By Dave Winkler

With the decommissioning of the Naval Historical Foundation, the online journal International Journal of Naval History (IJNH) (www.ijnhonline.org) continues to exist as an unaffiliated website that last published in early 2023. It is in a transitional period as the current Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Charles Chadbourn with the Naval War College, is planning to step down.

In publication since 2002, IJNH has provided a forum for lengthy academic, peer-reviewed articles to examine various naval issues and histories. This journal has attempted to fill what would have been a gap in maritime/naval academic journals following the departure of the leading journal in the field, and if the journal remains in a state of limbo, will stymie opportunities for the publication of scholarly articles that may offer insights on how to address contemporary maritime challenges. Navalists and academics must explore options for sustaining the future of this journal and in doing so, to generate interest to recruit and shape the composition for a new, potentially multi-institutional management team. 

Background

The last issue in 2002 of American Neptune after 62 years of publication by the Peabody Essex Museum created a void for an academic, peer-reviewed journal that would provide scholars opportunities to publish well-researched articles that could advance the understanding of maritime/naval history. In addition, such a journal also provided an important venue for another academic endeavor – book reviews. Recognizing this void, Dr. Gary Weir, then head of the Contemporary History Branch of the then USN Naval Historical Center (NHC), took on the initiative to create an online journal: the International Journal of Naval History (IJNH). In doing so, he gained the support of well-known overseas naval historians who would be hosted by the Naval History Center (now Naval History and Heritage Command) on the day prior to the commencement of the U.S. Naval Academy’s McMullen Naval History symposium held every two years.

The mission statement drafted by Dr. Weir, included below, emphasizes the research-based, independent ethos of the journal:

“The objective of the International Journal of Naval History is to provide a pre-eminent forum for works of naval history researched and written to demonstrable academic standards. Our hope is to stimulate and promote research into naval history and foster communication among naval historians at an international level.

IJNH will welcome any scholarly historical analysis, focused on any period or geographic region, that explores naval power in its national or cultural context. The journal will remain completely independent of any institution and will operate under the direction of an Editorial Board that represents various regions of the globe as well as various genres of naval history.”

As for the administrative structure, the IJNH webpage called for an all-volunteer effort led by a troika of editors who would work with a board of eighteen scholars “of international reputation.” The objective was to publish the journal in April, August, and December of each year beginning in 2002.  

In reality the “all-volunteer” effort did not occur in practice. The first editor-in-chief, Dr. Weir, obtained permission to work on the journal “on company time.” In addition, the Naval Historical Foundation not only agreed to cover the nominal costs of the establishing and hosting the website, it authorized its content developer to post updated volumes on the IJNHonline.org website. Under this “volunteering on company time” arrangement the IJNH came out on a regular schedule of three times a year for its first eight years. And then it ceased production for three years.

What happened? Dr. Weir, as the Chief Historian, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, could not perform editor-in-chief duties on company time. Hence, Dr. Chadbourn took on the Editor-in-Chief duties. Like Dr. Weir previously, he was allowed to work on the journal during his workday hours.

Unfortunately, the challenges of the academic year wreaked havoc on his production schedule and IJNH averaged one edition a year. An additional setback for the journal was that the impressive editorial board Dr. Weir assembled would be underutilized. Finally, the decommissioning of the Naval Historical Foundation deprived the IJNH of its host and content posting support. On a positive note, as an online journal the content is “evergreen” in that articles published two decades ago are being viewed and cited in current maritime publications. 

The posting of the journal on the web sans subscription in essence means IJNH is an open-access publication. As a consequence, the journal does not generate revenue – it is a totally altruistic endeavor. The question at hand is whether IJNH can be sustained utilizing its current business model. To answer that question, it would be worth taking a brief look at similar journals in the military-maritime milieu.

Other Journals Featuring Naval History Scholarship

For openers, publications such as the National Maritime Historical Society’s Sea History and the U.S. Naval Institute’s Naval History offer scholars an opportunity to publish short-to modest-sized articles that have broad appeal. The U.S. Naval Institute is to be especially commended for hosting the Chief of Naval Operations annual naval history essay contest that inspires submissions from well-established historians, up-and-coming historians, and midshipmen and cadets. However, word-count restrictions eliminate consideration of these publications as academic journals of the type that offer book-chapter length articles of 8,000 to 12,000 words in length. With this distinction established, current academic peer review publication opportunities include multiple journals of note.

