In 1895 Kentucky State Senator William Goebel shot John Sanford in broad daylight. Five years later he was being sworn in as the Governor of Kentucky while lying on his death bed with an assassin’s bullet in his chest. He remains the only sitting governor of a U.S. state to die by an assassin’s hand.

At the dawn of the twentieth century his will brought the Commonwealth of Kentucky to the edge of civil war. He was a man unafraid to turn the Bluegrass blood red in pursuit of his ideals and personal power.

Politicians don’t need guns to bully their citizens into compliance, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have one handy. In the case of Goebel and Sanford it is interesting to note that Sanford (while a fellow Democrat) was a banker, not a man of the people. As every good Occupy Wall Street student knows, bankers get what is coming to them. No need to mourn their passing.

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Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the opening hostilities of the Civil War, the History Channel is offering up a bevy of programming which kicked off Sunday with the two-hour documentary Gettysburg. Executive produced by brothers Ridely and Tony Scott, it offers a very personal account of the war taken from the perspective of the “boots on the ground” so to speak who fought (and died) during those terrible first three days in July 1863.  As an unapologetic Civil War “buff” I was looking forward to this episode.  I was especially psyched as the Gettysburg campaign is my focus of study and I’ve walked  the battlefield many times.  I was not disappointed with the Scotts’ program…and yet I was at the same time.

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First of all, about the show itself:  Gettysburg takes us through the three-day battle starting us at around 9:00am on July 1, 1863 and then focuses on several key moments throughout the see-saw fighting that would ravage the town and the surrounding countryside, leaving 55,000 casualties in its wake.  It follows several men on the front lines, from foot soldiers to generals.  Some live, some die.  Each has a story to tell and we see the raw terror mixed with unimaginable bravery that such battles summoned.  It also shows the ghastly wounds that were a horrible consequence of modern weapons meeting outdated line tactics of the day. The program is also quite effective at showing this to be a savage affair (including a graphic depiction of a Union soldier splitting a rebel’s skull with his rifle butt that had me cringing.)  If Gettysburg’s purpose was, as the History Channel’s website announces, to “strip away the romanticized veneer of the Civil War to present the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg in a new light—a visceral, terrifying and deeply personal experience” then it does the job.

There were, however, disappointments that I really didn’t expect.  First is the heavy reliance on re-enactors despite the liberating aspect of modern CGI.  (Perhaps budgetary constraints were in play here).  Re-enactors are great for replaying tiny segments of the battle, and the consultants must have paid particular attention to the grime and filth, even the tattered uniforms, so prevalent among un-bathed Civil War soldiers in the field.  But like the Turner feature film of the same name almost two decades earlier, the numerical limits of available play-actors means that these depictions are hopelessly under-populated.  According to the June 30 rolls, a combined 185,000 soldiers (105,000 Union, 80,000 Confederate) were in the area.  This means that massive infantry formations and rows of artillery lined hub-to-hub were engaged.  For example, the Confederate line of battle that assaulted the Union position on Herr’s Ridge at the very beginning of the still-developing fight was almost a mile wide.  (And that was just two brigades.  Three to five brigades made up a Confederate division, three divisions a corps, three corps made up the Army of Northern Virginia).  Indeed, Gettysburg was one of the few open field battles where entire mass formations were in plain view at once creating what one Alabama soldier described as “a grand panorama with the sounds of conflict added.”

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Great filmmaker but just a wee bit out of touch…

Left-wing Politico:

[T]he Civil War wasn’t the only thing on Burns’s mind as he visited Washington. As the budget battle continues in Congress, many lawmakers have discussed cutting off funding for public broadcasting, which has been Burns’s bread and butter for decades. …

“This is a completely foolhardy, unnecessarily partisan attempt at social engineering, of picking on something that they can score points with the base and it doesn’t make any sense and it will come back to hurt people. It won’t be a political hurt immediately, but what we’re talking about is whether we will retain our superiority as a country. That is the question. … If you’re serious about balancing the budget, then go and talk about much more significant parts of it, not a fraction of 1 percent of the whole budget. … People can make arguments about the marketplace, but if your house is on fire at 3 a.m., you don’t call the marketplace. When your road needs plowing, you don’t call the marketplace. The marketplace doesn’t have boots on the ground in Afghanistan. And while I would never suggest that public broadcasting has to do the defense of our country, it actually makes it worth defending.” 

As for the notion that the reporting of such public broadcasting outlets as PBS and NPR skew liberal, Burns says that’s nonsense. 

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The 20th Century provided filmmakers with countless stories of heroism in the face of tyranny, hope in the midst of despair, and courage in the presence of brutality: Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda, The Killing Fields... The list can go on and on.

