Gettysburg by Jim Weeks

Author:Jim Weeks [Weeks, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400832545
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Image of a Cold War Shrine

Gettysburg’s salience during the Cold War era owed something to a media event beyond manipulation of memory. During the 1950s, Gettysburg shone in the media spotlight as the home of the nation’s chief executive. Dwight D. Eisenhower, hero of World War II and president from 1953 to 1961, bought a Gettysburg farm in 1954 with hopes of retiring there. The first home “Ike” and his wife Mamie ever owned, the 496-acre farm, consummated the couple’s pleasant memories of Gettysburg framed decades earlier when Ike served as commander of a tank school at Gettysburg. Ike’s retirement plans accelerated, however, when he opted to recuperate in Gettysburg from a 1955 heart attack. As a result, Gettysburg continuously appeared in the news.58

After Ike set up a presidential office in the Gettysburg post office, U.S. News and World Report called Gettysburg “the unofficial capital of the nation.” Cabinet members came to visit, news conferences were held in the Hotel Gettysburg, and crowds gathered when Ike arrived in town. Cameras snapped and whirred when Ike brought famous people to Gettysburg such as Bernard Montgomery, Winston Churchill, Nikita Khruschev, or Charles de Gaulle. It may have been an exaggeration that the battlefield “now ranks second to Mr. Eisenhower as a tourist attraction,” as U.S. News concluded, but the Eisenhowers encouraged construction of several motels, restaurants, and the sale of “Ike and Mamie” souvenirs. Ike, however, represented more than a television celebrity like Cliff Arquette. After all, the Cincinnatus of Western civilization opted to settle at the pastoral site of the Civil War’s greatest battle. As chief executive of a nation characterized by both unparalleled affluence and tension, his avuncular visage provided comfort from Cold War hostility and domestic change. Reported to be small-town “everyday folks” by the people of Gettysburg, the Eisenhowers on their little farm offered a model for lackadaisical withdrawal from the world’s problems. Ike easily folded into Gettysburg’s image not only as a quintessential American tourist site but a place of retreat. In effect, the couple functioned as the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for Gettysburg.59

Neither Ike nor Gettysburg were fossilized relics fissured from the present, as each strengthened the other to forge contemporary meaning for the shrine. Ike, now commander in chief, had been helmsman of victory in Europe and could handily manage national challenges; Gettysburg, site of national tragedy and renewal, also provided confidence for confronting the future. The match dovetailed easily into the era’s anachronistic dissonance: colonial furniture and space age design, religious faith and faith in technology, Disney’s Tomorrow Land and Frontier Land, Davy Crockett and Elvis, Grandma Moses and Jackson Pollack, Westerns and outer space.60

Ike invigorated the shrine about the same time mass culture began to split the past from the present. Tourism had changed, and so had Gettysburg’s sacred significance for a nation confronted with freedom at home and abroad. The Cold War revived Gettysburg’s symbolic place in American exceptionalism, expressed as the rebirth of a nation divinely ordained for global leadership.

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