The American Scene; Civil War Roundtable

I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do, but I don't know what to do Good morning. This is Howard Vincent, viewing the arts for the American scene for the Illinois Institute of Technology. One of the points I've been making over the past weeks, the past months, from time to time, I hope not to iteratively, is that Chicago is a live in the arts. The joint is jumping in other words. They have lots of things going on. Besides the famous ones

like the Art Institute, which incidentally we ought to get on this program sometime, and the orchestra, another good idea for the future. I've brought on this program, we've had on this program many Chicago institutions, people, after all people are institutions, who are institutions, people who are doing things in the arts, which are interesting, sometimes not well known to the general public, but always significant. I've brought on authors, musicians, artists, and scholars, et cetera, et cetera. Sometime ago I introduced, we had on the air, a discussion of the Shaw Society of Chicago, a very lively organization, which presents plays of Shaw in readings during the winter, and has a very enthusiastic membership, and that show attracted quite a bit of attention.

And that having attracted attention, I thought we would take up another institution, not similar, but an institution of enthusiasts around a special subject, and that is the Civil War Roundtable. And to introduce the Civil War Roundtable, I've brought an expert, who is incidentally the same expert we had for the Shaw Society. Mr. Elmer Gertz, a distinguished lawyer in Chicago, you've seen his name in the paper, well, it's appeared in the past month, and it appears frequently, and he has received distinguished honors from civic organizations for his work against discrimination. And he has written a number of books, which I mentioned when we talked about the Shaw Society, his book about Frank Harris, biography, but this is Mr. Elmer Gertz. And he is one of the, what is it you are one of the founding members? Yes, a small group of us found at the Civil War Roundtable, and I was one of the presidents of it several years ago. What year did you found this? December of 1940.

1940. Actually, you might say it's origins go back earlier, a group of us used to meet every day at luncheon, and our topic of conversation almost invariably was American history. We were history enthusiasts. This is where the good clubs start. Remember Boswell's Johnson's Club wasn't a formal club for a long time, and even then it wasn't very formal. The same thing with the Transcendental group in Concord and Boston. A group of people are among the same enthusiasts, and the same kick get together and kick ideas around the famous Whits Club at the Roundtable at the Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s. Yes, and they tend all after a while to become two institutionalized, even a very remarkable group like the Civil War Roundtable does that. First we were a luncheon group, and then we formed a group called the Civil War Roundtable. We decided that we were going to have no rules, no formal

requirements of any kind, no manuscripts, nothing which would make this too much of an institutionalized group. Before we knew it, we had to elect officers and have a Constitution and bylaws. The whole thing became so formalized that sometimes we don't even recognize each other going to a large. This is too bad. We'll come back to this in a minute, but what was your interest in the Civil War, or the original interest besides the normal interest every American has? Oh, I suppose I had a special interest stemming from childhood. First of all, many years ago when I was about 13 or 14, the Hearst Papers ran an essay contest on Lincoln, and I was one of the winners of it. Oh, good. And then about that time, a... Excuse me, what was the subject to you, man? Lincoln. That's Lincoln in general. Lincoln in general, and... Lincoln was a great man, et cetera. And the Hearst Papers published my essay and I had been interested in Lincoln and American history before that, but that naturally accentuated my interest. And then I had the privilege as a kid of meeting my first

great man, Carl Sandberg, who of course is the great Lincoln and Civil War enthusiast. And then the whole series of things, such as my growing friendship with Ralph Newman, who was the one man industry in the Civil War field. And a whole series of things combined to give me a growing interest in Lincoln and the Civil War. And I got to know all of the great American historians, particularly those specializing in the Civil War field. So it's become a sort of private club. And then on top of that, I began to view all American history, including current history, as a continuation of the Civil War. To me, this presidential campaign is the latest skirmish in the American Civil War. And I mean that in no rhetorical sense. Well, in what way is this? Well, let me phrase it this way. We have in the present campaign questions with respect to

