All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and this book is so interesting.
It's called War No More, the Anti-War Impulse in American Literature, 1861 through 1914.
It's by Cynthia Wachtel and flipping to the back inside jacket here, she is assistant professor of American literature and director of the S.
Daniel Abraham Honors Program at Yeshiva University in New York City.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
Very well, thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
What a great book this is.
I admit I didn't quite finish it.
I left off at the Mark Twain part, but so that's most of the way through.
Very interesting stuff here.
It's the period from the very beginning of the civil war through, I guess, really the eve of World War I.
And it's interesting that you focus on that time period as it's kind of hard to ignore immediately in there.
And as you detail and analyze it and explain it, you really have in this era, particularly starting with the civil war, this major conflict in literary style at the time in the era of the romantics and the poets and all this.
Meeting mechanized warfare and the dawn of the industrial revolution, you know, and it really was the civil war, as you explain, where all these new, new kinds of rifles and new kinds of shipping and everything else were just really revolutionizing war while at the same time, the literary convention was still stuck back from an earlier era.
Exactly.
That's a really good synopsis.
So, well, I wanted to, I guess I'd like to let you get in a word edgewise about Julia Ward Howe, because I didn't realize the story of her great redemption.
But then I want to ask you about Sir Walter Scott and his influence on the minds of the American people in the lead up to the civil war.
Sure.
So should I start with Julia Ward Howe then?
Please do.
So what I'm looking at in the book, as you indicated, is this early generation of American anti-war writers, this generation of writers who are questioning the morality and meaning of war and the methods of war in the late 19th century through the early 20th century.
And Julia Ward Howe initially is on the scene as the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
And I am an atrocious singer, but I will sing the first line so your audience can recognize it.
It goes, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
So if they can make that out, that's a song, a poem that she wrote in the early years of the civil war, which became the most popular poem and song in the North, it became the anthem of the North.
And it's a poem which invokes God as a player on the Northern side.
It indicates that God will be supporting the Northern cause, that he'll be marching as it were by the side of the Northern soldiers.
And it presents a civil war as a very righteous war, a religious war, a God-blessed war, if you will.
And really, I mean, I know this from my own life.
I think the dawn of the war on terror, it was sung from time to time anyway.
I wonder, has that really stuck throughout the world wars and the Cold War?
Was that, you know, continually invoked or say the Spanish-American war?
Certainly the notion that we are fighting righteous wars has stuck through the centuries.
But I mean, that particular poem, because of course, when you sing that first stanza, everybody knows exactly what you're talking about.
Everybody's heard that a million times, right?
So, you know, that's really interesting.
I hadn't heard it sung in the context of our present wars, but obviously we all still know it.
So it's still sung and it's still invoked.
And certainly the concept that we're fighting religious wars continues.
But what you asked me about was her change of heart.
And what's really interesting about Trillia Ward Howe is that she wrote that poem, that song in the early 1960s during the Civil War.
And then in 1870, she drafted a very unusual manifesto.
And this manifesto was titled An Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.
And in this appeal, she called upon women the world over to arise and to join together in protesting war and in demanding universal disarmament.
And whereas in the poem, the Civil War poem, she had talked about God's terrible swift sword, which was going to help the Northerners win the war.
In this appeal that she wrote in 1870, she wrote the sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
And she proclaimed blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
So in other words, within eight years of writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, she had a complete change of heart and was advocating universal disarmament and calling upon women the world over to join together for a day to protest war.
And this is pretty stunning.
And it was extremely unusual in her day because women generally did not speak out against war.
And she wanted women to play this role.
And she suggested that women leave their homes for a day to advocate for peace.
And she wrote, let them meet first as women to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace.
And this is actually the origins of modern Mother's Day.
Yet in Hao's own day, she really couldn't find any followers.
She suggested that women step forward from their homes to advocate for peace.
But it wasn't something that women were willing to do.
And actually, in her memoir, she reflected upon this and in her autobiography, which came out right before the turn of the century.
She wrote, the ladies who spoke in public in those days mostly confined their labors to the advocacy of women's suffrage.
