{"id":20530,"date":"2013-06-26T12:22:54","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T20:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=20530"},"modified":"2013-06-26T12:22:54","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T20:22:54","slug":"war-and-peace-at-the-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/26\/war-and-peace-at-the-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"War \u2013 and Peace \u2013 at the Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Copperhead<\/i>, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of Harold Frederic\u2019s novella, opens in theaters June 28, with a second wave of openings July 19. You can find where it\u2019s playing at copperheadthemovie.com<\/a>. Herewith my introduction to the newly published edition containing Frederic\u2019s story and my screenplay; it\u2019s available at dzancbooks.org\/copperhead<\/font><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Harold Frederic, born in 1856, was a native of Utica, which though it is the eighth largest city in New York can fairly stake a claim to being, pound for pound, the literary capital of the state. Frederic lived a short but full \u2013 perhaps overly full \u2013 life. In brief, he began his career as a Utica and later Albany newspaper editor, in which capacity he was celebrated as a wit and bon vivant. He was a good friend of fellow Upstater and U.S. President Grover Cleveland, whose Jeffersonian Democratic political convictions Frederic shared. He left his native grounds \u2013 for good \u2013 in 1884 to become a New York Times<\/i> foreign correspondent based in London. Between 1886 and his death in 1898, Harold Frederic published more than a dozen books, most famously The Damnation of Theron Ware<\/a><\/i> (1896), a tale of a simple Upstate Methodist minister\u2019s loss of faith which is widely considered a masterpiece of late-19th<\/sup> century American realism. (F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Damnation of Theron Ware<\/i> "the best American novel" written before 1920.) Frederic was also a bigamist whose wife and mistress (and their children) lived about fifteen miles apart in the precincts of London. He spent weekdays with one family and weekends with the other. He suffered a stroke in 1898 and had the bad luck to be under the care of his Christian Scientist mistress, who refused medical treatment for the stricken author. Frederic died, and she was tried, unsuccessfully, for manslaughter. <\/p>\n

The Copperhead<\/a><\/i> \u2013 its title taken from the derisive serpentine epithet applied to Northern critics of the Civil War \u2013 was serialized in Scribner\u2019s Magazine<\/i> in 1893 and published in book form that same year. It was brought out in England the next year as The Copperhead and Other Stories of the North in the American War<\/a><\/i>. The novel, or novella, or longish short story, as you prefer, would reappear in several collections of Frederic\u2019s fiction, most notably in The Civil War Stories of Harold Frederic<\/a><\/i>, under the imprint of Syracuse University Press and with an introduction by Edmund Wilson.<\/p>\n

In every incarnation it sold poorly, as Frederic\u2019s work usually did. But then The Copperhead<\/i> hit none of the expected notes. It catered neither to "Battle Hymn of the Republic" Northern righteousness nor "Dixie" Southern romanticism.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Edmund Wilson, our greatest literary critic and a denizen of that magical literary ground surrounding Frederic\u2019s Utica, wrote that Frederic\u2019s "stories of New York during the Civil War reflect the peculiar mixture of patriotism and disaffection which was characteristic of that region\u2026Due to this, these stories differ fundamentally from any other Civil War fiction I know, and they have thus a unique historical as well as a literary importance."<\/p>\n

There is an unblinking, unsentimental honesty to The Copperhead<\/i> and Frederic\u2019s other stories of the War. The fanfare and spangles, the soaring rhetoric and battlefield heroism: you\u2019ll find none of that on his York State homefronts. We are shown, instead, a little world pockmarked, drained of life, even, by what \u2013 and who \u2013 is absent. Young men leave communities of which they are essential pieces. Some return intact but irreparably altered; some stagger home shattered; others make the trip back in pine boxes. The normal rhythms of courtship are disrupted. The interdependence of small farms, crossroads shops, and little Protestant churches is unraveled, and we are given to understand that things will never be the same. <\/p>\n