the voting of the South. We have questions with respect to the Civil Rights Program. We have economic problems. All of them are outgrowth of the struggle, which culminated, so it was thought in the American Civil War, but what really has been going on. The fight for emancipation of the Negro, and for civil rights for all, isn't yet over. No. We're yet having those battles going on. And much of the skirmishing at the conventions, and in the papers, and in American life generally, is a result of the unresolved struggle. Well, that certainly couldn't be safely argued against, because a great war is usually fought around issues, which are not just of the moment, although a momentary thing may spark it. The French Revolution, for example, is still going on at 1789, but it's still the consequences of that moment are still being felt in France, and

that the Revolution of 1838 and 1771 are in the commune of 1771 are just simply consequences. They're a great moment. So what we do in America's sense, as you say, is the consequence of the Civil War. I think this, we could have resolved that struggle earlier. We tried to solve the problem improperly. We didn't give the right answers to it, and those wrong answers are plaguing us, it seems to me today. Are you attacking the abolitionists? No, I would say this, that we went from one extreme to another. We tried overnight to give the Negro all of his rights, even when he was unprepared. We should have given full rights to the Negro, but we should also immediately have educated him to the proper exercise of those rights, and we didn't. Now, this is interesting. This is quite an obvious truth when all that you stated becomes obvious, but we didn't learn. The world didn't learn from this experience. Look at the Congo situation. People were

released too soon to the responsibilities of civic responsibility without being prepared. This is terrible. We become doctrinaire and academic in our liberalism sometimes. I regard myself as a liberal, but I'm very impatient of those who think that simply because you make a liberal pronouncement, you solve the problem. If you believe in human equality, then you have to prepare human beings for such equality. It isn't enough to make the speeches and write the articles. The equality isn't simply a state of being released. That's what the equality is, is a reset of responsibility. You don't get it by fire. No, we try to solve those matters by decree instead of, in the case of the Negro, for example, in the period following the Civil War, we should have given unlimited educational and employment opportunities to the Negro. We should have given him the chance to realize what the Constitution as amended said he was entitled to. Exactly, exactly. Well, to get back to your

interest in the Civil War, when did you first begin to write about it? You'll have written, haven't you? Yes, I wrote a group of radio plays and various aspects of the Civil War. Some of them were performed. I did one called Second and Naugh Grill. I did another on the Bixby letter. I did several others. Some well -known actors performed in them. I also have written on various persons connected with the Civil War. I wrote a pamphlet called Joe Medell's War, dealing with Joe Medell and the Chicago Tribune in the Civil War. Incidentally, excuse me for interrupting here, but didn't the Chicago Tribune make the finest commentary upon the Gettysburg Address? Amid all those terrible commentaries that were made, this is the speech of a savage, a wild Indian, wouldn't have done worse. But the Chicago Tribune said this is a speech for the ages. Yes, the Chicago Tribune was one of the very few newspapers that immediately recognized the genius of that address. Yes, and this was because of Joe Medell? Well,

it may have been fortuitous. They may not even have known that they had done it for all I know, because the Tribune crowd, though they had supported Lincoln, were also very critical of him. They thought he wasn't a strong enough president at the time. Wasn't most everybody critical of him? Oh, yes. But there was a constant growth in the appreciation of him. Somebody like Emerson, who was very critical originally, by the end of the war, even before the martyrdom of Lincoln began to recognize that here was an authentic American voice. And there's one man who knew instinctively, but after all, he was a poet. He knew Whitman knows. Of course Whitman overstated his death. Well, yes. But he really sensed the greatness of him. And he never would meet Lincoln. He saw him in Washington there when he was a civil war, when he was down there and during the war, but he would never approach Lincoln. Of course, he wouldn't have as much opportunity at intimacy as you think. No, he wouldn't. That's true. But he had instinctive understanding, the greatness of Lincoln. And of course, when lilacs last in the Doriard Bloom, then the other verses that he wrote, capture the spirit

and the greatness of Lincoln. Yes. They also happen to be great poetry, whether it was Lincoln or somebody else, you have to be great poetry. Do you all the bad poems that were written about the death of Lincoln? I think Whitman captured one other thing that Lincoln sensed. And that was the democratic philosophy of America in its modern sense. Lincoln was the great political philosopher of democracy, more so even than Jefferson, who had a sort of 18th century tinge to his democracy. Lincoln saw into the 20th century in his democracy just as Whitman did. They both had to say instinct for human people and for the universality of democracy. Also, Lincoln had, of course, that great tragic sense, which is remarkable. Well, you were writing a plan. Did you start to write before the Civil War roundtable? Before the Civil War roundtable was founded and afterwards, of course. I wrote

