Historian: Hollywood gets Civil War wrong

By Brian McNeill
Media General news Service
Published: April 11, 2008

Over his years of teaching at the University of Virginia, professor and historian Gary W. Gallagher has noticed that his students’ understanding of history tends to be influenced primarily by Hollywood.

“They think ‘The Patriot’ is history, rather than a Mel Gibson fantasy about history,” Gallagher said.

So Gallagher set out to explore how the film industry has been treating his area of expertise, the Civil War.

For months, he immersed himself in contemporary Civil War genre films - everything from 1989’s “Glory” to 2003’s “Cold Mountain.” He watched the films, many of them laughably bad, at least three times.

“Can you imagine watching ‘Gods and Generals’ three times?” Gallagher quipped. “There should be some sort of medal for doing something like that.”

The result of Gallagher’s exploration is his latest book, “Causes Won, Lost and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War.” He gave a lecture on his work Wednesday at the UVa Bookstore.

Gallagher came to two conclusions about modern films that tackle the Civil War.

First, what Gallagher calls the “lost cause” theme is decreasingly popular. This theme, he said, was a common viewpoint among the 5.5 million former members of the Confederacy in the wake of the war. It stated that the Confederate cause was a gallant struggle against hopeless odds. “Gods and Generals,” he said, is the most recent example of a film in the Lost Cause tradition.

Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Gallagher concluded that no films take the viewpoint of what he calls the “Union Cause,” meaning the view that the Civil War was an attempt to keep the United States - and its democracy - from fracturing apart. Gallagher argues that, in reality, the Union Cause was the most widespread view during the era.

“You want to understand the Civil War, you have to understand [the desire to maintain the] Union,” he said.

In fact, he found, Union troops are rarely shown at all. When they are, they are portrayed as vicious and racist.

“They even kill Kevin Costner’s pet wolf,” Gallagher said, referencing “Dances With Wolves.” “That’s how inhuman they are. Not content with killing his smart horse, they killed his pet wolf.”

Important Union figures such as Ulysses S. Grant are typically shown as drunk, bloodthirsty and corrupt. Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, meanwhile, is not shown at all. “If you want to get your Tecumseh groove on, you’ll have to get it somewhere else, because you won’t find it in films.”

Rather than exploring the era’s true views of the Civil War, Gallagher said, filmmakers tend to emphasize the themes of emancipation of slavery and brotherly reconciliation between the North and South.

Gallagher believes that Hollywood is uncomfortable exploring the viewpoint that Americans were compelled to fight to preserve the Union and democracy. It is likely, he said, that such nationalistic expressions remind them of unpopular projections of American foreign policy such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

“Hollywood is not good at having two ideas at once,” he said. “And Hollywood’s idea is that U.S. soldiers wreak havoc.”

Gallagher has no illusions that his arguments will trump the most important book in Hollywood: the ledger book. Filmmakers will continue to make movies about the Civil War with whatever viewpoint they feel will be best received by audiences, despite the films’ historical inaccuracy.

“I’m not an art critic. I’m not a film critic,” he said. “What I intended is to show what Hollywood chooses to portray and what Hollywood chooses not to portray.”