Gettysburg National Military Park and July 4, 2020: Personal Reflections

To be surrounded by men and women in festive patriotic attire and jungle fatigues, and holding a range of rifled weaponry was not how I expected my protest to end on July 4th. For much of the day my conversations with members of the Alt Right were uninteresting and largely forgettable. I was with my colleague Scott Hancock and a few other individuals in what can best be described as a teach-in at Gettysburg National Military Park. We came with signs that stressed the centrality of slavery to the Confederacy and posters that acknowledged the role of the enslaved on the battlefield. Nothing in my nearly 35 years of doing interpretation at Civil War sites, where I have encountered zealous defenders of the Confederacy, prepared me for the crowd of right-wing extremists who descended upon Gettysburg.  They were not the Lost Cause disciples of your parent’s generation.

As many have seen on You Tube, Scott had had an intense experience earlier in the morning at the Virginia monument, where the  self-deputized defenders of Gettysburg were angry and aggressive.  Scott handled the situation with bravery and integrity while always being respectful of the other side. It was a masterful performance and should be required viewing for all public historians.

Around mid-afternoon, Scott and I reached our designated area. Things were slow, and I ventured to the National Cemetery, the epicenter of the Alt-Right rally. What an amalgamation of people that included militia groups, extreme libertarians, anti-government folks who identified with the colonials of the American Revolution, neo Confederates, bikers, and Klansmen sans the white hoods. Noone occupied the rostrum, no one used a megaphone, and no one emerged from the crowd as a spokesperson. Chants of U.S.A and All Lives Matter erupted from time to time without provocation or purpose.

It was immediately apparent that law enforcement officials had lost control of the event. At one point a squadron of bikers raced through the gates of the National Cemetery–so much for respecting the memory of the fallen soldiers  at Gettysburg. Because Pennsylvania is an open carry state, brandishing firearms in public, including semi-automatic weapons, is perfectly legal. God forbid, though, that someone carry a beer in public as that would violate the state’s sacred open-container law.

For some members of the Alt-Right, the battlefield was merely a stage to act out their gun-toting fantasies of protecting Americans from radical forces. Others came to Adams County energized  by what they had seen along Richmond’s Monument Avenue, believing that Gettysburg’s monuments  would be targeted next. The uniformed militia groups, from what I witnessed, saw themselves as backup for the NPS police and Homeland Security. They seemed disconnected  from the “civilians”  screaming all lives. The militia, usually in dark green uniforms, and black helmets, marched across the battlefield with the precision of a reenacting unit filled with middle-aged men. It was bizarre to see a Twilight Zone episode unfolding on the battlefield.

At the end of the day, I was chatting with a fellow who, in a very heartfelt way, was explaining why he found the Black Lives Matter movement so divisive. I listened, and then listened some more, and in the meantime, I got separated from the rest of the group as we all headed back to our cars. When I reached the Taneytown Road, I was accosted by a man who ordered  me to “take my fucking sign and get across the fucking road.” I decided to interpret his lack of civility as an invitation to stay. Ten to fifteen of his friends encircled me, and I have no doubt that they were waiting for me to come their way the entire time. They were incensed by my poster, which read “10,000 slaves in Lee’s Army” with “#Black Lives Matter” at the bottom of the sign. To lift up the experience of African Americans was bad history in their opinion, when poor whites, especially the Irish, also got shot at Gettysburg. Why was I not telling the full story? When I tried to explain that I was carrying a poster and not a billboard, and that I couldn’t possibly address all the historical actors at Gettysburg, they just screamed obscenities at me. Two women repeatedly told me that I didn’t know anything about history and that I was a “fucking moron.” I am not such a moron, however, to have told them that I taught at Gettysburg College. Where was my knowledge lacking? They never specified. I expected a Lost Cause rant, but only one person played the loyal Confederate slave card. The folks in front of me didn’t know enough to be the intellectual heirs of Jubal Early.

Their verbal stoning of me was really over Black Lives Matter, because the movement, in their minds, was hypocritical and racist. They yelled about the media’s coverup of black people killing black people in Chicago and elsewhere. They also charged that black cops were guilty of police brutality, but that only white police officers were being blamed. And finally, they screamed at me about the funding for Black Lives Matters, insisting that donations go to Islamic extremists who will be led into race war by President Barrack Obama.

The people who surrounded me were delusional, to be sure, not especially bright or well-informed, driven by rage, apoplectically racist, politically paranoid, financially insecure, and convinced that their grievances against society are being ignored by all elites. One might wonder why I bothered to engage them in the first place?  I didn’t think it was right to abandon my ground when I had every right to stand there, but I didn’t do this out of spite. As an historian, I feel an obligation to try to understand all classes of people, especially when their perspective is vastly different from my own.  I wished I knew more about the economic and social status of the small mob, but from all appearances, they are not living the American Dream. I found them to be loathsome, but even so, their lives matter, and they are deserving of serious study if we are to fully understand why the working poor are drawn to reactionary ideologies. To conclude that the cause of white supremacy alone explains the Alt-Right gathering at Gettysburg, and that the disease of racism reveals itself as something handed down from one white generation to the next, is to ignore how the unique social conditions of today have  produced and sanctioned a vile and brutal form of institutional classism and racism.