on Charles Dana, who was the eyes of the government at the front during the Civil War. At one hand, he was a sort of spy for the war department. And Lincoln, in the other hand, was a correspondent, an organizer, an expediter of war movement. Haven't you dispatched it in published in the volume or not? Not in one single volume. Throughout the records of the rebellion, you find the dispatches of Dana. I myself took an old set of the records of the rebellion and tore out all the pages relating to Dana. And it was a considerable volume of about 400 pages, I would say. I had one time projected a book about Dana, and I actually published about three or four chapters of it in various places. This is going to be a fascinating book. In beginning to write about him, Civil War, you began to collect books, did you? Yes, I'm not a formal collector of the Civil War. I have many, many

volumes, even some manuscripts. And a lot of the correspondence of Dana and of General James Harrison Wilson, who was the youngest major general of the Civil War, and who died incidentally as recently as 1926. Really? I could have known him if I had realized it at the time. And a lot of material, and I got a sort of feeling, I hope, for the period, through association with Sandberg, and Newman, and Alan Nivens, and Bruce Catton, and many others. Was this group still meet regularly? Oh, yes. With any informality at all? Some informality. I might mention this. The group started with about 18 or 20 people in Chicago. Basically, you and Dr. Newman, and Otto Eisen -Schemmel, and Newton Fire, and Judge Harry Hirschen's son, and several others like that. And now there are chapters. Perhaps as many as a hundred chapters, it varies parts of the world. I

have seen fantastic figures as to the number of chapters. And the membership includes President Eisenhower, and former President Harry Truman, and many senators, and other officials, and historians, and bankers, real estate men, and every group. I can see why you're slightly disturbed at the very idea that you've grown too far, too much, because what is really vital in alive is a small group of you, who are really in there. And the initial group, still, is most active. I think most of the speeches are made by those in the initial group, plus the professional historians. Too many of the members, because a lack of time or lack of articulateness, do not make the speeches, deliver the papers, or enter into the discussion that's required. The important thing about a group, like the Civil War Roundtable, is that we have discussions. Otto Eisen -Schemmel, in particular, resents when we talk about a question -and -answer period. He gets angry. We don't have question -and -answer periods. We have discussion periods. I, my

son, for these are with him, because if you talk about speeches, well, that's all right, but your roundtable is not a speech -making place. It's a give -and -take place. Give -and -take, where every speaker has to expect to be taken apart, if he doesn't live up to the expectations of those listening. What's the exciting? Oh, it is. And it's a lot of fun. And every phase at a war, I might mention that we don't particularly deal with the military aspects, though many of our members are primarily concerned with it. The biographical, and the political, and the diplomatic, and the economic, and social phases are all covered. I suppose all these men do collect, and I don't mean a formal collector, but they have large libraries. Oh, yes. One of our now deceased members, Alfred Stern, not only had a great collection, but he gave his collections to the Library of Congress and to the Illinois State Historical Library, and to many universities, for example, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Brandeis University, and other

groups. Had he lived, I suppose, many of the colleges and universities of the country would have had Stern collections on Lincoln and the Civil War. His was the largest, was it? Perhaps the largest. There were other great collections. It was a great collective bar. The Oliver Barrett one, but that was scattered. I would say two -thirds of that collection was purchased by members of the Civil War Roundtable. They were. I myself attended the collection, bought a few items, and Ralph Newman acted as agents for most of them. I think we figured out that two -thirds of those who purchased items at the Barrett sale were connected with this original Chicago Civil War Roundtable. The son, Mr. Barrett, still has a number of items. Oh, yes. Roger is a great collector, but he doesn't confine his interest in the Civil War. He's interested in literature and gender. Oh, fantastic things. And in the generic figures of life, Freud or Marx or Einstein, he tries to get material on each of those great generic figures. I spent an evening