The Mariner’s Mirror – the international journal of the Society for Nautical Research (SNR). Recognized as a world-leading journal of both naval and maritime history, the journal has been in publication since 1911. Per the SNR website:

The content reflects the aim of the society and publishes ‘research into matters relating to seafaring and shipbuilding in all ages among all nations, into the language and customs of the sea, and into other subjects of nautical interest’. Subject matter ranges from archaeology and ethnography to naval tactics and administration, merchant seafaring, shipbuilding and virtually anything that relates to humankind’s relationship with the sea.

A review of the journal’s editorial board reflects its British origins and the content reflects the regional interests of its subscribers as The Mariner’s Mirror is a subscription journal, a benefit of membership to the society. SNR maintains a partnership with the academic journal publisher Taylor & Francis which makes the journal available to academic institutions. It is published quarterly in print and online through Taylor & Francis. The Mariner’s Mirror staff is compensated.

The International Journal of Maritime History (IJMH) is the journal of the International Maritime History Association established in 1989. Per that organization’s website:

“The IJMH is a fully-refereed, quarterly publication which addresses the maritime dimensions of economic, social, cultural, and environmental history. Truly international in scope, the IJMH publishes studies of a multidisciplinary nature on a broad range of maritime historical themes, including shipping, shipbuilding, seafaring, ports, resorts and other coastal communities, sea-borne trade, fishing, environment and the culture of the sea.”

A review of the editorial board has the Editor-in-Chief and Book Review editor based at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. As with Mariner’s Mirror, IJMH is a subscription journal. In the case of IJMH, since 2014 there has been a partnership with Sage Journals which bundles IJMH with other journals for sale and distribution to university libraries. The production staff is compensated.

The Journal of Military History (JMH) is the quarterly journal of the Society for Military History. JMH has published scholarly articles on the military history of all eras and geographical areas since 1937. Fully refereed, the JMH publishes articles and book reviews, as well as a list of recent articles dealing with military history published by other journals, an annual list of doctoral dissertations in military history, and an annual index. Though much of the content is land-warfare focused, there have been some notable naval articles featured in this journal. The Society of Military History and JMH are hosted by the Virginia Military Institute. JMH is a subscription journal and an arrangement is in place with Proquest to offer digital content to libraries and other archival institutions. The production staff is compensated.

The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord is published in Canada by the Canadian Nautical Research Society (CNRS) with the support of the North American Society of Oceanic History (NASOH). Per the CNRS website, The Northern Mariner is

“devoted to the study of maritime affairs and the inland waterways of the nations that touch the seas of the northern hemisphere. The journal’s content spans the fields of naval, political, diplomatic, social, cultural, gender, Indigenous, economic, and environmental history. Specific topics of interest include – but are not limited to – ships, shipbuilding, technology, merchant shipping, trade, labour, seafaring, maritime life, coastal communities, ports and harbours, naval warfare, maritime aviation, fishing, whaling, sealing, underwater archaeology, disasters and emergencies, and maritime biography.”

Though the journal is a subscription benefit of membership in CNRS and NASOH, digital copies are available on the CNRS website making it an open-access publication. The journal does not appear to have an academic institutional affiliation. 

There are other publications as well. The four journals mentioned above are not the only outlets for the publication of scholarly naval history work. For example, The Naval War College Review and the Journal of Advanced Military Studies published by Marine Corps University also offer outlets for publication. The Naval War College Press also publishes selected papers from the McMullen Naval History Symposium. In Germany, the Kiel Seapower Series, produced by the Institute for Security Policy, Kiel University, has produced a number of compilations of scholarly papers presented at various conferences. Depending on the content, opportunities exist in other academic journals, and naval historians should be encouraged to publish to different audiences to foster a broader understanding of the role sea power plays in a variety of fields. This author recently reviewed an article on the naval confrontation with wildlife for Animal History. 

Continuing IJNH

The good news is that outlets exist for the publication of naval history scholarship. However, none of the journals cited above focus solely on naval history. Mariner’s Mirror may be the closest but it is Eurocentric in its coverage. Meanwhile, growing attendance at McMullen Naval History Symposiums in recent years has demonstrated that more scholarship is being generated that is begging for publication in academic journals. A revitalized IJNH can fill that need and serve to facilitate the growth of a community. A study of other maritime/military history journals offers the following options for ways forward.