Hollywood has impeccably documented man’s cruelty to man in the 20th Century.

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As we begin the second decade of the 21st century with Sudan at the brink of a return to civil war and genocide, I’m reminded of a “Great Crime” at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Armenian genocide foreshadowed all other crimes which took place in the 20th Century: indiscriminate killing, the wholesale massacre of men, women and children, forced deportations, the systematic destruction of a population based on ethnicity, organized killing in the service of ideology. The Armenian genocide, the “Great Crime,” was the first milestone on the road into a century of genocide, democide, and war.

January 9, 2011 will be remembered as an important milestone in the 21st Century. If the planned date for a referendum on independence for Southern Sudan becomes a return to war and mass slaughter and enslavement of defenseless refugees, women and children, we have to ask what hope we have for our century. (more…)

“It is time for stronger remedies to be applied,” said abolitionist Wendell Phillips of the Union’s effort during the Civil War, “in the form of hot lead and cold steel duly administered by 100,000 black doctors.”  His vision became a reality as over 180,000 African-Americans (free men and escaped slaves) joined the Union Army to fight against the slave-holding Confederacy.

The story of the first such “colored” regiment to be formed, the 54^th Massachusetts, is beautifully retold in director Edward Zwick’s 1989 film Glory.  That this film didn’t even garner an Oscar nomination for best picture – in a year where Driving Miss Daisy took the prize – is puzzling to me.  Glory features a first-rate script, wonderful imagery, and a stellar cast led by Matthew Broderick who plays Col. Robert Gould Shaw, the real-life idealistic white officer chosen to lead the regiment. The film is also a feast for the ears as the majestic chorus of the Harlem Boys’ Choir permeates the score. (more…)

“Eventually a man’s got to decide if he wants to do what’s right. That choice cost me more than I bargained for.” So says Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin), title character in Warner Bros.’ DC Comics adaption of “Jonah Hex.” 

This dark, cliché quote reflects the film. Hex was a Confederate soldier, not because he believed in slavery but because he opposes government control. While serving, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) – the father of his best friend – orders him to burn a hospital filled with women and children to the ground. He refuses. This event disillusions him from the Confederate cause, and in his ensuing side-switch, he kills his friend. The vengeful Turnbull tracks Jonah down and forces him to watch as he murders his family, then brands his face so he won’t forget. Jonah swears vengeance. When Turnbull dies in a fire he thinks he has it – until he hears from President Ulysses S. Grant that Turnbull is still alive, and plans to terrorize the country during its bicentennial celebration. Grant begs Jonah to find Turnbull and stop him before it’s too late – a request Jonah is only too happy to oblige. 

As a comic book adaptation, the beginning of the film plays out episodically like the beginning of a TV show, with cartoon images showing the transition in Jonah’s life from a soldier to a man whose near-death experience gave him the power to talk to dead people.  (more…)

“Objectivity is impossible,” self-styled “peoples’ historian” Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

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Sunday night, the History Channel airs The People Speak, a star-studded presentation of Howard Zinn’s Voices of A People’s History of the United States.  Accompanying this series is the Zinn Education Project, a curriculum meant to expose children from pre-school through high school to American history through the philosophical lens of Zinn.

The plan has many critics, and rightly so.  For one thing, as Zinn openly admits, his is an activist history meant not only to inform the student, but to inspire them to take up his cause.   This puts the teaching of Zinn in public schools on precarious legal grounds at best.  Others draw attention to Zinn’s radical views themselves.  Zinn says of America, with her representative government and guaranteed freedoms, that,  “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” parceling out just enough wealth and comfort to its citizens to keep them from revolting.  But to truly understand Zinn, and why his work has no place in public education, all a person needs to know is this –  Howard Zinn is not an historian at all; Howard Zinn is a religious zealot. (more…)

You’ve heard it said before: “The book is better than the movie.” But the movies helped me write my new book, The First Assassin.

The First Assassin is a historical thriller set primarily in Washington, D.C., at the start of the Civil War. Bestselling author Vince Flynn blurbs it on the front cover: “An excellent book–it’s like The Day of the Jackal set in 1861 Washington.”

The Day of the Jackal is a twofer: Both the book (by Frederick Forsyth) and the movie (the 1973 version) are excellent. But the book is still better. It’s super excellent.

Anyway, I started working on The First Assassin in 1996–more than 13 years ago. Yeah, that’s a long time. It was the project I kept setting aside when something more pressing came along, such as the birth of a child or a writing deadline that came with a guaranteed paycheck. (more…)