent mass culture, new white-collar and working-class Americans of diverse European backgrounds were bonded by a feeling of white superiority through racially demeaning entertainment. (1)
The watermelon-eating contest cited above occurred neither at Luna Park nor at a great fair's midway, but at Gettysburg, a site sacred in American memory. By 1899 veterans had transformed the scene of slaughter into a genteel memorial park that served as the nation's meeting ground for Blue-Gray reconciliation. Although foreign papers such as the British Northern Whig commented that "the tablets at Gettysburg commemorate one of the most significant events of the present century--the death of slavery and the dawn of civil liberty," this recognition was rare in American observations about the battle's significance. As historians such as David Blight have noted, the Civil War's seminal issue and continuing racial challenges were overlooked in the interest of national unity at the "Mecca of Reconciliation," especially at Gettysburg's monumental fiftieth anniversary reunion. Although first-person accounts describe black veterans attending the spectacle, the ceremonies and official pronouncements disregarded racial matters altogether. (2)
Slavery and its legacy not only were ignored at Gettysburg's sacred performances--solemn gatherings, parades, or speeches--but were also separated from the war's memory by the festivities held there. Like other shrines, Gettysburg has served as an oasis for expressing social extremes of veneration and play. Play, defined here as release from work and responsibility through amusement, existed at the shrine in both traditional and modern forms until the traditional disappeared after the turn of the century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both black and white visitors to Gettysburg brought the spontaneous, communal revelry characteristic of traditional or premodern play, while impresarios of modern commercial culture operated a variety of controlled, rational diversions. Memory is organic and continually revised through new experience, so play at a site of memory can affect the thing being remembered as powerfully as commemorative rituals. This essay argues that both premodern and modern forms of play at Gettysburg have served commemorative purposes that contributed to the exclusion of African Americans from the war's larger meaning. (3)
Historically the Gettysburg neighborhood offered a chilly cultural climate for engaging racial issues. Gettysburg's own black community lived on the edge of town in substandard conditions. The town's Democratic paper continually stirred racial animosity for townspeople who showed little sympathy for black equality. No hostelries welcomed black tourists, and not until well after the turn of the twentieth century did a boardinghouse open expressly for African Americans. Antics of visiting black groups received detailed coverage and censure in the local press, yet black tourists also served as a source of amusement for whites. White locals and tourists, for example, enjoyed chuckling over black jittering and cakewalks at Round Top Park, located at the southern end of the battlefield. Some black excursionists, such as a 300-pound woman or a wizened man alleged to be a century old, were ogled by townspeople and tourists as if they were freaks.
Sometimes white organizations using the sacred ground could be downright hostile to African Americans. When National Guardsmen from Virginia and Maryland encamped with black U.S. Regulars on the battlefield in 1910, several racial incidents erupted. In the ugliest episode a Virginian became enraged when a black trooper sat at the same bar in the Hotel Gettysburg. A brawl ensued that spilled into the square and continued until mounted guards arrived. When a Virginia militia band struck up "Dixie" at the camp on the Fourth of July, a "mighty shout arose" and "the air penetrated to all parts of the camp." In 1925 10,000 Ku Klux Klan members dressed in colorful capes conducted a rally on monument covered Oak Ridge in "a sea of red, white, and blue." Klansmen had pasted "On to Gettysburg" stickers to their trucks and cars, "a splendid advertisement for Gettysburg," in the opinion of the Gettysburg Times. (4)
Nevertheless, this town situated on the border between former slave and free states became the nation's chief site for remembering the Civil War. Because a modern, industrializing nation fought the Civil War, the conflict's memory unfolded in part as a leisure commodity for an expanding commercial culture. Nowhere has the market for Civil War memory found a fuller expression than at Gettysburg. Memory at Gettysburg was and continues to be a current event, floated by the latest communication technologies and marketing techniques. Immediately after the battle boosters began transforming the crimson fields into a tourist site, aided by photographers, artists, and publishers whose commercial representations of the battle enhanced Gettysburg's sacredness. Hosting continual dedications, parades, and other rituals, Gettysburg became the "representative battleground of the Civil War." According to one guidebook, it is "the most consecrated ground this world contains." Veterans erected so many monuments that the battlefield looked like "a vast cemetery" to visitors. (5)
Yet Gettysburg increasingly served as more than a sacred site of memory after a second railroad line eased access from eastern population centers in 1884. To encourage plebeians to ride the rails to Gettysburg, the Gettysburg & Harrisburg Railroad not only slashed fares but constructed Round Top Park, an amusement area between the Round Tops and Devil's
Den that appealed to working-class tastes. For all the solemnity of the battlefield's funereal grandeur, commercial enterprises and the crowds they attracted gave Gettysburg a festive air. The...
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