You know you have stumbled on to the blog of a history geek when you find not just antiquarian trivia but posts about historians—notorious drudges
whose personal biographies do not
typically make gripping reading.
Over the several years I have been committing these posts, I have made entries
on one English historian, Edward Gibbon of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire fame—“Another fat, square book, eh, Mr.
Gibbon? Scribble, Scribble. Scribble!” said King George III. But mostly I have taken note of American historians of the American experience. Among them have been Frances Parkman, the virtual founder
of serious American history;
Henry Adams, detailed chronicler of
the Jefferson and Madison administrations and his own education; Fredrick Jackson Turner who expounded a thesis on the American Frontier;
naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan
whose book was considered one of the ten most influential 19th Century volumes in the world and which led to an international
arms race and ultimately World War I; Bernard DeVotto, whose
work on the fur trade exposed the roots of western expansionism and
Manifest Destiny;
Charles and Mary Beard who insisted
on taking into account technological
advancement and economic causes
and maintained that history must be more than a parade of heroic actors and the achievements of the elite; Stephen Ambrose,
World War II tale teller and a believer
in the great actor in works on Lewis and Clark and the building of the
Transcontinental Railway; and
finally Howard Zinn who turned things upside down with his People’s
History of the United States.
Now it is the turn of Bruce Catton, the man who rescued the Civil War from generations
of Lost Cause myth makers and Southern
apologists, almost succeeded in making American history
cool to a couple of generations, and did so with a journalist’s eye for compelling narrative. He did it in a series of wildly successful books, as editor of
a slick magazine,
and without the benefit of an academic degree. Naturally, he was often disparaged by the Ivory Tower crowd, many of whom were green with envy for what they considered his un-merited public acclaim.
Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan on the southeast
shore of the Little Traverse Bay
of Lake Michigan on October 9,
1899. That’s the country where young Ernest
Hemingway spent his summers fishing and hunting with high school buddies and was the setting for
his early Nick Adams stories.
His father was a Congregationalist
minister serving the New England
diaspora who populated much of the upper
Midwest giving it a Yankee and loyally Republican character.
In early childhood the family
moved to Benzonia,
Michigan in the heart of lumber
country. The village had been founded as a Christian colony before the timber
boom and as the home of what became Benzonia
Academy. His father took a teaching
position at the school and he soon became headmaster.
Many local residents had flocked to the colors when the Civil War broke out. Michigan was a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment and was near the top of all Northern states in supplying troops to the Union
as a percentage of the population.
When Catton was a boy the Civil War was about as distant in
time as the Vietnam War is for
us today. There was a large and active Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) post in the town which participated in all public occasions. Many of the veterans were esteemed civic leaders, businessmen, and politicians still young enough to be vigorous and active. In his memoir of his Michigan childhood, Waiting for
the Morning Train, Canton would recall listening to the stories of the
veterans with rapt attention and frank hero worship.
Catton
went off to college in 1916 to that bastion of liberal Congregationalism, Oberlin College in Ohio with an eye to following his father into an academic
career. But fate, in the form of the American entry into World War I intervened. What was
a young man steeped in patriotism and
tales of glory to do, but volunteer?
He dropped out of school and enlisted in the Navy. He saw no combat duty and after the Armistice was one of the thousands of recruits
who were allowed to leave the service early as the Navy prepared
to shrink.
After the
war, young Catton drifted before he began to pick up assignments
as a freelance reporter The Cleveland News. He turned out to be very good at it. A newspaper man was born. He scaled
the professional ladder quickly. From 1920 to ’24 he worked for Hearst’s Boston American.
In 1926 it was back to Ohio for a turn as an editor at the The Plain Dealer, the prestige paper in the Cleveland
market.
From 1926 to 1941, he worked for the
Scripps-Howard Newspaper Enterprise
Association syndicate where
Catton wrote editorials, book reviews, and served as a Washington correspondent.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941,
Catton was 42 and too old for military service. Other men of his
age and professional accomplishment as well known around Washington as he were
able to secure commissions and given
administrative,
staff, or support duties.
But Catton lacked the college degree that was the magic ticket to such
appointments. Instead, he took a job as Director of Information for the War Production Board which he held through most of the war.
Later he took similar positions at the Department
of Commerce and the Department of
the Interior. The latter job included the National Park Service which produced
hundreds of historic documents related to its sites, including several Civil
War battlefields and cemeteries.
Catton’s perch as a Washington insider during the war gave him insight
on the enormous effort to quickly and efficiently organize to mobilize American natural resources and production
into the greatest arsenal the world
had ever seen. He kept careful notes during the war and
afterward while still working at Commerce and Interior, conducted meticulous research into the effort that sprawled
across virtually every agency of the Federal government. The result
was his first book, War Lords of Washington, published in 1948. Although the public’s interest in books about the greatest event of
its time seemed insatiable, it did not extend to tales of Washington bureaucrats and desk jockeys. Although well reviewed, the book was not a success. But it did inspire
Catton to leave government service to concentrate on writing and history.