Publishing – Academic/Non-Profit Partnership: An arrangement with an academic journal publishing house could generate revenue to sustain management expenses. Of course, that would change the nature of the journal away from open access. Unfortunately for a potential journal publishing house, any arrangement could not grant rights for previously published work as authors never transferred those rights to IJNH at the time of publication. Before setting up such an arrangement, IJNH should look to reestablish a partnership with an academic institution or non-profit organization or consider establishing itself as a non-profit. Once IJNH finds an academic/non-profit home, an immediate effort should focus on the recruitment of an Editorial Board. 

Academic/Non-Profit Partnership: An arrangement with just an academic institution and non-profit organization can enable the journal to continue on as an open-access publication. The institution/organization taking IJNH on would need to fundraise to sustain management expenses and/or dedicate staff “company time” to keep the issues coming out on time. Once IJNH finds an academic/non-profit home (or homes – consider a consortium of universities with maritime programs collaborating), an immediate effort should focus on the recruitment of an Editorial Board.

Stay Completely Independent:  Independence is a viable option but would require a dedicated volunteer effort. As part of that volunteer effort, non-profit status for the journal should be sought to facilitate contributions to cover management expenses. As with previous options, recruitment of a new editorial board should be an immediate priority.

Recommendations

The quote “when you come to the fork in the road you should take it” attributed to Yogi Berra is appropriate in that a direction needs to be taken if IJNH is to remain a viable entity for the publication of new naval history scholarship. To facilitate a direction, it is recommended this point paper be shared to gather comments and additional ideas on the three options  that have been presented.

As for the selection of the editorial board, the new management team should aim to recruit individuals who have entered the profession in recent years to encourage submissions from younger scholars. Given the “International” scope of the journal, the board needs to aim for overseas recruitment as well. For the younger board members, serving on the board will assist in furthering personal career objectives and create networking opportunities and lifelong friendships. Additional consideration should be given to establish a smaller advisory panel where diversity and breadth and depth of experience would enhance the quality of the journal and provide mentorship.

Conclusion

The retention and re-invigoration of IJNH serves the interests of the naval historian community as a tool for professional development for both contributors and those associated with the journal. The content published in past editions is finding its way into the footnotes of recent scholarship, and new content can inform the thinking of contemporary leaders engaged in naval/maritime affairs. Comments and constructive ideas will be welcome and considered. Contact the author at the address below.

David F. Winkler is a retired Navy commander having received his commission through Penn State NROTC. Having earned his Ph.D. at American University, he served as staff historian at the Naval Historical Foundation for 25 years, has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy and Naval War College, and held the Charles Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He has published five books with the Naval Institute Press and writes a monthly historical perspective column for Sea Power Magazine. Contact Dr. David F. Winkler at david.winkler@usnwc.edu.

Featured Image: U.S. Navy carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) afire and listing after she was hit by a Japanese air attack while operating off the coast of Japan, 19 March 1945. (Photo via U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

By Bill Bray

When I attended a small Catholic high school in the early 1980s, several teachers tried to dissuade me from pursuing a military career. In the shadow of the Vietnam War, some questioned whether military service could be reconciled with the moral demands of the Catholic faith, while others simply opposed me serving on social or political grounds. A Jesuit reassured me that a military protecting a free society must be led by virtuous men and women of conscience—the type the high school endeavored to cultivate.

Today, the U.S. military’s strongest domestic critics are not on the political and social left, but the right. There is a growing chorus of voices who claim the military is too “woke,” that it has become a vehicle for progressive social experimentation at the expense of developing warfighting toughness and skills.

Historically, woke was a term used in Black communities to signify a general social consciousness. Today, when I hear or read critics of progressive policies using the term as a pejorative, it is rarely clear what they actually mean. What I do know is that there is no such thing as a coherent woke ideology, just as there is no such thing as “woke capitalism.” Opponents of change in the military—specifically, diversity and inclusion initiatives—often ascribe whatever bothers them to the term. And they often fail to realize that many of their preferred politicians are deliberately capitalizing on the acute outrage the term “woke” provokes in certain constituents, and how these politicians are purposefully repeating and cultivating the term to simply harness these constituents’ outrage for political benefit. The supercharged emotions the term “woke” incites among its critics has proven ripe for political exploitation.

