Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn
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Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn
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Overview
Among the many myths surrounding the Little Bighorn is that journalists of that time were incompetent hacks who, in response to the stunning news of Custer’s defeat, called for bloodthirsty revenge against the Indians and portrayed the “boy general” as a glamorous hero who had suffered a martyr’s death. Mueller argues otherwise, explaining that the journalists of 1876 were not uniformly biased against the Indians, and they did a credible job of describing the battle. They reported facts as they knew them, wrote thoughtful editorials, and asked important questions.
Although not without their biases, journalists reporting on the Battle of the Little Bighorn cannot be credited—or faulted—for creating the legend of Custer’s Last Stand. Indeed, as Mueller reveals, after the initial burst of attention, these journalists quickly moved on to other stories of their day. It would be art and popular culture—biographies, paintings, Wild West shows, novels, and movies—that would forever embed the Last Stand in the American psyche.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806151090 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud
Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn
By James E. Mueller
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5109-0
CHAPTER 1
"So Fit a Death"
Custer's Last Stand
On hearing the news of George Armstrong Custer's death in 1876 at the Little Bighorn, a New York theater critic penned an essay claiming that the ideal hero of the frontier had died. Andrew C. Wheeler, a playwright, war correspondent, and novelist as well critic, noted that Custer had a successful Civil War record but that other Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip H. Sheridan had overshadowed him. Some people were in fact surprised when reading the extensive Civil War achievements listed in Custer's obituary. Nevertheless, the erstwhile "boy general"—he had reached that rank at age twenty-three during the war—was unquestionably the leading hero of the plains Indian wars.
Custer's frontier reputation was based in part on his memoir, My Life on the Plains, which had remained popular since its release in 1874 and was, according to Wheeler, sold out in New York the day after the battle was reported in the city. Wheeler explained that Custer wrote only "good newspaper English" and his memoir was full of dime novel clichés, "but it is precisely these defects which attest the genuineness of the work and constitute its charm." My Life on the Plains was an excellent nonfiction complement to the frontier-themed novels devoured by a public seeking romance and adventure.
"What happier combination of circumstances! Thanks to Cooper and Beadle's dime series we are all Indian-mad, and, through the progress of settlement in the Far West, and the presence there of the army recruited from every section of the country, almost all of us have a personal interest in the ceaseless struggle with the Indians. Romance and intense personal feeling are thus blent as they, perhaps, never have been." It was, Wheeler wrote, as if Sir Walter Scott had been writing his popular romantic medieval novels during the Crusades, and every English family at that time was reading them.
It was an apt comparison. Custer, who had read such romances as a boy, was often compared to a knight in newspaper stories about his cavalry charges. According to Wheeler, Custer was the perfect fit for this idealized image transplanted to the American West:
Not till the sun falls dead from the signs [skies] will such a niche be so filled. Custer had the presence of a popular hero, and flashed through the history of a prosaic age resplendent and romantic, with the locks of a Cavalier or hero of a Norse saga; the dress and fiery enthusiasm of Rupert; the luck of a favorite of the fairies. On the plains he becomes the ideal hunter and warrior, with his fringed buckskin suit, his gay arms and trappings, his thoroughbred horse, his grayhounds and staghounds by his side. Such a character takes and retains the public eye.... And when at last he fell in battle fighting against the odds and surrounded by his comrades he crowned the story of his life with so fit a death that it will be many years ere his name fades from its place in history and literature—if it ever fades and does not rather become enduring in popular tradition like that of Carson or of Boone.
Wheeler was certainly correct about Custer's image as a frontiersmen, but he downplayed too much the public's appreciation of his Civil War record. No newspaper sketch artists were on hand at the Little Bighorn in 1876 to record what would become known as Custer's Last Stand. But readers could easily imagine what it looked like without any help from a picture. Custer's image as the beau sabreur of the Civil War—the very epitome of a cavalryman—had been embedded in the public's mind since his appearance on the cover of Harper's Weekly in March 1864. That drawing shows Custer leading a charge in a nameless battle. The youthful officer, shaven except for flowing mustache, is hatless, sword upraised to urge forward a group of bearded, grizzled veterans, blurry in the background. Custer's horse, wild-eyed and champing at the bit, is bounding toward the unseen enemy. The sketch might have been from a fight on the Rapidan River in Virginia—the magazine was not specific in its story—but it clearly illustrates Custer's Civil War record—a series of usually victorious, furious charges, including one at Gettysburg that some historians argue saved the battle and thus the war.
The press noticed Custer for more than his combat leadership. When he was promoted to general—the youngest in the Union army at the time—he designed his own outfit of a dark blue velveteen jacket with gold braid curling up the sleeves, a light blue large-collared navy shirt, a wide-brimmed hat, and a red necktie. His clothing and long, golden hair and flowing mustache gave him a look that was easy to remember. It was a look that inspired hero worship in men and crushes in girls.
