Foote's Public Activism
No longer a reclusive novelist and Civil War writer, Shelby Foote took on a public persona after his 1990 television debut on the Burns’s PBS series, using his celebrity to weigh in on controversies surrounding Civil War memory. In the mid-1990s, for example, he joined the debate about Disney’s proposal for an American history-themed park near the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and he also defended Nathan Bedford Forrest, the controversial Confederate general, whose monument in a public Memphis park continues to attract protests and disputes.
Attempting to bolster their shareholder income, Disney leaders in the 1990s planned to open more theme parks, and as part of this push, the company bought a 3,000-acre site in Prince William County, Virginia for “Disney’s America.”[1] According to the 1993 proposal, this park – located only four miles from the Manassas battlefield – would feature animatronic robots of every American president, era-themed rides, and virtual Revolutionary War and Civil War re-enactments.[2] Agitated and anxious that “Disney’s America will turn the unique historical landscape of northern Virginia into another Orlando,” two hundred historians organized themselves into a group called Protect Historic America.[3] Along with David McCullough, James McPherson, C. Vann Woodward, and Barbara Fields, Shelby Foote joined the group and made himself available for radio and newspaper commentary on the controversy, suggesting in one interview that “The Disney people will do to American history what they have already done to the animal kingdom – sentimentalize it out of recognition.”[4] Coupled with environmental activists concerned about the park’s impact on the Virginian countryside, opposition from the historical community eventually encouraged a congressional resolution against the proposal, and Disney abandoned the project shortly thereafter.
Foote’s public defense of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s memory is more controversial than his involvement in the Disney debate. In his 1952 novel Shiloh, Forrest had presented the Confederate general as the hero of the battle, celebrating the military prowess and bravery that made him “the most man in the world.”[5] In the trilogy and on the Burns’s series, Foote similarly lauded Forrest and ignored his problematic legacy as a slave-dealer, the “Butcher of Fort Pillow,” and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. But many of his fellow Memphians disagreed with Foote’s assessment of Forrest, and since the 1980s, a lively debate has persisted in the community over Forrest’s commemoration in a local public park. Formerly named after the general, Health Sciences Park is located just outside of downtown and houses the remains of Forrest and his wife under his imposing bronze rendering, mounted on a horse. Beginning in 1985, the local chapter of the NAACP lobbied to remove the statue from the park, and in 1986, vandals spray-painted the statute’s base with KKK slogans.[6] In locally published articles about this debate, Shelby Foote was frequently interviewed. In one such interview, Foote claimed, “The day that black people admire Forrest as much as I do is the day when they will be free and equal, for they will have gotten prejudice out of their minds as we whites are trying to get it out of ours.”[7] The Tri-State Defender, an influential African American newspaper, quickly responded to Foote’s comment, reprimanding him for admiring a racist and for disregarding the sentiments of black Memphians.[8] Nevertheless, Foote continued to defend his hero and the statue for the rest of his life, and widely popularized his estimation of the general in the Burns’s series. Thanks to his celebrity, Foote’s opinions – on the Disney park and on Forrest – helped shape popular memory of the Civil War at the end of the twentieth century.
Footnotes
[1] Jacqui Shine, “America Almost Had a Disney Theme Park with a Slavery Section,” Atlas Obscura, March 1, 2016, accessed July 6, 2016, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/america-almost-had-a-disney-theme-park-with-a-slavery-section.
[2] Ibid.; Richard Perez-Pena, “Disney Drops Plan for History Theme Park in Virginia,” New York Times, September 29, 1994.
[3] James M. McPherson, “Battling to Preserve Our History,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1994; Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 166.
[4] Stuart Chapman, Shelby Foote: A Writer’s Life (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 266; Shelby Foote qtd. in Michael Posner, “Historians Join to Battle Disney over Theme Park,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 12, 1996: 46.
[5] Shelby Foote, Shiloh: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1952), 150.
[6] Court Carney, “The Contested Image of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” The Journal of Southern History 67, no. 3 (August 2001): 625-626.
[7]“Troops Rally to Defense of Forrest,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 7, 1988, Forrest Clippings File, Memphis Room, History Department of Memphis and Shelby County Public Library, Memphis, Tennessee.
[8] Carney, “Contested Image,” 627.