Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town

Studies of historical memory have shown that acts of commemoration are deeply rooted in contemporary power relations. Looking backward, together, portrays the status quo in ways that serve political and economic agendas. In Gettysburg 1963, Jill Ogline Titus demonstrates that this kind of mobilization was at play in south-central Pennsylvania a century after the Army of Northern Virginia came and went.

She argues along two fronts: (1) that the flurry of commentary about Gettysburg made the site a memorial epicenter for 1960s understandings of the Civil War and (2) that race was central to American Cold War thought. Connecting the two threads is not an easy task, but Titus succeeds in this thought-provoking work.The book reveals the layered, diverging meanings that commentators wrapped around the Civil War generally and the Battle of Gettysburg specifically. Titus presents many examples of the four main narratives performed at Gettysburg in 1963, which came in no particular order and could coincide at any given occasion.

First was an educational framing of the war as a civics lesson about the prudence of consensus. This was the version promoted by the National Park Service (NPS), Pennsylvania’s centennial commission, and county-level planners. Second was the contribution of Southern politicians and genealogy groups: a states’ rights take that honored southern sacrifice and branded contemporary civil rights efforts as un-American.

The third narrative presented the Civil War as an unfinished push to address deep inequities in the United States. Black townspeople, activist groups, and Lyndon Johnson supported this emancipationist reading. Finally, a Cold War packaging of Gettysburg made American perseverance and courage the bedrock of the Free World.

Northern politicians, chambers of commerce, and local hardware store owners broadcast this vision. With all of the monuments to dedicate or rededicate, the mini-anniversaries to recognize, and the functions to attend, Gettysburg in 1963 was fertile ground for speechifying.Titus describes the nature of centennial celebrations as “programmatic and logistical,” both about high symbolism and mass education and about motel vacancies and traffic control (75). This division becomes the guts of Gettysburg 1963; Titus links commentators’ grand ideas to the mundane operations of historical memory.

For historians of Pennsylvania, the most absorbing parts of the book may be the logistical passages that detail the mechanics of commemoration in Adams County. Early on, Titus shows that an economic reliance on tourism made some white residents excuse racial discrimination, to avoid upsetting southern guests. The first chapter reviews the history of race in twentieth-century Gettysburg, from Ku Klux Klan rallies and lingering Jim Crow practices to sporadic attempts by African Americans to force change at public pools or barbershops.

Meanwhile, the commemoration industry kept things pleasant for (white) paying customers. A chapter on the early July 1963 events animates the tensions between administrators and performers (especially community actors and military reenactors) over the tone and focus of their programs. All of this is fascinating.Titus also reminds us how the timeline of Civil War commemoration synched with other, better-known chronologies.

The Cyclorama Building was dedicated just weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The battle anniversary itself came fast on the heels of firehoses in Birmingham, George Wallace in the schoolhouse door, and Medgar Evers dead in his driveway. Dwight Eisenhower spoke at the Gettysburg Address centennial on a Tuesday; President Kennedy was killed that Friday.

These connections strike a chord because they place ideas about Gettysburg in the larger world, where they might have mattered.I write “might,” because we cannot know if the commemorative “battle” that Titus refers to in the book’s opening sentence determined anything beyond its own reality. The symbolic malleability of July 1863 comes through clearly; anyone with a microphone could make Gettysburg mean what they wanted it to mean. Readers learn how particular meanings emerged via the pressing events of the era.

But once we get to the speeches, editorials, and pageants, their substance underwhelms. This is a challenge inherent in a study of pomp and oratory. Everyone performing at the centennial was ready to “send a range of messages” to the gathered throngs (84).

Every regional newspaper told readers what to think about the proceedings. The Boston Globe and Atlanta Constitution weighed in. Yet everyone in the crowd could “exercise a certain element of control” over their reception of the messages (40).

So Titus must qualify statements to acknowledge the breadth of human opinion. “Many” Black Americans thought one way and “substantial numbers” thought other ways (42). “Many members of the crowd likely perceived the event through Cold War lenses,” while others “likely felt a profound sense of loss and grief” (142).These are accurate ways to characterize a wide range of experiences, no doubt, but too much of this makes Gettysburg just one more site up for grabs. If the cavalcade had stopped at, say, Punxsutawney, most of the book’s expert presenters would have found a way to make their same points about a groundhog rather than Pickett’s Charge. Gettysburg was convenient and evocative—which is another way of stating Titus’s point.

The NPS and bestselling authors had made Gettysburg’s battle legible; now a new crop of storytellers arrived with their scripts. Titus calls Gettysburg a “spiritual hinge point of the Civil War,” which made it a particularly conspicuous canvas on which visitors could make their marks (29). That accounts for the volume, but does it explain the significance of the moment?

How did the national spotlight relate to most people, who were not paying attention? To the historian, the rich conversation appears as a struggle between “reconciliationist, Lost Cause, and emancipationist memory,” but is that how people experienced it in 1963 (149)?Simply put, readers should consider these ideas themselves by grabbing Gettysburg 1963. It is grounded in archival sources, local newspapers, and a strong scholarly literature.

It moves briskly and sits nicely beside Jim Weeks’s twenty-year-old study of the town’s tourism history. Communications scholars, public historians, and historians of the Civil War will all find rewards within its pages.