A decade of press coverage followed Custer to the frontier, where he traded Union blue for buckskins and created a new look for a new era. He hobnobbed with visiting Russian royalty, led exploratory expeditions, and helped grow his own legend by writing numerous magazine and newspaper articles as well as My Life on the Plains. He even found time to lead a victorious yet controversial campaign against the Cheyennes in what is now Oklahoma.
Is it any wonder that, when the New York Herald solicited money for a monument to Custer after the Little Bighorn, it received donations from everyone from waiters to Broadway actors, and from both Union and Confederate veterans? A wagon driver who could afford to give only 25 cents wrote that he would also give his life if the government called for volunteers to avenge Custer. An office boy named Philip Hoffman said he would be rejected if he tried to enlist, but he was contributing 10 cents and would collect more donations at work. "I am of German parents, but as an American by birth my heart swells with indignation over the death of our gallant General and soldiers at the hands of the brutal Indians." An anonymous school girl sent 10 cents after reading the Herald story to her mother, who presumably was illiterate. "We girls admire brave men, because, I suppose, and as mother says, we are such cowards ourselves. I would give the world to have had one look at the fearless General Custer; and then he was so young and, as the papers say, so handsome. I could cry tears over his sad fate. All the girls and women, I fancy, must feel as I do, for such heroes as General Custer are what they most admire, and then, you know, they are scarce. Leave it to the school girls and a monument will soon be raised to the gallant General Custer, for he was a man."
Uniquely charismatic men like Custer, who always seem to be in the right place at the right time, are indeed rare, which is why he was always good copy, as journalists are wont to say. If it is true that he led himself and his men to their deaths at the Little Bighorn in a mad dash for glory, then he was only doing what the press and its voracious readers expected him to do. At least that was the take of a Louisville Courier-Journal correspondent who had attended West Point with Custer. The reporter, identified only as J.M.W., wrote that twenty-five or thirty years earlier an officer would have hurt his reputation by trying to draw attention to himself like Custer did, but that the Civil War "changed all that feeling."
The country had eagerly followed the exploits of its soldiers during the War of the Rebellion, as it was fondly characterized by the North. Officers learned quickly that press coverage, though not more important than battlefield success, could nevertheless help make or break careers. George Gordon Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, feuded with the press, and the resulting bad publicity may have kept the ambitious general from running for president after the war. Custer was not that ambitious, but he knew good press could help get promotions in the small, competitive peacetime army.
The Courier-Journal writer thought Custer's image would remain intact despite his leadership in a defeat in which he and all the men under his immediate command perished:
The old Indian fighters, judged by the modern standard, were slow, but it was because they had little to gain in reputation by dash, and so they went at the Indian cautiously, with no other motive than to punish him. The country now demands that our Indian fighters shall be dashing fellows, who shall sweep over the plains with their whirling squadrons and ride down the ruthless savage. Custer was only meeting the demand of the country when he met his fate. His fault was the fault of his times and people. He fulfilled to the letter, from the golden locks floating in the wind down to the jingling spurs that impelled his fiery steed to the charge, all the popular conditions prescribed for the dashing Indian fighter of the frontier. His memory will go down to posterity as surely as it should go as a hero, and even now criticism on his military operations sinks back abashed in the thronging crowd of tender and glorious memories that cluster about the life of this dead young soldier.
The tender memories thronged because of Custer's tragic yet heroic death, but before the shock of the Little Bighorn Indian fighting on the frontier was just one of many issues to think about in a time the Hartford Daily Courant called "the condensed age." The Courant worried that the popularity of abridged books in 1876 was a sign people were too busy to read seriously and think about big ideas. Book sales were hurt by large public libraries, where readers were "borrowing [books], galloping through them and returning them" instead of purchasing copies to keep for continual reflection. "The age is active, restless beyond all precedent," the Courant harrumphed.
Perhaps people were extraordinarily restless because it was an era of unprecedented change. It was, after all, also the "Gilded Age," named after the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that spoofed American greed, materialism, and corruption during the rapid and unsettling period of postwar industrialization. In 1876 the country was still suffering the effects of the Panic of 1873, a depression that would last until 1879. It would cause widespread bankruptcies, bank closings, deflation, violent strikes, and unemployment as high as 14 percent.
Amid this economic turmoil, always in the background like a chain-rattling ghost, was the vivid memory of a horrific war that had killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Americans and laid waste to one region of the country. The great contest had begun as a call to save the Union, but after four years of devastation and slaughter it had taken on the more spiritual meaning of "a new birth of freedom." Now, a little more than ten years later, the new freedom seemed closer to death than birth. Reconstruction was going poorly in the South. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan were terrorizing blacks, who were desperately clinging to the right to vote. Northerners were getting tired of funding an army to police the violence in the South.
Politicians violently disagreed over how to handle the country's problems. A resurgent Democratic Party had won the midterm elections in 1874 and appeared ready to ride public anger over Republican scandals to take the White House in 1876, which would mean the end of Reconstruction. Republicans, on the other hand, had vilified the Democratic Party for ten years as rebels and traitors. Republicans promised to "wave the bloody shirt" to try to win just one more presidential election. People on both sides feared that a close election might be disputed and prompt a return to civil war.