With one great war just behind him
and his work at the Interior Department to refresh
his interest, Catton turned to what would be the great subject
of the rest of his career—the Civil War.
His attention focused on the famed—and often criticized—Army of the
Potomac—which General George B. McClellan
whipped up into one of the best trained
and best equipped armies ever to take the field—indeed in the opinion of many
military historians the first really modern
army for an industrial age.
Yet McClellan was loathe to risk his creation and constantly overestimated the numbers and condition of his enemy, Robert
E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Most accounts of that confrontation had been little more than swoons
over Lee’s alleged military genius and the daring-do of brilliant
subordinates like J.E.B Stuart and Stonewall Jackson by the creators of the Lost Cause myth.
In Mr. Lincoln’s
Army, published in 1951 Catton followed the Army from its shaky
beginnings to the epic, bloody, Battle
of Antietam, a narrow Union tactical
victory but a monumental lost opportunity. Although well
researched and footnoted, Catton departed from a dry academic
approach and painted a
picture in vivid detail of the daily life of the troops and told
many stories gleaned from letters and diaries as well as press
accounts and official battle reports. He approached his epic
subject like a novelist with
attention to narrative.
It was written frankly not for an academic audience, but for what was then
called the intelligent public.
It was the first book of what became
a trilogy. Glory Road in 1952 followed the Army
under a succession of commanding
generals from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg. But it wasn’t
until the third volume, A Stillness at Appomattox, which
became a runaway best seller, that
the full scope of Catton’s achievement became apparent. The final
book traced the Army under its new de facto commander—George Gordon Meade, victor
at Gettysburg, was in nominal
command but Ulysses S Grant, in charge of all Union armies, made his
headquarters with the Army of the Potomac. It was a brutal war of attrition with massive losses on both sides which devolved from a war of daring maneuver to a slug fest
and eventually trench warfare that
previewed the carnage of World
War I. Capping it off was a moving account of Lee’s final
surrender and the extraordinarily generous terms old Unconditional Surrender Grant gave his
enemy following Lincoln’s directive to “let him up easy.”
The book won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Readers who had missed the first two volumes were sent scrambling to get a hold
of them. In addition to the original hard cover and subsequent book club editions, mass market paperback editions flew off
drug store racks as if the books
were romance novels or detective thrillers. That’s where
I picked up my well-thumbed copies in the early ‘60s. During the Civil War Centennial all three books
were issued together in one thick volume as Bruce Catton’s Civil War.
That fame and his background as a
journalist led directly to Catton’s new job as founding editor and leading contributor to the ambitious American
Heritage magazine in 1954. The magazine aimed directly at the
audience of the hugely successful National Geographic—a supposedly middle brow reader with a decent
education and curiosity about the world. Each issue was
mounted on quality paper, without advertising,
and hardbound—meant to be saved and shelved.
Articles were lavishly illustrated including many cuts in color.
Topflight historians who were willing to adapt to the narrative style of the
magazine as well as gifted journalists and writers were recruited to
contribute. Under a distinctive logo of a Federal eagle, wings outstretched, the magazine unapologetically celebrated
America. Catton put it this way in his introductory essay:
We intend to deal with that great, unfinished and
illogically inspiring story of the American people doing, being and becoming.
Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in
very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the
sunset skies.
In its general outlook, the
magazine exuded Eisenhower era patriotism, confidence, and
conviction that overall, the nation was on the right side of history
and still the “hope of the world.” Yet it wore its ideology
relatively lightly and did not grind its ax too noticeably.
The warts of American history—slavery,
the displacement and near eradication of native populations, exploitation
of the working class, the age of the robber barons, political corruption, and Jim Crow—were all frankly acknowledged but it did not dwell
on them or examine deeply root causes. The role of immigrants was
acknowledged. And if women were
ornaments, not actors on the stage, well, it was all part of
the myopia of the times.
As intended under Catton’s editorial
direction American Heritage became a fixture
in many middle class homes.
Mine included. As a youthful history
geek, I eagerly awaited each issue and poured over it upon arrival.
It influenced how I write history, even if I take a less rosy prospective
and add a dash of class consciousness
to my analysis. My stories are still narrative driven and strive to be
entertaining as well as informative. As middle brow as it
gets.
Similarly, Catton and American Heritage shaped the
sensibilities and style of film
documentarian Ken Burns. It is no accident that his main script writer and the author of the
accompanying coffee table books to
his epic documentary series is Geoffrey
Ward, a Catton disciple and one of his successors as American Heritage editor.
