But while Butler did deliver such a speech, at no time did he ever wave any bloody shirt in the House. It became a common cartoon trope. Budiansky describes the cultural outcome of this rhetorical manipulation:. To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.
The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it.
The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.
The use of this rhetorical manipulation—which is fundamentally underhanded, deceptive, and abusive—by conservatives, especially those who wish to whitewash the reality of far-right violence, has never ceased. In the s, it was a common reference among defenders of the revived Klan. More recently, you could hear versions of it whenever right-wing extremists would act out violently, often following the on-air urgings of right-wing pundits—who would then complain bitterly about anyone daring to connect them to the violence.
The most striking example—mainly because of its real-world effects— came in , when the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement warning that right-wing extremists were becoming more active and recruiting veterans. It worked. Fox News seized on the issue, running multiple segments on virtually every news show discussing the DHS bulletin.
Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh weighed in, declaring it an attack on conservative free speech. Limbaugh also claimed the DHS report—which actually had been commissioned during the Bush administration—was an attempt to attack the tea party movement.
One noteworthy example of this was when he came to the defense of Rush Limbaugh after he was denied the chance to own an NFL team. Laura Ingraham and other Fox News figures quickly figured out this rhetorical gimmick and used it as well. This same patter has been going on for so long that now white conservatives no longer believe that their racism is the problem.
The problem is the other people supposedly discriminating against them by calling them racists. Since the ascent of Donald Trump to the White House in , much of conservative political strategy advancing the spread of white nationalism has been predicated on a similar kind of gaslighting.
The narrative became official in The House held hearings on domestic terrorism, and Republicans invited demagogue Candace Owens to be their chief witness. Handouts and fear. Reparations and white nationalism.
They know that they are doing it, it's obvious they just don't care. Now, in the wake of a violent insurrection by pro-Trump Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, white nationalists and other yahoos, Carlson is singing a new verse for the same old tune: The Capitol siege was no big deal, the problem is liberals trying to make political hay with it. You are now a dangerous insurgent. Predictably, the public was fed similar rhetoric this week when the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security again held hearings on domestic terrorism in the wake of the Jan.
Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas tried to claim the Jan. All this happens to align neatly with the views of Republican voters. The consistent repetition of the Big Lie that Joe Biden won the election fraudulently by Republicans on the Sunday shows showed that they are all lining up to promote their gaslighting narrative of blamelessness.
Just as distressing was the realization that none of their interlocutors from the mainstream media were at all willing to confront this lie. All this gives us an idea what to expect for the foreseeable future out of the mouths of Republicans. The narrative will evolve into something like this:.
David Neiwert. Daily Kos Staff. Please log in or sign up to continue. Recommend Unrecommend He was a magic-lantern one, and they are not so bad as other kinds. He had magic-lantern pictures of Europe and Washington and other towns, and he showed them on a big white sheet, and talked about them Brown Taylor and Huntington were attempting to cash in on a technological novelty. Thus equipped, the lecturers could be expected to make a living of some kind by setting up in towns throughout their territories for a night or two.
The company even marketed a series of museum cases where images could be displayed through stereoview lenses to four people at a time, a situation somewhere in between the private side of individual viewing and the public quality of the shared spectacle the exhibitor would give a small talk while the views were being shown.
Crucial to the success of the enterprise appears to have been the involvement revolving around G. These were the same veteran soldiers that magazines such as the Maine Bugle , a periodical from the s sent to members of the Maine Cavalry regiments of the Civil War, would have addressed:.
Taylor and Huntington addressed this group through their lecturers:. Happily our Government authorized, during the war, skillful photographers to catch with their cameras the reflection, as in a mirror, of very many of those thrilling and interesting scenes Taylor 1. Taylor and Huntington proposed texts for the lecturer, and even suggested enrolling the local choral group to sing patriotic songs during the show, thus emphasizing the spectacular quality of the presentation.
The available images of the war were by no means exhaustive, and the lecturer would have been required to make a choice of what to show among the available photographs. The Civil War became a generality, a wholly-inscribed narrative, rather than an individual experience. Those experiences would have to be built upon the pre-existing norm of how the war was to be seen, and consequently remembered.
They do not. Was the temporal distance still insufficient to smooth over the brutality of the War? Does when we see affect how we see? Did the spectacle entail a different esthetic for the audience? Certainly, the images proposed, projected, exhibited and sold were as close to eyewitness accounts as could be found, but they were now being offered as substantiation of a political agenda as well as a token of a lived past.
The paradox was, of course, that such eyewitness accounts were being sold and exhibited to eyewitnesses in their own right. The images being projected were to be seen not just as conduits to personal memories but as the very foundation of the Civil War itself. This confusion between personal and collective memories might well be located in the construct of the idea of the Civil War: a contest formed of individuals with conflictive relationships with their wartime experience, most notably in the necessity to render the private subservient to the collective.
But the horror of the rites, and arguably of the war, also acts as a means of creating group cohesion. Groups like the G. Taylor and Huntington, through the repetition of public image viewing, enabled the spectactors to relive the very reasons of belonging to the group. To these layers of time, time lived as well as time imagined and memorialized, must be added the newly established Kodak Company Fig. Soon, the average person would have access to his or her own images of a newly-minted present.
Indeed, as Kirsten M. The publication of The Photographic History of the Civil War in to coincide with the 50 th anniversary of the beginning of the War announced the triumph of sectional reconciliation through the photographic image. In the few short years that separated the Taylor-Huntington enterprise from the volume history, the vision and the moral of the War had been tempered. With the reconstruction of the narratives around the images from and of the Civil War, images that had been thought to be inalterable in their meaning at the time of their taking, the conflict between North and South appeared to have moved from one of rending to one of concord.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, New York: Review of Reviews, Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Washington: Smithsonian Books, Figure 13 Souvenir memorial programme. The dedication of Grant's sarcophagus ceremonies, New York, April 27th, Taylor and Huntington. Voir la notice dans le catalogue OpenEdition.
Navigation — Plan du site. Keywords: Civil War , G. Plan The Grand Army of the Republic. Sectional Reconciliation and the Image. Figure 1 G. Medal Agrandir Original jpeg, 24k. Agrandir Original jpeg, 44k. Agrandir Original jpeg, 36k. Figure 5 Captured Confederate Battle Flag, unknown regiment. Agrandir Original jpeg, 16k. Agrandir Original jpeg, 20k. Figure 10 Advertisement for Stereopticons, ? Agrandir Original jpeg, 40k. Agrandir Original jpeg, 24k. Agrandir Original jpeg, 8,0k.
Bibliographie ANON. Paris: Payot, Haut de page. Table des illustrations Titre Figure 1 G. Another Vision of Empire. Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace Transnationalism and Modern American Women Writers Modernist Non-fictional Narratives: Rewriting Modernism Histories of Space, Spaces of History Artistic and Literary Commitments Disease and Pain: American Voices
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