[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 54 (Wednesday, April 13, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E704]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      RECOGNIZING THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

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                           HON. STEVE ISRAEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 13, 2011

  Mr. ISRAEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the 150th 
anniversary of the start of the American Civil War and an important 
piece of journalism by Ken Burns entitled ``A Conflict's Acoustic 
Shadows.'' Mr. Burns' article in the New York Times reminds us all of 
the importance of reflecting upon this pivotal moment in our nation's 
history.

                            [April 11, 2011]

                     A Conflict's Acoustic Shadows

                             (By Ken Burns)

       More than once during the Civil War, newspapers reported a 
     strange phenomenon. From only a few miles away, a battle 
     sometimes made no sound--despite the flash and smoke of 
     cannon and the fact that more distant observers could hear it 
     clearly.
       These eerie silences were called ``acoustic shadows.''
       Tuesday, the 150th anniversary of the first engagement of 
     the Civil War, the Confederacy's attack on Fort Sumter, we 
     ask again whether in our supposedly post-racial, globalized, 
     21st-century world those now seemingly distant battles of the 
     mid-19th century still have any relevance. But it is clear 
     that the further we get from those four horrible years in our 
     national existence--when, paradoxically, in order to become 
     one we tore ourselves in two--the more central and defining 
     that war becomes.
       In our less civil society of this moment we are reminded of 
     the full consequences of our failure to compromise in that 
     moment.
       In our smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in 
     our society, we are continually brought up short by the old 
     code words and disguised prejudice of a tribalism beneath the 
     thin surface of our ``civilized'' selves.
       And in our dialectically preoccupied media culture, where 
     everything is pigeonholed into categories--red state/blue 
     state, black/white, North/South, young/old, gay/straight--we 
     are confronted again with more nuanced realities and the 
     complicated leadership of that hero of all American heroes, 
     Abraham Lincoln. He was at once an infuriatingly pragmatic 
     politician, tardy on the issue of slavery, and at the same 
     time a transcendent figure--poetic, resonant, appealing to 
     better angels we 21st-century Americans still find painfully 
     hard to invoke.
       The acoustic shadows of the Civil War remind us that the 
     more it recedes, the more important it becomes. Its lessons 
     are as fresh today as they were for those young men who were 
     simply trying to survive its daily horrors.
       And horrors there were: 620,000 Americans, more than 2 
     percent of our population, died of gunshot and disease, 
     starvation and massacre in places like Shiloh and Antietam 
     and Cold Harbor, Fort Pillow and Fort Wagner and Palmito 
     Ranch, Andersonville and Chickamauga and Ford's Theater.
       Yet in the years immediately after the South's surrender at 
     Appomattox we conspired to cloak the Civil War in bloodless, 
     gallant myth, obscuring its causes and its great ennobling 
     outcome--the survival of the union and the freeing of four 
     million Americans and their descendants from bondage. We 
     struggled, in our addiction to the idea of American 
     exceptionalism, to rewrite our history to emphasize the 
     gallantry of the war's top-down heroes, while ignoring the 
     equally important bottom-up stories of privates and slaves. 
     We changed the irredeemable, as the historian David Blight 
     argues, into positive, inspiring stories.
       The result has been to blur the reality that slavery was at 
     the heart of the matter, ignore the baser realities of the 
     brutal fighting, romanticize our own home-grown terrorist 
     organization, the Ku Klux Klan, and distort the consequences 
     of the Civil War that still intrude on our national life.
       The centennial of the Civil War in 1961 was for many of us 
     a wholly unsatisfying experience. It preferred, as the nation 
     reluctantly embraced a new, long-deferred civil rights 
     movement, to excavate only the dry dates and facts and events 
     of that past; we were drawn back then, it seemed, more to 
     regiments and battle flags, Minie balls and Gatling guns, 
     sentimentality and nostalgia and mythology, than to anything 
     that suggested the harsh realities of the real war.
       Subsequently, our hunger for something more substantial 
     materialized in James McPherson's remarkable ``Battle Cry of 
     Freedom'' and many other superb histories, in the popular 
     Hollywood movie ``Glory,'' and in my brother Ric's and my 
     1990 documentary series ``The Civil War.''
       It was an emotional archaeology we were all after, less 
     concerned with troop movements than with trying to represent 
     the full fury of that war; we were attracted to its 
     psychological disturbances and conflicted personalities, its 
     persistent dissonance as well as its inspirational moments. 
     We wanted to tell a more accurate story of African-Americans, 
     not as the passive bystanders of conventional wisdom, but as 
     active soldiers in an intensely personal drama of self-
     liberation.
       We wished to tell bottom-up stories of so-called ordinary 
     soldiers, North as well as South, to note women's changing 
     roles, to understand the Radical Republicans in Congress, to 
     revel in the inconvenient truths of nearly every aspect of 
     the Civil War.
       Today, the war's centrality in American history seems both 
     assured and tenuous. Each generation, the social critic Lewis 
     Mumford once said, re-examines and re-interprets that part of 
     the past that gives the present new meanings and new 
     possibilities. That also means that for a time an event, any 
     event, even one as perpetually important as the Civil War, 
     can face the specter of being out of historical fashion.
       Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through 
     past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times 
     archive.
       But in the end, it seems that the War of the Rebellion, the 
     formal name our government once gave to the struggle, always 
     invades our consciousness like the childhood traumatic event 
     it was--and still is.
       Maybe Walt Whitman, the poet and sometime journalist who 
     had worked as a nurse in the appalling Union hospitals, 
     understood and saw it best. ``Future years,'' he said, ``will 
     never know the seething hell, the black infernal background 
     of the countless minor scenes and interiors .  .  . of the 
     Secession War, and it is best they should not.''
       ``The real war,'' Whitman admonished us, ``will never get 
     in the books.'' We are, nonetheless, obligated to try.

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