Gettysburg: Display Window for Popular Memory

Gettysburg's streets rocked with the din of artillery on February 26, 1884. Added to the clamor of bells and cheering crowds fluttering red, white, and blue, the booming signaled festivity rather than conflagration. Into the town irrevocably changed by war in 1863 steamed the bedecked locomotive "Jay Cooke," bearing a beaming Cooke himself. Financed in part by Cooke, the inaugural of the Gettysburg & Harrisburg Railroad opened Gettysburg to improved connections with northern, eastern, and western population centers. The Harrisburg Patriot termed the celebratory cannonading "nearly as important to the town as that which occurred twenty-one years ago," and the railroad "another victory for Gettysburg" that "brings the historic battlefield within reach of the thousands who want to visit it." Appropriately, the locomotive stopped outside of town for a brief ceremony that included driving two golden spikes, one inscribed "1863" and the other "1883." But the spikes represented more than just corporate gimmickry exploiting historical memory, and even more than a new era in the apotheosis of Gettysburg. Rather, they symbolized the ongoing metamorphosis of the angel of death into an avatar of commercial celebration.' Although the railroad opened Gettysburg to new clients and attractions, it served as only one of many enterprises that transformed Gettysburg into a commodity. No project of twentieth-century avarice, the production and exchange of Gettysburg in America's cultural marketplace began immediately after the battle. Since the Civil War Centennial a succession of struggles, each labeled by the media "the second battle of Gettysburg," have pitted preservationists against developers. The issues usually limn secular forces of commerce as the beast of the Apocalypse threatening to desecrate sacred ground. Similarly, an axiom in histories of post-Civil War Gettysburg is that patriotic preservationists founded the shrine while later promotion by commercial forces tainted the holy for venal purposes.' Perhaps part of contemporary self-castigation, this romanticized perspective overlooks the grip of market forces on American life before the Civil War. The morality play view of good versus evil might enhance the site's sacred value, but it ignores the complex web of market transactions that created and continue to shape the shrine. It baits the late-twentieth century mind with profaning intrusions, but does not consider the subtle ways the market penetrated all areas of American life in the nineteenth century. In his book Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, Edward T. Linenthal points to the amount of cultural labor such as rituals, monument building, and panegyrics involved in forging and maintaining a shrine out of a battle site such as Gettysburg.' What needs to be given its due is the prodigious market activity that entwined with venerative gestures at Gettysburg to produce a popular American shrine. It was no coincidence that the Gettysburg icon grew apace with America's shift from a producer to a consumer nation. As we shall see, a variety of purveyors in the decades surrounding the turn of the century marketed Gettysburg for a commercial society characterized by display, spectacle, images, and commercial leisure. In the vernacular of merchandising, Gettysburg became a display window for popular memory, presenting the American past in a manner appealing to Victorian consumers. Although consumer capitalism finally triumphed around the turn of the twentieth century, it had been making strides for decades. Even at the time of the battle, the marketplace provided the main arena for cultural production and consumption. The middle class rising from the turmoil of industrialization provided a ready market for cultural commodities available from transportation, printing, and other technological improvements. Full of aspiration and intensely self-conscious, the middle class simultaneously turned inward toward the family and outward to a world accessible through commercial venues of print, images, and travel. …