in his place one time looking at his collection, and I was pretty suddenly simply dazed and staggered. So I became facetious, and I said, well, you know, your collection is very incomplete. You don't have a signature of Shakespeare. Well, such things don't exist. There are only six in the world, as you know. And he said, well, yes, that's true. But he said, I may have one. Really? And he has a book in which there is a signature of Shakespeare. And he said that the Folger Library in Washington thinks it's genuine. And he sent it over to the British Museum to see how they're expertize it. Of course, with that word, it could never be proved. It would be a fantastically valuable item. Of course, what he would like to have, what the whole world would like to have, is the manuscript of Hamlet. No, no Shakespeare manuscript. I had an amusing experience with Roger Barrett. We returned from the Barrett sale in New York together, and we got in conversation about manuscripts. And I didn't regard myself as a collector at that time, and we talked about very subjection. Passing me out and mentioning I had this or I had that. And at the

end of the trip, Roger turned to me and said, and assembling everything and began putting it in order. Because I discovered, like the character Mollier, that we've been talking pros all his life. I had a collection, which I hadn't realized that had. That's a nice way to get a collection. Oh, yes. And you have a collection which you know. Much of it is addressed to me. Yes. Oh, really? Oh, good. I have, for example, a Truman collection. Several hundred outstanding people throughout the world have written to me, giving their views of Truman. Well, that's a Truman collection, but it's also my correspondent. Yes, very good. And now the, in this... Truman is a great student of the Civil War. Yes, he is. He told me once, without boasting that he thought he could, without notice, conduct a group over Chancellorville and give a full account of that badly. Amazing. Amazing. And you people in the Civil War round table, I suppose you make Pilgrim into something. Oh, yes. That's one of the interesting things we do. We have historical journeys in the spring and also

in the summer in a minor scale. We go, have gone to practically all of the major battlefields. We spend several days there. We have leading authorities talk with us. And we really live through those battles. When Douglas Southall Freeman was alive, we spent a good deal of time with him. He was very, very grateful. Well, I think the last book he gave out was one of his real rarities. He inscribed to me in a few days later he was dead. Incidentally, he ran a cocktail party for us at his home. I think that was one of the very few times the liquor was served in the Freeman home. He was deeply absorbed in it. In your visit to these battlefields, yes. And there must have been, there must be, and there will be, a tremendous amount of literature produced by this group. How many books you've done? Eisen Schemmel has done so many. Well, the literature in the Civil War is unquestionably the

largest such literature covering any field. More than Napoleon. Can you verify the bibliographies that have been published? Listing only books. Run into the thousands of items. But Napoleon is fantastic. But I think by now, I'm reassuring that by now Lincoln has passed. Lincoln and the Civil War. Yes, yes. Well, people can find their interest to Lincoln, but most have other phases. Of course, you have to get a general overall picture. Sure. But then you have to confine your, especially. You have to become really specialist on that. Of course, some of our people. The third day at Gettysburg, let's say, are the first day at Chancehurst. Some people, of course, are antiquarian. They're very limited interest. But most of the members at a round table have a living interest. This isn't something there. Don't scorn the antiquarian, though. Oh, no. Because I myself sometimes click relics. I remember at Malvern Hill, I picked up a mule shoe from the Civil War. And I have it hanging in my rick room. Well, maybe it's silly

and childish, but I get to commend this trail. Sure. It's a sentimental attachment, which one may not deny. Incidentally, do you know that wonderful poem on Malvern Hill? It's by Melville. He wrote a very fine one. No, I don't know. This is not known, unfortunately. He wrote a very fine book called Battle Pieces, which dealt with the Civil War. It's really almost a history of the Civil War, a series of poems, including a document at the end, which is as noble in its sentiments about attitude towards the soul as the second inaugural. You know, a friend of mine, a very dear friend of mine, had an unfortunate experience in the $64 ,000 question. And I had told him in advance something that I've emphasized often, that no matter how much you know about a subject whether the Civil War or anything else, anybody can trick you into false answers. And there's no such thing as knowing everything, like what you've told me about Melville. I'm sure there are