Stephen Crane, whose own The Red Badge of Courage<\/a><\/i> is commonly regarded as the great American Civil War novel, said of Frederic\u2019s Civil War tales that they illumed "the great country back of the line of fight \u2013 the waiting women, the lightless windows, the tables set for three instead of five." This is the side of war that is most immediate for Americans yet which seldom interests our artists, let alone our politicians: The war at home. The domestic consequences of our crusades.<\/p>\n

Angus Macfadyen, who plays Jee in Copperhead<\/i> (the film dispenses with the article), says that the story reminds him of The Deer Hunter<\/i>, Michael Cimino\u2019s epic film exploring the devastation wrought upon a small Pennsylvania community by the Vietnam War. I hadn\u2019t thought of that, but Angus was \u2013 as is his wont, I grudgingly concede \u2013 right. <\/p>\n

Frederic wrote The Copperhead<\/i>, like almost all his published fiction, while living in England, but as with a later skeptic of the War, Gore Vidal, although he lived abroad he was no expatriate. He was, rather, a proprietary patriot ("All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the Revolutionary War, and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded this record by fighting on both sides") who believed that America was his country, which is why he felt no need to write spread-eagle stories glorifying a war that had cost his homeplace blood and treasure, the lives of its young men and the vigor of its communities. <\/p>\n

Typically, in a story of a dissenter, the author flatters himself and the audience. The deck is stacked; the cards are marked. Every right-thinking reader or viewer is confident that of course he or she would be at the side of this poor recusant who is being persecuted by narrow-minded peasants or clerics who deny that the earth orbits the sun or that man is a product of evolution or that the world is older than six thousand years or that the simon-pure prisoner who is about to be lynched is innocent. But really: is any pose more cheaply purchased than standing \u2013 at a very safe distance of years \u2013 with Galileo or Scopes? <\/p>\n

Smugness is detestable. Only a complacent idiot enjoys burning strawmen or crowing over his moral superiority to the benighted. Harold Frederic does not let the reader bask in his own sanctimony. It\u2019s so easy to say that you\u2019re for free speech; that you honor the First Amendment; that though you may not agree with so and so who says such and such, you\u2019ll defend to the death his right to say it. Well, here\u2019s Abner Beech, an Upstate New York farmer of 1862. He thinks this war between the states \u2013 this hallowed war, this bloodletting out of which modern America was born \u2013 is an unconstitutional atrocity. He despises the soon-to-be martyred Abraham Lincoln, who by most 21st<\/sup>-century lights is the greatest American hero. Abner stands up and speaks his piece \u2013 his peace \u2013 during time of war. <\/p>\n

Okay, Mr. Free Speech. Are you willing to defy the mob and defend Abner?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not so easy. <\/p>\n

"Doin\u2019 right ain\u2019t got no end," says the murderous Kansas redleg fanatic who wipes out the title character\u2019s home and family in Clint Eastwood\u2019s masterpiece The Outlaw Josey Wales<\/a><\/i>. To assert otherwise in time of war \u2013 including our own age of perpetual war \u2013 is virtually an act of sedition. In The Copperhead<\/i>, Abner Beech learns this lesson, and he learns it good and hard. <\/p>\n

Jee Hagadorn, the abolitionist whom Frederic loathes but whom we, in the film, have sought to humanize, is absolutely correct on the central moral question of the age: the immorality of slavery. But Jee has subordinated all else \u2013 his family, his community, his daily responsibilities \u2013 to an abstraction. He sees only a forest and no trees. Jee is the archetypal religious fanatic who exults in war because God Is On Our Side. (\u2018Tis a happy coincidence that his forename is homonymic with the first syllable of jihad.) In our film \u2013 if not in Frederic\u2019s novella \u2013 Abner does not concede an inch of Christian ground to the Bible-quoting Jee. He matches him verse for verse, in a running colloquy between a New Testament man of peace and a thundering prophet of the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

Gore Vidal, in his essay on Steven Spielberg\u2019s Amistad<\/a><\/i>, wrote: "our writers and directors tend to know as little about the country\u2019s history as the audience, so when they set a story in the past the characters are just like us except they\u2019re in costume. But the past is another country, and to bring it to some sort of dramatic life takes a capacity for which there is no English word."<\/p>\n

