"John Brown's Body" Reconsidered

 

One of the joys of going to law school in a neighborhood where there were well-stocked used book stores was setting aside a little money each month to buy books which I did not have time to read, but wanted to read someday.

Someday.

Now, about 50 years after I invested 60 cents to get a hard copy 1928 edition of Stephen Vincent Benet’s Pulitzer Prize winning John Brown’s Body, I have finally read it.

 All I knew of the book in the early ‘70s was that it sought to be an epic poem capturing the essence of the American Civil War and its aftermath. (And having been the Devil in a junior high school production of Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, the appeal of reading more of his work was intriguing.)

Not too long after my purchase, I read the last few pages, which sought to summarize what America, dominated by the Industrial Revolution, had become in the six decades after the end of the Civil War. I found the last stanza of the book compelling:

So, when the crowd gives tongue

And prophets, old or young,

Bawl out their strange despair

Or fall in worship there,

Let them applaud the image or condemn

But keep your distance and your soul from them,

And, if the heart within your breast must burst

Like a cracked crucible and pour its steel

White-hot before the white heat of the wheel,

Strive to recast once more

That attar of the ore

In the strong mold of pain

Till it is whole again,

And while the prophets shudder or adore

Before the flame, hoping it will give ear,

If you at last must have a word to say,

Say neither, in their way,

“It is a deadly magic and accursed,”

Nor “It is blest,” but only “It is here.”

Finally, some years into my retirement and two years into The Covid Pandemic Isolation, I opened the beginning with anticipation. A worthwhile read, but still a disappointment, for several reasons. 

First, Benet’s poetic narrative of the War itself pretty much ended with the Battle of Gettysburg. He treated the last 22 months as an inevitable denouement. This may be an unfair quibble, but I did not expect it. The length of the War was an integral part of its horror, as Ken Burns’ narratives demonstrate. 

Second, while Benet did put a focus on Lincoln as a human being, he glaringly (at least to my mind) omitted any discussion of The Gettysburg Address, which was deemed the seminal document of the War not very long after it was delivered  To understand the Civil War, and, indeed the entire American enterprise, one must grapple with Lincoln’s vision that the awful and awesome struggle would determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people [would] perish from the earth.”

Third, Benet did not illustrate or seek to capture the American industrialization which followed. He just jumps from April 1865 to the economic/technological transformation in the last few pages.

Finally, Benet did not come close to plumbing the depths of the horrors of American Slavery, and Herculean efforts of the enslaved and their allies to resist, escape, and dismantle the system.  His focus on a few representative non-famous people to illustrate the War’s impact was a useful approach, but the enslaved individuals came across as cardboard cut-outs. These deficiencies were (and are) not limited to Benet, who considered himself a progressive.  They are blind spots (which are related, it seems to me, to Benet’s omission of anything about The Gettysburg Address) that have been endemic to White America. Indeed, these blind spots are illustrated by the conclusion of this 2014 essay from the Library of Congress discussing a post-World War II recording of a stage version of the book:

In the early 1950s Americans wanted an exceptional America, a nation that had suffered in order to redeem itself from the sin of slavery, the nation that Lincoln had called "the last best hope of earth."  John Brown’s Body’ gave them what they wanted. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/John-Browns-Body_Grieve-Carlson.pdf

In more recent decades, and particularly in more recent years, it has become clearer to much of White America — as it has always been clear to Black America — that the country did not fully “redeem itself from the sin of slavery.”  Writing in 1927 — three decades after the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision (which validated and accelerated the Jim Crow laws, which enshrined an American form of Apartheid which persisted until Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) — Benet approved of the end of legal slavery, but made no mention of the attacks on, and ultimate destruction of, Reconstruction. Nor was there any reference to the failure of federal and state legal systems to protect the rights of African Americans.  Tragically, Benet, like most of his class and generation, fell victim to the cultural amnesia that followed the abandonment of the formerly enslaved following the end of Reconstruction after the 1876 presidential election.

America had not been redeemed by the the Civil War. We have made partial progress since Benet wrote his epic. But now we are backsliding.  Indeed, in many places in America, people seek to cast in stone the woefully inadequate vision which imprisoned Benet’s generation.   

We can, and must, do better