I were not much interested in my scheme of a worldwide protest of women against the cruelties of war.
So she's really interesting, both because she had this profound change, apart from suggesting that war was righteous to claiming that it was not acceptable in any instances and it was violent and it didn't resolve problems.
And it was also interesting because she was playing a role as a pacifist, which women were not playing in that era.
OK, now, I guess we could develop that a bit further, but in the interest of time, I want to skip to Sir Walter Scott, who wasn't even an American.
But this is part of the story where it reminds me of community college.
And what I understood from American lit class then or, you know, is really American history through the eyes of what was being written at the time.
You really can't have a very small group of writers in the 19th century really hold major sway over the minds of the American people and what's important to them in the way that TV news kind of carries us now.
And I don't think there's really writers that are analogous in our current era.
They really were very powerful.
And this guy, Sir Walter Scott, you say, kind of was the seed of uncounted imitators.
This was the dominant sort of popular fiction writing in the era preceding the Civil War in both the North and the South.
Right.
And I think you point to something really important in your lead in there, which is this was an era before radio, before telephones, before movies, before Twitter, before email, before YouTube.
So literature played an extremely important role in shaping the public's ideas about many things, but also in particular in shaping the public's opinion about war.
People were reading their newspapers and their magazines very carefully during the Civil War years.
And poetry was very common in those publications.
In fact, Americans of all levels of talent were routinely flooding their local newspapers and their local other publications with their own poetry.
So that's something we don't see today.
You and I don't send poetry in unsolicited newspapers to reflect upon what's going on with General Petraeus, but this is a typical thing to be doing in that era.
And Sir Walter Scott, who was Scottish and had written in the decades before the Civil War and in fact was long dead by the time of the Civil War, had played a tremendous role in shaping Americans' literary tastes.
And he had written a series of romances, novels, which focused upon chivalry and knightliness and heroism and valor and honor.
And so when Americans came to write about the Civil War, they were building upon that legacy.
He had been immensely popular in America.
He'd been perhaps the single most popular author of the early 19th century.
And as you noted, had many, many, many imitators.
So when people started writing about the Civil War, they wrote about the war in this very romanticized, sentimentalized, sanitized way, as if knights were still battling with swords on the battlefields, when in fact it wasn't the case.
All right.
So sorry, we have to leave it there to take this short break.
We'll be back, everybody, with Cynthia Wachell to talk about War No More, the anti-war impulse in American literature, 1861 through 1914.
After this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
The book is War No More.
And the guest is Cynthia, I realized during the commercial break, I forgot to ask you how to pronounce your last name correctly.
Pardon me.
It's OK, it's Wachtell.
Wachtell.
Did I say it right that time?
OK, good deal.
OK.
And she wrote this book, War No More, the anti-war impulse in American literature, 1861 through 1914.
And the music and the commercial messages interrupted us there.
But you were right about a point about romanticism in literature versus the realities of warfare.
So what I try to make clear in my book is that there are a number of writers who, during the Civil War, were questioning this conventional notion of the war, which drew upon the legacy of Sir Walter Scott.
So I look at the published and private writings of people like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, these writers who we've been taught to regard very highly.
And what I try to show is that there are aspects of the writing which very clearly are challenging war, challenging both the morality of war and the means of warfare in the late 19th century.
And sometimes we have to look at the drafts of the writings to see this.
Sometimes we have to look at their private letters or their private diaries.
But we can see them coming out very strongly against war.
For example, Walt Whitman visited the battlefield of Fredericksburg in late 1862.
And when he arrived there, he saw the black and bloated bodies of the men who had died there, of the Northerners who had died there.
He saw a heap of amputated limbs beneath a tree outside a field hospital.
And he wrote in his diary, Oh, the hideous, damned hell of war.
Were the preachers preaching of hell?
Oh, there is no hell more damned than this hell of war.
So that's Walt Whitman.
But it's a side of Walt Whitman which we're not particularly familiar with because he didn't allow these lines to enter into his published poetry, into the volume that he published after the war.
He published a collection called Drum Taps in 1865.
Herman Melville published another collection of poetry called Battle Pieces in 1866.