It is hard to make an argument against such generalized, unspecific attacks. In fact, as an editor it is not my job to do so. But it is my job to carefully consider counterarguments to articles promoting diversity and inclusion initiatives, and we will continue to publish well-considered, thoughtful counterarguments. We will not publish fact-free rants. What we get is mostly the latter.

Social policies are always being debated across the country. In that sense, the U.S. military has always been changing. And many, if not most, changes were vigorously opposed by traditionalists, who viewed them as paths to warfighting incompetence, indiscipline, or moral destitution (or all the above). All too often, however, resistance to change rested on strawman arguments, and traditionalists wound up arguing with themselves while the country moved on. This is true of momentous changes, such as racial and gender integration, and those of less consequence and controversy (although, I assure you, plenty of mid-1800s Navy officers believed abandoning “the lash” would lead to a plague of indiscipline and mutiny). In any event, the military adapted and moved forward, responding, as it must in a representative democracy, to the demands of the public as articulated through their elected representatives.

What is important, I believe—and I make this case as a retired Navy officer and not as an editor—is to address the ostensibly growing call from many on the right to discourage young people they know from joining the military. While reliable, hard data is never presented, in recent months some commentators claim progressive social policies are at least partially responsible for the military’s recent struggles with meeting recruiting goals. In October, Meghann Myers at Military Times dug into this problem. As you can read for yourself, while the charges of a “woke” military float free of any factual basis, the myth is gathering legs.

Recently, former Navy officer J. A. Cauthen attacked the U.S. Naval Academy’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and directives as “ideological (re)education” and “wokeness.” The essay is poorly supported by real data, embarrassing in its frequent digressions into partisan jeremiads, and infused throughout with absurd assumptions and well-worn exaggerations, such as that they are teaching that America is “irredeemably racist.” It also features non-sequiturs, such as how any diversity training is at the expense of warfighting training and weakens warfighting culture (while there is a multitude of other things the Navy has done that have come at the expense of its warfighting training and culture). Former naval officer and undersecretary of the Navy Seth Cropsey made a similar argument more recently in the National Review.

Since I also teach an ethics course at the Academy, I found both Cauthen and Cropsey’s description of its curriculum and culture completely unrecognizable. And they, like so many likeminded critics of the Academy, dismiss the Brigade of Midshipmen, some of the brightest college students in the nation, as incurious followers incapable of earnestly considering all sides of an issue, thinking critically about it, and making up their own minds.

The Training Sailors Actually Get

Curious about what had changed in the Navy that is triggering charges of wokeness, I looked at what a typical sailor gets in terms of formal training in his or her first two years in service. Between eight weeks of basic training, follow-on special skills training (what the Navy calls A-school, or military occupational specialty training), and one full year of mandatory general military trainings (GMTs) at their first ship or command, I could not locate anything that qualified as “woke” training beyond annual equal opportunity training (EEO training). Perhaps some would include sexual assault prevention and domestic abuse training, but I have never heard or read a complaint against those in the context of wokeness.

EEO training is one of seven mandatory GMTs (another 11 can be assigned at commanding officers’ discretion, and most are probably held annually). EEO training is a thorough review of current U.S. law, Department of Defense, and Department of the Navy policy on equal opportunity and discrimination (based on race, color, religion, gender, age, etc.). It would be hard to argue that sailors and officers should not be educated on what the rules are, and what they can and should do if they believe the rules are being violated. Perhaps the only part of EEO training that could be controversial is the final barriers section, which aims to illuminate more subtle obstacles to minority opportunity and advancement. In a rough approximation, in the first two years in the Navy, less than two percent of a sailor’s formal training could even be remotely described as progressive social training.

