Back in September 1957, President Eisenhower signed into law a congressional joint resolution establishing a Civil War Centennial Commission to oversee from 1961 to 1965 a national commemoration of that era of the nation’s history. Congress was responding to appeals from members of private Civil War roundtables, from professional academic historians, and from the National Park Service (in whose keeping were many battlefields and monuments).

At the time, creating the CWCC was a fairly logical and uncontroversial action. Eisenhower, hero of World War II, was a West Point graduate and owned a farm at Gettysburg, to which he would retire in the centennial’s first year. The United States was engaged in fierce Cold War competitions with the Soviet Union. The American nationalism and unity that had preserved the Union and healed its war wounds could be used in a unified crusade to combat communism.

Now we are a month away from September 2007, the 50th anniversary of the CWCC creation. But so far as we can ascertain, there has been little lobbying or publicity for a 150th anniversary commemoration of the War Between the States in 2011-2015. Rumor has it that a commission has been authorized, with its work to be coordinated by Louisiana State University and Gettysburg College scholars.

We were in graduate school in the centennial years, and we were only faintly aware of its activities. We recall hearing about some battle re-enactments at places such as Shiloh and Bull Run; we recall some books about Grant by Bruce Catton; we recall a fine novel by Robert Penn Warren entitled “Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War,” and we recall a goodly number of tourist items in gift shops everywhere (replica parchment documents, replica minie balls, miniature brass cannon, rebel flags, rebel caps, decals, postcards, and such).ˇ For some strange reason, most of us did not connect the first two volumes (1958 and 1963) of Shelby Foote’s masterpiece trilogy with the centennial, nor did we think of C. Vann Woodward’s provocative “The Burden of Southern History” as part of it.

Some battlefields did get preserved, and some historians became engaged in writing more accurate and detailed histories than had been available, and many libraries benefited from gifts of diaries and letters passed down from long-gone participants in the war.

But for the most part, the centennial came and went virtually ignored by most people. The fireworks occasion fizzled out, in part because the occasion created other fireworks (political and racial) than those expected.ˇ

In his recent book, “Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965” (LSU Press, 2007, 300 pp.), historian Robert J. Cook provides us with an account and analysis of the rise and early fall of the CWCC. Knowledge of why that activity disintegrated half a century ago may shed light, at least in part, on why no one seems eager to propose a 150th commemoration.

The primary reason the Centennial collapsed was its lack of funding. Congress provided a budget of only $100,000. Without federal funding, the commission immediately decided that the bulk of the observance would have to rest in the hands (and bank accounts) of the states and, within the states, in the hands of county and local groups. This combination – no funding and no central control – quite naturally led to chaos in squabbles over who was in charge, debates over what goals defined a project or how an event was to be interpreted or who would be invited to speak.

But other circumstances also came to bear on the centennial. For one thing, it had the bad fortune of coming at precisely the same time as the escalating civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and re-enactments of Antietam or Appomatox just simply could not compete with headlines about schoolhouse door stands, Birmingham water hoses, Freedom Riders, Selma or Washington marches, or the Kennedy assassination.

Behind the scenes, the commission itself was waging its own mine-Civil War, with diehard Southern conservatives battling Northern liberals, enactment and tourist advocates battling professional historians, and segregationists battling integrationists, leading to assorted resignations (including that of Ulysses S. Grant III as chairman), boycotts and counter-celebrations for most events, and to commission staff firings.

What the failures of the Civil War Commemoration really meant, 50 years ago, was that the war wounds had not healed yet nor the memories, real or fancied, been erased. So, in a way, it was probably in the best interests of the American people of that time that the occasion played out in such a low-key, poorly funded and little-noted manner.

Does that mean that we are any better prepared to agree and unite for commemorations of the 150th anniversary than we were for the 100th?

Probably not. The controversies over Statehouse flags and over blue vs. red voting patterns and over public vs. private schools don’t lead us to think we are ready to rise in statesmanship and demeanors above our divided and opinionated positions. Maybe William Faulkner was right, when he had one of his wisest characters say (and I paraphrase here), “Not yet. Maybe in a few hundred years. Maybe a thousand. But not yet.”

My own plans call for visiting some battlefields, contributing to the purchase or preservation of endangered battlefields, and reading all the books on the Civil War that I may have missed over the years since the centennial. I can forego enactments, pageants, speeches and political debates and be quite content with creating my own commemoration through my private acts.

Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.

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