Neither of their collections are particularly popular.
But if we look carefully at their writings, again, both within these collections and their private drafts and private letters and private diaries, we see them questioning the popular representation of war, offering a much more graphic, much more disturbing, much more bleak vision of warfare during the Civil War years.
Well, and it seems like the measure of the pressure on Whitman to self-censor the way he did, the way that you write about his letters back and forth to publishers and the revisions made to his work, the contrast between his published work and his private essays.
Either he was a terrible coward or there was just no demand whatsoever for the reality of the Civil War.
People wanted to hear, you know, everybody got a single bullet to the chest and died without blood like the 1950s spaghetti westerns or whatever.
Right.
That's a wonderful way of describing it.
Exactly.
Everyone wanted to believe that the war was righteous, that the men, whether their fathers, their brothers, their sons, their loved ones who were fighting in the war, were fighting what would be called good at death, death with a tidy bullet to the breast, in which their comrades attended to them, buried them, wept over them, made sure that they were interred in tidy graves on a tidy battlefield or in a tidy graveyard.
No one wanted to confront the reality of war in which sometimes battlefields took flame.
So men might be burned to death if they were trapped or wounded or corpses might be burned or men might be left unburied or men might suffer agonizing death, might suffer lonely death.
These were truths which people didn't want to confront.
They wanted to believe in the perfect war, even if the Civil War wasn't so perfect.
And their poets and other writers obliged them in offering them this very romanticized version of war.
So there was no literary market whatsoever for authors who were challenging this norm.
So we can see Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and others trying to deal with their own conflict of convictions, with their own desire to support the Union, but their own moral doubt about war.
And we see expressed in their lines of poetry, whether published or unpublished, a version of war which doesn't correspond with this very sanitized, very tidy, very uplifting tradition which was being published in the popular works of the day.
Well, I wonder what's our problem now.
It sure is hell in romanticism, but nobody cares about the war is ongoing in this country.
And I would actually draw a parallel, if you would.
We don't have poetry, as I noted in our newspaper today.
But one way that we can see sort of a similar blindness to war, I think, is if we look at the way that the war dead are represented or not represented in photography.
There's been a really big absence of photos of our current war dead.
So, for example, if you look at the ratings from the last 10 years, for example, in 2005, there's an article on Salon magazine titled Iraq, the unseen war.
And the author of that article pointed out that at that point, 1868 troops had been killed, but there are almost no photographs of them.
Right.
Well, and if you remember, too, there was a I think a young Marine shot in Afghanistan and was it Reuters or AP published one still photograph of it.
And there was a major uproar that they would show us even one picture of one dying American soldier.
You're exactly right.
So I can quote the Encyclopedia of War Journalism, which wrote in 2009, U.S. military command banned journalists who were embedded with forces in eastern Afghanistan from videotaping or photographing soldiers killed in action.
And this was considered a response to the release of that photograph of Lance Corporal Bernard, who had been fatally shot and was at the center of a story called Death of a Marine.
Similarly, the Pentagon had a ban for 18 years on taking photographs of the bodies of American soldiers being repatriated at Dover Air Base.
So, again, I feel we have this sort of parallel event taking place, whereas the Civil War generation didn't want to be confronted with the realities of death through their poetry.
I feel we don't want to be confronted with the realities of death through our photography.
You know, why is it that it's so threatening even to see the casket, a flag covered casket of a soldier being returned to America through Dover Air Base?
Why was that banned for 18 years?
So I think, you know, there's a similar unwillingness on the part of Americans to deal with the reality of war death.
And I think we need to think about what are the implications of living in a country that is at war in which we do not routinely see these images of the battles of our battle dead.
Well, the war between the states certainly was a big turning point in a great many things.
And you talk one of the things that's most notable about the book, I think, is what Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the monitor and the invention of industrial mechanized warfare on the seas and how it was certainly the mark of the death of one thing and birth of something much worse.
Right.
And this is a huge anxiety beginning with the Civil War, that war was becoming ever more anonymous, ever more deadly, that machinery was becoming the determining factor in war that was no longer about men's heroism or their individual valor, but it was instead about who had the best musket, who had the best rifle, who had the best machine gun, who had the best artillery.