Then there is Task Force One Navy, established in 2020 in the wake of nation-wide social justice protests to take a comprehensive look at the Navy’s progress and continued challenges in diversity and inclusion. It is beyond the scope of this essay to comment on the entire report. It contains many recommendations along five lines of effort. Not all will be implemented, but many will have at least some effect on Navy policies and processes in the future. It should be noted that the report contains many positive findings, acknowledging much progress the Navy has made in the past 20 years. Its fiercest critics seem to anchor on implications the service still harbors systemic barriers to inclusion, as evidenced by disproportional equity outcomes in promotion demographics and the like. However, for the Navy to acknowledge these outcomes and continually examine itself seems a responsible and unavoidable approach, not one beholden to any ideology. Warfighting in defense of a free society is not just about competence, training, and technology. It is about the will and support of the population, and that requires a military in whose ranks the population is more broadly represented.

Service before Politics

Whatever one thinks of the Navy’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, attempting to equate patriotism and service with partisan politics is wrong and harmful to national security. Unfortunately, it is becoming all too common by those who should know better. Anti-woke warriors such as Cauthen give away the game when he writes the following to explain the Naval Academy’s implementation of diversity and inclusion policies and programs, “Willing collaborators all too eager to appease their political masters are accomplishing this transformation through directives, policy, training, and the creation of new offices and positions staffed to advance the agenda of wokeness.” It seems Mr. Cauthen would have no problem if the Navy’s willing collaborators appeased political masters for whom he voted and approves. In his warped understanding of civil-military relations, civilian control is conditional—it depends on the political masters’ affiliation and viewpoint.

That a Naval Academy graduate who took a commission and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution would write such a line is unfortunate. But he is one of many who cannot see, or refuse to see, the problem with such a view. My generation of Academy graduates from the 1980s has no business lecturing on this point. The shift to an all-volunteer force nearly 50 years ago always had the potential of a military gradually cultivating leaders who supported the political party that favored it more, both fiscally and culturally. This seems to have happened during the Reagan years.

Indeed, what today’s right wing seems most furious about is that they can no longer count on the military being a reliable constituency for their political positions and views. For years it counted on this, routinely trotting out claims that a socially conservative military would be weakened and possibly even destroyed if progressive policies infect it (never were such claims based on anything remotely close to real evidence). There is some truth to the view that military personnel tend to be socially conservative, but that often obscures how the views of servicemembers shift over time in step with society’s shifting views. The drastic change from the early 1990s until the 2010s of the percentage of Americans in favor of gays serving in the military is a case in point. As young Americans from different backgrounds join year after year, the military is constantly changing its makeup in many ways. The military is not some monastery insulated from society. It is society.

For those that claim wokeness is hurting recruiting, they should examine the demographic data from the 2022 midterm elections, even in the reddest states. Younger voters skew progressive, in some states more than 60 percent. Also, as Risa Brooks recently noted, 41 percent of military personnel identify as coming from a minority group. Not all minorities favor progressive policies of course, but they are statistically more likely to at least be more open to them. The notion that the military can solve its recruiting problem by renouncing wokeness and targeting red constituencies is fanciful, and a move that would harm its nonpartisan ethic.

What the Navy needs—what it has always needed—is patriotic Americans from all walks of life willing to serve with the comfort of knowing their personal political views are irrelevant. Servicemembers are free to believe what they want and vote any way they want. They are not free to cherrypick the policies and initiatives they will support.

Yet so little of what happens in the daily life of a Navy sailor can be attributed to a woke agenda. Even those with the most socially conservative views should have no trouble elevating the virtue of service above partisan politics. That many conservative commentators believe they should not (or cannot) do so speaks far more to those commentators’ fragile sensibilities than to a real problem.

It is worth reminding those who claim a woke military is a hostile place to serve the nation that at one time many Black Americans still chose to serve their nation in a segregated military, where discrimination was overt, entrenched, and legalized. Yet today, are socially conservative Americans actually going to refuse to serve because they must take EEO training or an FDA-approved vaccine, or are encouraged to use a gender-neutral pronoun as an act of respect, or must report to a ship or base no longer named for a Confederate traitor to the United States? While critics of wokeness in the military often claim they want to depoliticize the military, what they really want is to politicize it in their favor. This can even feature partisan loyalty tests, particularly for senior officers. This is inappropriate and dangerous, and military leaders have correctly resisted it.