countless other items that even profound students, not the Civil War. Oh, surely, surely. I remember once having a class at the University of Chicago from the leading constitutional historian of the United States. And just passingly, I asked him about Tom Payne. And this famous historian had never read anything by Tom Payne, believe it or not. Oh, now. He had read Fisher Ames and countless others, but Tom Payne somehow he hadn't read. Oh, well, we all have our blind spots. It's a very curious thing, and that's true in the Civil War. How often do you meet in the Civil War, aren't there? We, once a month, plus these battlefield tours, plus these special meetings, plus a lot of meetings that take place when books come out. We often have autographed parties at Ralph Noman's or elsewhere. And we meet socially and for many of these people who are in the Civil War roundtable, have become intimate friends of ours. As a matter of fact, I am one of the few lawyers who actually litigated the Civil

War in a court. Oh, really? How was that? Analyzing Shema wrote a couple of books which were plagiarized, at least we thought so. And we had some very bitterly contested cases, and went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, in which every phase of the Civil War in particular Lincoln was a subject of examination and cross -examination and the briefs. Well, now I want to make you say, Shema plagiarized. No, no, he was accused of plagiarizing. No, no, no, he accused somebody of plagiarizing. I think it was fully justified. I felt that his books were taken almost bodily, put in popular form, but still the substance was there. And we sued. And somebody else had done it. Yes, we sued. And the cases were very bitterly contested, went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Did you win it? A divided court decided against us on a phase of the law that ought to be covered for the sake of all historians and serious writers. The United States Supreme Court has never

passed upon what constitutes fair comment for use. Yes. It's a very delicate question, and it needs a pronouncement by the United States Supreme Court, defining just what scholars and others can do with other people's writings. Yes. I know. Some day, the United States Supreme Court will pass upon it. I'm sure, when it will do us no good, they will decide that our viewpoints were sound. All the law review articles that have appeared on the subject have decided that we're right, but even though the court by split decisions. Well, I'd like to have the decision on this, because I was reading a... In each scholar. Whether the Civil War or any other thing. I was reading an article the other day, which it took over several ideas that I had put out in a book. Without any acknowledgement whatsoever. Now, I know ideas are in the air, but this is on a very special subject. He put my book in the bibliography, but I mean, and old, we see this all the time. All the time. The Department of Curious Coincidences in the Yorker puts it. I had the experience of a

famous collector of anecdotes who has a great reputation on radio and TV and other fields. He put out a collection of stories. And a couple of the very best ones. He had swiped from writings of mine. Without a word of acknowledgement. Well, that's characteristic. Yes. Whether the Civil War field or any other field. Incidentally, in that Eisenschimmel suit, the other side presented when I was taking the deposition of the author. Hundreds of books and pamphlets having no remote connection with the subject, but they were all on Lincoln and the Civil War. And they filled the room. What have made it in a very interesting display. Yes. And it was just a small part of the literature on the subject. Are you working on anything now on the Civil War or book or something? You probably don't want to talk about it. Well, on one day, I hope to finish my day in a book. One day, I would like to write about the journalism of the Civil War. I regard myself as more or less of a specialist on the

journalism of the Civil War. I've talked and written on Greeley, on Wilbur Story, on Dana, and on others. I think the journalism of the Civil War is particularly interesting and particularly important, because that was the period of the great personal journalists like Bennett, and Greeley, and Dana, and Raymond, and a host of others. More of the top flight personal journalists lived during the Civil War period than any subsequent period. Well, I don't believe that, just on general principle. I mean, I don't know the subject, but people always get a sentimental attachment to it. I'll tell you why. There after the newspaper field became what William Allen White said it was, a 6 % investment. Well, all right. At that time was something more personal. Well, you do this book. You're a young man. You have a lot of time to do this. Today is my birthday, and I'm sorry to say that I'm just a few years removed from being 60, so I'm not that young. Well, plenty of time. Plenty of time to work on work. And can anybody join the Civil War? Anyone who

is recommended by our members are executive committee passes on it, but we are really pretty democratic. Oh, good. Well, even if you know something about the Civil War, you're not excluded from membership. Well, thank you very much, Alma Goods, for coming in and talking about the Civil War around tables. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope you can get together another one in your enthusiasm in the future. Thank you very much, thank you.