And even by the end of the Civil War, war had devolved into trench warfare with sharpshooters.
So it wasn't a version of warfare of men marching shoulder to shoulder into the fray.
Even at the time of the Civil War, the people who are on the attack were going to lose the people who were in an entrenched position, the people who are on the defensive.
Well, you know what?
Can you say one more segment?
Sure.
Great, because there's so many more ideas to develop that I found in this book.
Very interesting.
It's War No More, the anti-war impulse in American literature, 1861 through 1914 by Cynthia Wachtell, right?
Exactly.
All right.
Good deal.
Hang on.
Anti-war radio.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio talking with Cynthia Wachtell, author of War No More, the anti-war impulse in American literature, 1861 through 1914.
And right before the break, Cynthia, you were talking about the invention of newer and better rifles and artillery, etc., changing the dynamic of war on the ground.
Although, of course, the generals were the last ones to figure that out as they, you know, marched human flesh straight toward sheets of incoming lead and massive, horrific, hell on earth type casualties and some horrible battles in the Civil War.
But now, you know, what I wonder is, because you really make it clear in the book that certainly, you know, there were these small exceptions, but in the general view, at least in the North and I guess in the South, too, this romantic era of American literature held throughout the war and through all the portrayals of the war, particularly in the poetry, etc., like that.
But I wonder whether it was the war itself that killed that romantic era and ushered in the age of realism, or was it something else?
That's a wonderful question.
Certainly, realistic literature becomes much more popular in the decades after the war.
So romanticism gives way to realism.
It doesn't disappear, but realism becomes acceptable.
I think, yes, probably the war was a major contributing factor to that, so that by the late 19th century, authors like Ambrose Pierce and Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, could write books that were much, much more critical, much more cynical, much more graphic, much more raw about the Civil War and be praised and be successful.
The Red Badge of Courage was hugely successful when it came out in 1895, both in America and when it was published in England.
So clearly there is a huge shift that took place in that era, which no doubt was informed by the Civil War, among other things.
Yeah.
Well, but as you say, though, it sure took a while, right?
1895 is 30 years later.
What was being written in the meantime?
Nothing about the war is sort of like Vietnam.
Let's just all pretend that never happened or what?
Yeah, you know, it's a wonderful question.
Generally, what scholars will tell you is that in the 1870s, very little was written about the Civil War, that people were exhausted by the subject.
They didn't want to focus upon it.
They didn't want to deal with it.
And so it wasn't really until later in the century that a revival, if you will, of interest in the Civil War took place and accounts by generals began to be published.
Some very famous series, a very famous series was published in the Century Magazine.
And once that series, which was called Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, was published between 1884 and 1887, sort of opened the doors to a new round of revisiting the war and a new generation of works about the war.
Mm hmm.
Tell us about this guy, Harold Frederick, that wrote The Copperhead.
That was an interesting part of the book to me.
So Harold Frederick was a northerner.
He'd been a child in upstate New York during the actual war years.
And in this period, which I was referring to, of the late 19th century, he wrote this novel, The Copperhead.
It appeared in 1893, and it focuses upon a farmer who protests the war.
The farmer says, this war, this wicked war between brothers must stop.
But he's really isolated by his community.
He's alienated from his community.
And although he's protesting war, his neighbors are zealously patriotic.
So he'll say things like, why just think what's been going on?
Great armies raised, hundreds of thousands of honest men taken from their work and set to murder in each other, whole deer sticks of country torn up by the roots, homes desolated, the land filled with widows and orphans and every house, the house of mourning.
So Frederick uses this protagonist, this main character, to state his case against war and to show how devastating war is, yet to show how so many Americans were blind to it during the actual war years.
Yeah, it's it's amazing because you look back on it and you had all these newspaper editors in the North who were arrested and held by the army.
In fact, even a former governor and a sitting member of the House of Representatives, I think, from Ohio, who was arrested.
So, you know, I guess there was some of that, but it really does the way you portrayed in the book.