In our day any imaginative leap into the past brings a flurry of charges that one must surely endorse every prejudice or social convention of that past \u2013 which is why such fictions usually feature an auctorial alter-ego whose attitudes are anachronistically, ridiculously au courant, and utterly unbelievable. The past in such works of art, or rather propaganda \u2013 sometimes crude, elsetimes slick \u2013 is emptied of meaning, content, its pastness<\/i>. It exists only to serve the modern and transient and tedious political needs of the author.<\/p>\n

But our film, if it is any good, must be of<\/i>, must be suffused and perfused and imbued with, 1862-3. Otherwise it is just moderns wearing period costumes and speaking like it\u2019s 2013.<\/p>\n

(Why, I can hear some ask, are there no African Americans in the film? After all, the war that Abner condemns was fought, at least after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, for their liberty. <\/p>\n

In 1860, the black population of Oneida County, the real-life counterpart of Copperhead<\/i>\u2019s fictive world, was 627 out of a total population of 101,626. That is, it was minuscule, and concentrated in the county\u2019s population centers rather than its rural versions of the Corners.)<\/p>\n

Copperhead<\/i> the movie was born, in a sense, over breakfast at the Roger Sherman Inn in New Canaan, Connecticut. (Sherman, a great if unheralded patriot, signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He also coauthored, with my erstwhile biographical subject Luther Martin of Maryland and William Paterson of New Jersey, the New Jersey Plan, the decentralist alternative to what became the U.S. Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.)<\/p>\n

Ron Maxwell \u2013 who with Gettysburg<\/a><\/i>and Gods and Generals<\/a><\/i> staked claim to being our foremost cinematic interpreter of the Civil War \u2013 and I, producers Bob and Susan Bishop, and our daughters Daisy Bishop and Gretel Kauffman had spent the previous night at a meeting of the New Canaan Historical Society, which Ron had addressed on the topic of, yes, the Civil War. A questioner had asked when he would make another movie about the conflict; Ron replied that he was always looking for a book or story that might serve as the basis for such a film. I mentioned, over breakfast the next morning at the Roger Sherman, this novella titled The Copperhead<\/i>. <\/p>\n

"That\u2019s a great book," he replied.<\/p>\n

Yes it is, so here we are.<\/p>\n

As a lad I read screenplays with a fine lack of discrimination. From David Holzman\u2019s Diary<\/a><\/i> to the obscure Robert Redford-Michael J. Pollard motorcycle movie Little Fauss and Big Halsy<\/a><\/i>: if the Batavia Junior High or High School libraries carried it, I read it. <\/p>\n

I had long since abandoned that groove, but when Ron Maxwell and I decided to collaborate I undertook a tutorial in writing for the screen.<\/p>\n

I read partly to learn the grammar of film, but also to see how the best screenwriters ignore boundaries in chasing down dreams. My reading consisted of James Dickey\u2019s (unfilmable) screenplay for Deliverance<\/a><\/i>, which revealed the literary possibilities of the form; Paul Schrader\u2019s Taxi Driver<\/a><\/i>, a film I have loved warily since I was a boy; Graham Greene\u2019s The Third Man<\/a><\/i>; Robert Towne\u2019s Chinatown<\/a><\/i>; Cameron Crowe\u2019s Almost Famous<\/a><\/i>; and Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Reservoir Dogs<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

I also wanted to read a screenplay by a good writer for a bad film. I chose Missouri Breaks<\/a><\/i> by Thomas McGuane, a fine novelist who scripted two movies I admire from that halcyon era, the early \u201870s: Rancho Deluxe<\/a><\/i> and 92 in the Shade<\/a><\/i>. Where and how, I wondered, had McGuane gone wrong? (It wasn\u2019t all his fault; I put much of the blame on Marlon Brando\u2019s self-indulgent goofing as a dress-wearing hired gun.)<\/p>\n