Conclusion

In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was not uncommon to find critics on the left disparaging military servicemembers in terms that cast them as immoral and bloodthirsty agents of the American war machine. These attacks were unjustified and well beyond reasonable debate about the size and shape of, or even the need for, the armed forces. They fed a distorted narrative about American military life that deterred many young people from even considering service. Critics on the right who claim without evidence that the military is now corrupted by wokeness are committing the same sin. In fact, the military is full of smart, dedicated, and tough men and women. The true corruptors are those who refuse to rise above partisan politics to serve the nation and a greater cause.

Bill Bray is a retired Navy captain. He is the deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.

Featured Image: Sailors man the rails aboard the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford in June 2021. (U.S. Navy photo)

By President Christopher Stockdale-Garbutt

Dear CIMSEC audience members,

On behalf of the Center for International Maritime Security, I would like to wish you all a very happy festive season and to thank you for being a member of the CIMSEC community and for your support and contributions this past year. 2022 has witnessed many international maritime security developments and challenges and we hope that you have enjoyed listening to our podcasts and reading our many articles analyzing these events and many other issues.

The team and myself are looking forward to what 2023 will bring as we continue to expand and develop the group. We have lots of exciting projects and developments on the horizon and will continue to engage with professionals, academics, and forward thinkers through our articles, forums, events, podcasts, and other platforms and content.

I would like to close with a personal message of thanks to all our volunteers and officers that willingly give up their time to help make CIMSEC such a great organization. It has been an honor to serve as President this year and I look forward to continuing to lead the group throughout 2023!

Once again we wish you and your families Happy Holidays!

Best Wishes,

Christopher J. Stockdale-Garbutt

President of the Center for International Maritime Security

Featured Image: Port de Grave Boat Lighting festival for Newfoundlanders to celebrate their Christmas. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

By Bill Bray

In the past year or so, there seems to be more than usual public commentary about America’s past, particularly concerning racial and social justice. Some believe the past is being distorted and “canceled” to serve a progressive social agenda. Others believe as a nation we have never honestly reckoned with it. Still others seem to want to ignore or forget it. Move on.

As the Department of Defense Confederate naming commission continues its work and prepares to make its recommendations on what bases, buildings, sites, and perhaps even ships should be renamed, it is instructive to read and reflect on how humans understand and interpret the past. Social scientists and artists, among others, have long wrestled with this phenomenon. Both know that the past is not something we can simply know, as if we were looking at it objectively from a distance. Instead, it is something we never fully know or escape. To a large degree we interpret the past through what we want to believe, and that insistently informs how we think about the present.

However, acknowledging that we cannot fully know the past does not mean trying to know it is a hopeless endeavor. On the contrary, societies must never stop trying to understand their pasts. The quest for a strong, shared understanding of the past is an important component to living harmoniously together. The past can never be forgotten. Claiming otherwise is delusional or disingenuous. Forgetting is impossible. The past matters more than most realize or want to acknowledge. History is more than perspective. There are facts. But contemporary human experience is meaningless without memory—without a past. The past is in the present as oxygen is in water.

Critics who claim renaming U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals is tyrannical, “woke cancel culture” are—probably partially in ignorance—advancing a hypocritical argument deeply offensive to the thousands of Union Army, Navy, and Marine Corps veterans. Following the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, these men formed a veterans’ organization called the Grand Army of the Republic (there were GAR chapters across the northern states). While initially created to advocate for better veterans’ benefits, by the end of the nineteenth century the GAR chapters were engaged in a fierce public relations campaign to debunk the Lost Cause mythology narrative. They opposed pensions for Confederate soldiers, statues and memorials to Confederate generals in Washington and other northern states, and the display of the Confederate flag, among other things. While the term was not in use at the time, GAR members knew what many contemporary historians have since aptly demonstrated—the Lost Cause narrative was the greatest “cancel culture” campaign in American history. 

Take, for example, this statement from the Michigan GAR in 1903 in response to the widespread practice of putting Lost Cause literature in Southern textbooks: “There is a sentiment which endeavors more or less to place the disloyalty of the South upon the same plane with the loyalty of the North, which aims to make an act of disloyalty less disgraceful. I have no use for such sentiment. It is only a matter of time when history will correct itself and place them in the true light on its pages as traitors.” In 1914, the department commander for the Indiana GAR wrote, “While I have long forgiven my ex-Confederate brother for the terrible mistake he made in trying to destroy this Union of ours . . . you should remember and never forget it, that there was a right and there was a wrong . . . a government that fails to recognize the difference between a patriot and a traitor, a defender and a destroyer, would and should pass from the earth.” 