Yet there was still a sense of optimism over the country's growth that was manifested in the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Almost 10 million people—about one-fifth of the population—attended the fair. The exhibition contained an amazing sampling of artistic, scientific, and industrial displays celebrating the nation's one-hundredth year of progress. It included new inventions like the typewriter, which visitors could use for 50 cents to write a souvenir letter, and a gizmo called the telephone, which so shocked the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II that he dropped the receiver when he tried it, saying, "My God! It talks!" One of the stars of the exhibition was the Corliss steam engine, a 1,500-horsepower behemoth that was the largest and most powerful machine of its type in the world.
Such scientific marvels were a stark contrast to a large display of various American Indian tools, pottery, tipis, and weapons. A 65-foot canoe and life-size papier-mâché and wax figures modeling Indian clothes gave fairgoers a thrilling illustration of what was considered a rapidly dying race. Charles Rau, a Smithsonian curator who organized the display, said in a speech called "The Happy Age" that Americans should "glory" in having surpassed their primitive ancestors and in knowing that progress "governs the development of mankind."
While the fairgoers were gawking at Indian mannequins, across the continent the army was marching against flesh-and-blood warriors who were not ready to accept the idea that their time was past. On May 17, one week after President Ulysses S. Grant had opened the Centennial Exhibition by starting the Corliss engine, a column of infantry and cavalry under the command of Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory to converge with two other columns to force Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho bands onto reservations. In charge of the Seventh Cavalry regiment under Terry's command was Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. Despite Custer's celebrity, what would come to be called the Great Sioux War got comparatively little attention in newspapers back East. Since the founding of the country, Americans had opposed a large peacetime army for fear it would infringe on their civil liberties, and they considered Indian conflicts to be police actions instead of real wars. The current war, or police action, was not widely popular because many saw it as merely a pretext for seizing the Black Hills, where gold had been discovered two years earlier during a surveying expedition led by Custer. The Courant, for example, on May 19 castigated Custer for "his rose-colored reports of the Black Hills" that led miners to invade the Indian territory. "They [the miners] are being killed and scalped by the score, and in their behalf the nation is obliged to incur the expense of a military campaign for the slaughter of the Indians who are only defending their lands from lawless depredators. So much for Custer."
And so much for the Great Sioux War. The Gilded Age crowds at the Centennial were more concerned with wonders like a two-ton silver nugget pulled out of a mine in Virginia City, Nevada. The nugget's popularity bothered George P. Rowell, a pioneering ad man who had organized the Centennial's Newspaper Pavilion, where fairgoers could read just about every newspaper in the country but often passed it by for shinier objects. "Thousands of curious men and women are drawn about it, and look wonderingly and wistfully at its huge form," Rowell said of the nugget, admitting that it was a better draw than his newspaper building. "It represents to man's cupidity just so much of life's happiness. But thieves may break through and steal such treasures. Who thinks of the toiling thousands of earnest literary men and women, scattered over our states and territories, who waste midnight oil in preparing that mental food which, enduring when silver and gold have taken to them wings and departed never to return, proves to be a lasting comfort!"
Rowell, the founder of the industry journal Printer's Ink and a namesake newspaper directory that was one of the first annuals to provide circulation statistics, believed fervently in the power of journalism to improve lives. "Track the globe around, and those lands will be found most highly civilized and forward in catering to their people's comfort where the press is most plentiful, free and powerful," he wrote. Rowell was bullish about the future of newspapers despite the economic depression. He claimed that more than eight thousand newspapers were published in the United States, more than all the titles in all the other countries of the world combined. In fact, growth in the number of newspapers in the United States—10 percent a year—was greater in the 1870s than in any previous decade in the nation's history. Why the growth in an economic downturn? Newspapers were the main medium of news, and they provided cheap entertainment to boot. Most of these newspapers were started in small towns or new industrial cities, and many of them practiced the "new journalism" that emphasized topics of interest to the ordinary reader, things like crime, sports, and features rather than what had long been the staple of the news business—partisan political coverage. After all, people needed a break from the standard ten-hour day, six-day work week, and they needed information they could use; few wanted stories about political wrangling unless they were told with humor. Editors were beginning to see readers not just as voters in elections but as consumers of goods in a market society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud by James E. Mueller. Copyright © 2013 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
1. "So Fit a Death": Custer's Last Stand,
2. "Horrible!": The News Shocks the Nation,
3. "The Blood of These Brave Men": Assessing the Blame for Defeat,
4. "A Little Cheap Political Capital": The Little Bighorn and the Presidential Campaign,
5. "The Old Rebel Spirit": The Hamburg Massacre Bumps Custer off the Front Page,
6. "Asses Who Are Braying for Extermination": The Indians in Little Bighorn Coverage,
7. "Custer's Death Was Sioux-icide": Humor and the Little Bighorn,
8. "Duty and Valor": The Focus of Little Bighorn Coverage,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,