Ron Maxwell and I had a deep and rich well to draw from in Harold Frederic\u2019s source novel, and if we veered away from his plot and characterizations I hope the script, and movie, are true to his brave spirit. <\/p>\n

Copperhead<\/i> was filmed over seven weeks at King\u2019s Landing, a historical "living museum" located about twenty miles from Fredericton, the lovely capital of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. <\/p>\n

The cast and crew were superbly talented and blessedly convivial. The staff at King\u2019s Landing, the extras, and the people of the region were a delight. Making this film \u2013 or, more accurately, given the relative paucity of tasks a writer faces on the set of a well-planned movie, tagging along for the ride \u2013 was among the most satisfying and enjoyable experiences of my life. <\/p>\n

Hell, I even got to meet and hang out with Peter Fonda. Since I was a teenager I\u2019ve owned a seven-foot-long Easy Rider<\/i> poster declaring "A man went looking for America. And couldn\u2019t find it anywhere." I consider Fonda\u2019s The Hired Hand<\/i> (1971) one of the finest films I have ever seen; what a kick it was to talk to its auteur. <\/p>\n

Coincidentally, Peter Fonda\u2019s family name graces the seat of Montgomery County, New York, about 50 miles east of Harold Frederic\u2019s Utica. Peter\u2019s father, Henry, appeared in film versions of three novels by Utica-area author Walter D. Edmonds: Chad Hanna<\/a><\/i>, The Farmer Takes a Wife<\/a><\/i> (from the novel Rome Haul<\/a><\/i>), and Drums Along the Mohawk<\/a><\/i>. <\/p>\n

I was taken aback \u2013 pleasantly \u2013 when I read this line in Harold Frederic\u2019s preface to his collection In the Sixties <\/i>(1897): "It was at this time that I gathered the first materials for my projected work [about the Revolutionary War], from members of the Fonda and other families."<\/p>\n

Yes, that<\/i> Fonda family. And so it comes full circle, as Peter Fonda plays the critical role of Avery in Copperhead<\/i>. (I should point out that Avery in the film differs substantially from Avery in the novella.)<\/p>\n

I write every day with a photo of Eugene V. Debs tacked to the wall on my left. Debs, the leading American socialist of the early 20th<\/sup> century and, more importantly, a faithful citizen of Terre Haute, Indiana, was America\u2019s most famous martyr to wartime censorship. In the photo, Debs is addressing an audience in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918, condemning U.S. entry into the First World War and remarking, with wry prescience, that "it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world."<\/p>\n

For this speech, Debs became one of 15,000 Americans jailed for violating President Woodrow Wilson\u2019s Espionage and Sedition Acts. As Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis explained when handing down a twenty-year sentence in another such case, "In times of peace, you have a legal right to oppose, by free speech, preparations for war. But when once war is declared, that right ceases." Strange, isn\u2019t it, how the Founders never got around to appending that footnote to the First Amendment? <\/p>\n

Copperhead critics of the Civil War were often persecuted, too, if not to the extent that dissenters from the First World War were. Newspapers were shut down, antiwar editors and speakers were imprisoned, habeas corpus took a holiday. War is always the enemy of liberty and free speech. <\/p>\n

Those who wish to investigate the Copperheads further might read the works of the late historian and Marquette University professor Frank Klement, the dean of scholarly studies of Northern opposition to the Civil War. Klement was a product of the University of Wisconsin\u2019s legendary history department and shared its populist-Middle American orientation. He demolished the myth that the Copperheads were disloyal pro-Southern traitors and demonstrated that by and large, they were honorable dissenters, "Democratic critics of the Lincoln administration who opposed the changes that the Civil War foisted upon their country." <\/p>\n