The GAR did not oppose forgiveness and reconciliation, only veneration built on a lie. They opposed what Major General Henry Thomas, a Virginian who stayed loyal to the Union, in writing to Ulysses S. Grant in 1868, called any effort to paint the “. . . crime of treason . . . with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government. . .” Sadly, just this year, the Confederate flag was brandished in the U.S Capitol during an attempted insurrection. History has still not corrected itself. Would it not be a wonder that the men of the GAR would be shocked that it has taken so long?

As the last of the Civil War veterans passed away in mid-century, the GAR had largely failed to counter the Lost Cause narrative and all that came with it for white and black Americans alike. For generations that came of age after World War II, including mine, in both the North and the South, the past was not understood independent of this narrative. It has infected both popular and academic literature. The long effort to resurrect the Confederacy as a noble cause has become part of the collective experience.

Thinking about the Past through Literature

One Southerner who would not be shocked at all began his writing career as this GAR campaign was in full fury. Perhaps no American writer dealt with the past more deftly and innovatively than William Faulkner. His technique of using inner dialogue across time—where past and present are intertangled and often indistinguishable, narratively—frustrates most first-time readers, but then, if they persevere, awakens them to how the past lives in all of us. Through so many unforgettable characters, Faulkner shows that experience is chaotic, disorienting, and often emotionally violent. Humans quickly order experience retrospectively to make sense of the world, a mechanism made possible only with memory—how they remember the past.

William Faulkner knew the past of his people well, but as an artist he was most interested in how they thought about the past, and how the past always lives in the present and determines the future. Past, present, and future are not neatly distinguished in the human mind, and Faulkner’s greatest achievement—the one that makes him perhaps the greatest writer in American letters—is how he demonstrated this narratively. In a 1956 interview with Jean Stein for The Paris Review, Faulkner remarked that, “The fact that I have moved my characters around in time successfully . . . proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as ‘was’—only ‘is.’ If ‘was’ existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

Most recently, Michael Gorra masterfully tackled how Faulkner dealt with how Southerners thought about the Civil War with his book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. With racial and social justice so prominent in the news today, no book from last year seems more relevant to me. It is an intricate blend of Civil War history, biography, and literary criticism.

As Gorra shows, Faulkner rarely includes Civil War scenes in his oeuvre, yet the war is always there, its traumas swirling just beneath the surface of both scenery and dialogue. Most of his characters know the Civil War only as a fragmented labyrinth of memories and myths passed down to them. They feel the past as their truth, while acknowledging, as Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner’s recurring characters, does in Absalom, Absalom!, that they do not fully understand their own history.

Readers of The Sound and the Fury (1929) know that Quentin kills himself on 2 June 1910, following his freshman year at Harvard. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) begins the year prior, in 1909, with a tortured Quentin discovering who he really is, a terrifying journey of self-awareness. Quentin is the past—an incarnation of the pathos of a region defeated and desperate for the balm of Lost Cause mythology. He bears the burdens of the racial divide that intensified following the failure of Reconstruction, and the rarely-acknowledged secret of Southern plantation heritage that would become the cardinal sin in the Jim Crow South—miscegenation.

Absalom, Absalom! appeared the same year Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind, for which she would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mitchell presented a highly romanticized, white-washed Civil War history to a still deeply racist country, and Americans loved it. While William Faulkner’s many flaws and contradictions regarding race are well documented, he, unlike Mitchell, was not popular with Southern segregationists. Complex depictions of the South’s post–Civil War reality were not their cup of tea. Faulkner was the far more courageous writer in never ceasing to search, through his literature, for what the Civil War really means for who we are and where we are going. 

Those charged with deciding whether to rename military bases named for Confederate generals or remove Confederate statues could do worse than to read William Faulkner’s books. As his character Gavin Stevens, the lawyer in Requiem for a Nun (1951), remarks, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Should a member of the GAR be alive today to witness a Confederate statue coming down or a base being renamed, he would never view it as an injustice or affront to Southern heritage. He would view it as history correcting itself—finally.

Bill Bray is a retired Navy captain. He is the deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.

Featured image: Gettysburg Battlefield National Park. Photo by U.S. National Park Service.