Catton remained the guiding force
behind the magazine until 1959 and remained a regular contributor the rest of
his life.
Catton continued to mine the Civil
War for more books. U. S. Grant
and the American Military Tradition in considered Grant’s military
legacy as the essential author of modern industrial warfare and
incorporated what is still considered short biographies of the general.
The next year he aimed for young readers inn Banners at Shenandoah: A Story of Sheridan’s
Fighting Cavalry about Union cavalry
in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
But the crowning achievement
of the mid-‘50’s was This Hallowed
Ground. It was an account of the
war from the Union perspective. Unlike so many other military historians of the
war, Catton was an unabashed Union
sympathizer. This book, widely considered the best single volume history of the Civil War,
captured the flag from the Southern
partisans who dominated the field and was a major turning point in how the war was popularly conceived. It received the Fletcher Pratt Award from the Civil
War Round Table of New York in 1957.
In America Goes to War in
1958, Catton stepped back from the battlefield a bit and
examined the Northern mobilization
of its vastly superior resources and
much larger population.
Drawing from insights from his own World War II experience,
Catton was one of the first to depict the Civil War not as the last gasp of Napoleonic set piece battles and chess board maneuvering by opposing
armies but as the introduction of
industrial and total war in
which the enemy’s
population, economy, and resources are as important a target as armies in the field. He recognized that
while Virginian romantic George Patton may
have channeled dreams of glory and Stonewall
Jackson in his imagination, Dwight
Eisenhower was the heir of the relentless, merciless Grant
and William Tecumseh Sherman.
In fact, Catton returned to Grant as
a subject when the widow of Lloyd Lewis, author of the popular Captain
Sam Grant tapped him to complete a projected biographical
trilogy about the Union’s triumphant general. Using Lewis’s research
notes as well as his own original research, Catton completed Grant Moves South in 1960 and Grant Takes Command
in 1969.
The Centennial of the Civil War naturally
brought renewed interest in the subject. Catton was ready. The American Heritage Picture History of
the Civil War and its briefer companion for adolescent readers The American Heritage Short History of
the Civil War were both issued in 1960 and became instant classics. The glossy Picture History was a
hefty coffee table tome with more
than 800 reproductions of color paintings, illustrated newspaper engravings, and what were then rarely seen photographs. It also included easy to understand maps.
My mother invested in the very pricy
big book. I was so glad she did. I spent hours closely
examining every illustration and digesting Catton’s text. So did Ken
Burns. His PBS documentary series
was born in Catton’s book.
Catton’s
main effort of the ‘60’s was an even grander trilogy, Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War. These books went beyond the familiar territory of military
history to examine the root causes
and social context of the conflict
as well as its effects on
civilian populations both North and South. The Coming Fury in 1961explored the causes and events
leading to the start of the war, culminating in its first major combat
operation, the First Battle of Bull Run.
Terrible Swift Sword in 1963 followed
both sides as they mobilize for a massive war effort continuing the Battle
of Fredericksburg. Never Call
Retreat in carried the war through Vicksburg,
Gettysburg, and the bloody struggles of 1864 and 1865 before the final
surrender.
In 1963 working with his son,
historian William Bruce Catton he
reached back to examine the building national
tensions that lead to the war using the lives of future adversaries Abraham
Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as the
lenses viewing the events unfold. The book was an attack on the
still common assertion by Southern partisans that the Civil war “was not
about slavery.”
The same year Catton had to
interrupt his work on the Civil War to prepare one of the most popular instant histories of the Kennedy Assassination, Four Days: the Historical Record of the
Death of President Kennedy,
a 144-page collaboration of American Heritage and United Press International (UPI) which became a must-have memento in millions of homes,
mine included.
By the end of the decade, Catton had
finally completed his work on the Civil War and moved on to a partial retirement. He was
spending more and more time back home in Michigan where he established a
summer residence near his boyhood home of Benzonia. He crafted Waiting
for the Morning Train in 1972, a nostalgic
memoir of his childhood and
youth. He followed that up with Michigan:
A Bicentennial History in
1976.
Catton
had one more big, fat book in him, The
Bold and Magnificent Dream: America’s Founding Years, 1492–1815, an ambitious survey from
the Age of Discovery through
Americas “second war for independence,”
the War of 1812.
In 1977
fellow Michigander President Gerald R.
Ford presented Catton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest
civilian honor. Ford noted that Catton, “made us hear the sounds of battle
and cherish peace.”
Less than a year later, on August
28, 1978 Catton died at age 79 at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan. He was laid to rest under the familiar
soil of Benzonia Township Cemetery.
There is considerable irony in the fact that this Union partisan’s papers
somehow ended up in the custody of the Southern military academy The Citadel in North Carolina
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