Week 9: Custer's Myth: From Heroic Martyr to Villain

Welcome to the show everyone I'm Eleanor Finch here with Simon Carver And Simon let's start with a date that instantly became a defining pivot in American folklore July 10th 1876 Just two weeks after the disaster at the Little Bighorn the New York Tribune published a poem by Walt Whitman titled A Death Song for Custer Oh, Whitman got his tribute in fast. Didn't he actually send a $10 bill to the newspaper along with the poem? Talk about rapid response poetry. Exactly 10 And in that poem Whitman writes Thou of the tawny flowing hair in battle Bearing a bright sword in thy hand But here is the historical catch Simon At the Little Bighorn Custer had his hair cut closely cropped before the campaign and not a single trooper in the 7th Cavalry carried a sabre into that battle No swords So the entire image we have of him standing on that hill waving a gleaming saber with his long yellow locks flowing in the wind It was literally invented out of whole cloth within days of his death Completely The public demanded a tragedy of Homeric proportions and the press delivered it Within months by December 1876 a novelist named Frederick Whittaker published a massive biography titled A Complete Life of General George A Custer Whittaker compared him directly to Napoleon and declared there is no spot on his armour A spotless night. And to keep that armor shining, Whitaker had to invent some pretty cartoonish villains, didn't he? Like Major Marcus Reno, who survived the battle, and the Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face. Indeed Whittaker blamed Reno entirely for cowardice hounding him until Reno had to beg for a court of inquiry in 1879 just to clear his name And as for Rain in the Face newspapers claimed he had personally cut out Costa's heart on the battlefield to avenge an 1874 imprisonment Henry Wadsworth Longfellow even wrote a popular poem about it The Revenge of Rain in the Face Which is wild, because didn't the actual soldiers who recovered the bodies state that Custer's corpse was found entirely unmutilated? But a good, gruesome, heart-plucking story is just too juicy for the public to let go. Precisely Facts were entirely secondary And Custer's widow Elizabeth Bacon Custer spent the next 50 years of her life writing best selling memoirs like Boots and Saddles in 1885 carefully curating this image of a saintly flawless husband who was a patron of the arts and loved children No one wanted to challenge a grieving widow And then, corporate America stepped in to cement the visual. In 1896, the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company distributed over 150,000 copies of a lithograph titled Custer's Last Fight to saloons across the country. It was an advertising gimmick, but it became a permanent fixture of working-class visual culture. It became the most viewed print in American history up to that point. As the historian Paul Hutton noted, the public simply preferred the myth because it satisfied a national need to see the conquest of the West not as a messy, violent subjugation, but as a heroic, civilising sacrifice. But then, Eleanor, the wind shifts. If the late 19th century needed a perfect martyr of progress, the 20th century, especially after the disillusionment of the First World War, started looking for idols to smash. And the man who swung the first major sledgehammer at Custer was Frederick Van de Water in 1934. Ah yes his biography Glory Hunter That title alone tells you everything Van der Waerter flipped the script entirely painting Custer as a vain unstable and borderline sadistic martinet whose military success was pure luck and whose final defeat was the direct result of his own arrogance It was a total demolition of the myth And what's fascinating is how quickly the culture absorbed it The New York Times which had spent 50 years praising Custer suddenly hailed Vandewater's book as the definitive truth It was like they were suddenly waking up to the tragic reality of federal Indian policy and needed a scapegoat And that scapegoat became a full blown caricature by the time we hit the late 1960s and the Vietnam War era You have the rise of the civil rights movement and a growing national self reckoning Vine Deloria Jr published Custer Died for Your Sins in 1969 calling Custer the ugly American of the 19th century who got what was coming to him And Hollywood went even further. Think about Arthur Penn's 1970 film Little Big Man. Errol Flynn's heroic, noble Custer from 1941 is replaced by Richard Mulligan, playing Custer as a raving, genocidal lunatic who literally wanders the battlefield screaming in his undergarments before being struck down. It was a mirror for the Vietnam quagmire The film used Custer to critique contemporary military arrogance and racism but in doing so it created a portrait that was just as historically inaccurate and one dimensional as the Anheuser Busch lithograph That's the real kicker of Paul Hutton's thesis isn't it As a society we didn't actually move closer to the historical truth We just swapped one cartoon for another We traded a spotless plaster saint for a mustache twirling villain because the new cartoon fit our updated political anxieties Exactly The actual historical figure – a man of immense complexity a brilliant Civil War cavalry leader who was also deeply reckless politically insubordinate and caught in a deeply tragic clash of civilisations – remains entirely obscured The public has never wanted Custer the human being They only want Custer the symbol And that leaves us with a pretty unsettling question. If our history is just a series of simplified myths we swap out when the mood strikes, do we ever actually learn anything from the past? Or are we just using it to talk to ourselves? A question well worth chewing on. That's all for our Quick Take today. We'll see you next time. Take care everyone.