Significantly, Frank Klement came of age as a historian during the Truman-McCarthy Cold War Red Scare, which he viewed as a witch-hunt. This surely colored his view of the Copperheads, for as Klement told an interviewer, "You can\u2019t separate a historian\u2019s philosophy of life or the era in which he lives from his scholarship." Ominously, in our own day, shadowed as it is by Bush-Cheney-Obama wars and see something\/say something paranoia, the academy may be tilting back toward a view of the Copperheads as treasonous fifth columnists who ought to have been rounded up, a la the Japanese-Americans who filled FDR\u2019s WWII West Coast internment camps, or at least closely surveilled, like the protesters who are confined in Orwellian-named "free speech zones" if they interrupt Democrat-Republican conventions. <\/p>\n

We live in a time and in a country which finds principled dissent of the sort exercised by Eugene V. Debs and Abner Beech almost incomprehensible. In one sense, freedom of expression knows no bounds: Internet pornography, snuff-game videos, libelous tweets \u2013 laissez faire, man. But with respect to politics, art, culture\u2026.seldom in American history have the limits of permissible speech been so narrow, so constricting. True, our Eugene Debses aren\u2019t usually thrown into gaols, but nor do they become cause célèbres, like Debs. Their prison is the red state-blue state idiocy under which the limits of acceptable opinion are demarcated by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and writers live in the fear (which, I can tell you as one who has long worked with members of the DC punditocracy, absolutely paralyzes careerists) of saying the wrong thing and running afoul of the hall monitors and tattletales who police American discourse. Harold Frederic \u2013 and Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal and pretty much any writer on American subjects who is worth a damn \u2013 does not fit the liberal-conservative straitjacket. The very premise of Copperhead<\/i> \u2013 that some honorable men of the North resisted Lincoln\u2019s call to arms, whether from commitment to Jeffersonian democracy or pacifism or wrongheadedness or the awful presentiment that war would remake the country \u2013 will enrage the enforcers of opinion orthodoxy, who insist that there is only one acceptable narrative (and a boring one at that) of American history: nationalist-consolidationist and social democratic at home, and world-saving-militarist abroad. There is no room in this carefully monitored and barren storyline for Abner or M\u2019rye or Jeff Beech, or even Jee, Esther, and Ni Hagadorn. These men and women have been written out of American history. This film lets them back in.<\/p>\n

\n

In his preface to In the Sixties<\/i>, Harold Frederic explained: "There remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing with varying aspects of home life in the North \u2013 or rather in my little part of the North \u2013 during the Civil War. These stories are by far closer to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they seem to me to contain the best things I have done or ever shall do, partly because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and experiences of my own childhood \u2013 and a little also, no doubt, for the reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal affection had desired for them\u2026.These stories of mine\u2026are in large part my own recollections of the dreadful time \u2013 the actual things that a boy from five to nine saw and heard about him, while his own relatives were being killed, and his school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood forced into mourning and despair \u2013 and they had a right to be recorded."<\/p>\n

Yes, they did.<\/p>\n

Copperhead<\/i> does not preach or hector or demonize. It is not an advocacy film (for why did we redesign the character of Avery, make him the spokesman for the pro-Lincoln, pro-war side, and cast an iconic American to play him?) or a message movie (except as a plea for the tolerance \u2013 or should I say the reappearance in our America? \u2013 of dissenting opinions). It is a story squarely and defiantly in the American grain about a town and two families and the way they are ripped apart by a war that is so very far away and yet so devastatingly close. It is about the war waged at \u2013 and upon \u2013 home. It is a story as old as moldering bone fragments at Antietam and as fresh as the tears a mother cries as her son leaves to fight in whatever country the U.S. military is occupying as you read these words. <\/p>\n

A nation cannot live on myth alone. War, as one who prosecuted it with especial vigor once said, is hell. A people who forget this are destined never again to know peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copperhead, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of Harold Frederic\u2019s novella, opens in theaters June 28, with a second wave of openings July 19. You can find where it\u2019s playing at copperheadthemovie.com. Herewith my introduction to the newly published edition containing Frederic\u2019s story and my screenplay; it\u2019s available at dzancbooks.org\/copperhead. Harold Frederic, born in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-20530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20530"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20538,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20530\/revisions\/20538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20530"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}