It's as it's like the people in the North really had no access to anti-war sentiment at all, almost or, you know, publishing wise anyway.
Right.
And what really surprised dinner tables, maybe something else.
Right.
And what surprised me is I had thought that there would be pacifist groups who'd be writing against the war and that the Quakers would be writing against the war.
And I kept looking for this during my research and saying, well, where are the Quakers?
So, for example, the most famous Quaker poet of the day was John Greenleaf Whittier, who was a sensation in the early 19th century.
It was just huge, immense fame.
But he was also an abolitionist.
And so I think he was really torn when it came to the war about whether he would protest the war because he was a pacifist and a Quaker, whether he would allow the war to take place because he was an abolitionist and hoping that the war would end slavery.
And he ended up writing a collection of poems called In Wartimes and Other Poems.
And when this was published in 1863, it was a very well received and it helped to boost Northern morale.
So far from taking a stake, you know, being argument out against war.
He had really advised his fellow Quakers and others to sort of to silently wait out the war.
And he supported the war.
And he was even invited by a brigadier general to visit the general in the field.
And when he did, he was told by the brigadier general, your loyal verse has made us all your friends, lightening the wearisomeness of our march, brightening our lonely campfires and cheering our hearts in battle.
So it's rather amazing that you have a Quaker poet who's being thanked for cheering the hearts of soldiers in battle.
And it shows you how silent America was during the Civil War, how silent, at least pacifist America was during the war years.
Yeah, well, it's really something, but I guess we can see it in our own time.
Of course, the stakes in the Civil War were much higher, but you can see how whipped up the American people can get about a war just in our own contemporary time.
And that's with, you know, to be not to be too presumptuous in your interview, but bogus wars like the war against Iraq, a helpless little third world nation, you can really have half the population call and the other half traitors for not going along with something even like that.
Right.
And I think that's why this book is so important, because it shows that there is this very strong tradition of anti-war writing in America that, in fact, some authors who we consider the quintessential American authors, people like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, were clearly questioning the morality and the methods of war right back, you know, 150 years ago during the Civil War.
So for people to be saying that it's un-American to question war is clearly to misunderstand the legacy of these writers.
Howard Zinn wrote, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
So I think we need to recognize that American anti-war writing dates back far earlier than we think.
It's not simply something which evolved after World War One, after the devastation of World War One, but it's there, you know, in this war, which is we look back to as being the biggest American war, a war in which 620,000 Americans died, the last war to be fought on our own ground.
And I think that's really important.
And I think that the protesters today need to embrace that legacy and to say we're actually engaging in a very, very American tradition of war protest.
And, you know, we are not the people who are un-American in this scenario.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and speaking of Mark Twain, I thought I knew a lot about him, but I'm kind of ashamed to measure my ignorance.
I didn't realize that he had killed a man who turned out not to be a Northern soldier at the beginning of the Civil War.
Right.
So I don't think, I think you're not alone, that many people don't know that Mark Twain actually fought in the Civil War.
And that's because he did so in a sort of unofficial capacity during the opening weeks of the war.
He and a group of friends joined together fighting for the Confederacy in Missouri, which is where Mark Twain was from.
And later for that series that I mentioned, the century series about battles and generals of the Civil War, Mark Twain would contribute a piece.
So about 20 years after the fact, in 1885, he wrote this piece recalling what he did during these early weeks of the Civil War.
And he writes the piece in sort of a comic vein.
And he says, oh, they were so scared they would run anytime there was danger nearby.
But then he recounts what happened one dimly lit night.
And that's the night that he and his friends mistakenly killed a man believing he was a Northern soldier.
Yeah, and certainly changed his life ever after that.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time, but I thank you very much for your time, Cynthia.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And if anyone wants to know more about the book, there's a website, www.warnomorethebook.com.
OK, great.
Thanks so much.
OK, thank you.
Bye.
Everybody, that's Cynthia Wachell, War No More, the anti-war impulse in American literature, 1861 through 1914.
She is, again, assistant professor of American literature and director of the S.
Daniel Abrams Honors Program at Yeshiva University in New York City.
