George Armstrong Custer: Changing Views of an American Legend

Since news of the tragedy didn’t surface until July 5, it is highly unlikely that word of a victory would have had any chance of reaching the convention in time to affect its outcome. There is no firm proof anywhere that Custer craved the White House. One of the few known Custer quotes regarding politics came in a letter he wrote to Libbie in the fall of 1864: I believe that if the two parties, North and South, could come together the result would be a union closer than the old union ever was. But my doctrine has ever been that a soldier should not meddle in politics. Nevertheless, the damage had been done: Custer’s image had forever changed and the anti-Custer propaganda would continue, often becoming more and more negative.

Although TV’s 1968 Legend of Custer portrayed him as true hero, in Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel Little Big Man and the movie it spawned in 1970, Custer appears as a genocidal raving lunatic. Soon after the Berger and Sandoz books, Vine Deloria Jr. catapulted to the forefront of the American Indian Movement (AIM) with the publication in 1969 of Custer Died for Your Sins. A passionate — if biased — statement of the Anglo-Indian conflict, it became the battle cry for native people across America, as well as non-Indians who rallied to their cause. Deloria’s declaration that Custer was the Adolf Eichmann of the Plains pounded another nail into the coffin of Custer’s heroic legend. The Berger-Sandoz-Deloria image couldn’t be denied, and it turned Custer, the long-haired hero of the idealized West, into a representation of all the evils of Manifest Destiny — an image the media readily embraced.

Into the 1970s, Custer’s name continued to be smeared: He came to represent bitter racial hatred. Poverty dominated Indian reservations and emotions ran high, leading to an armed confrontation between AIM members and the FBI near Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973. Two agents and a native died. In his 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peter Matthiessen claimed to document the FBI’s war on AIM. And the tarnishing of the myth of Custer continued in what is perhaps the most accurate Custer film to date, the 1991 television miniseries Son of the Morning Star. Based on the biography by Evan S. Connell, it presents Custer as a bombastic, uncharismatic bore.

In addition, although purporting to be factual, Turner Films’ 1994 Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee, which dramatized the 1973 AIM-FBI 71-day standoff at Wounded Knee, added another lie to the negative Custer myth. Two minutes into the film, the main character, talking about the 1890 tragedy at Wounded Knee, states, Custer’s men shot down 300 Lakota men, women, and children. Custer had been dead for 14 years by the time of that massacre, and Indian casualties were half that number.

Yet Custer seems to live on in the national consciousness, and even the Custer experts seem hard-pressed to explain why. Historian Utley has commented: Everyone has heard the name Custer. For most, the name summons at least a fleeting image of a soldier who died fighting Indians. His true role in history cannot account for the nearly universal name recognition. For that explanation, one must probe the murky realms of mythology and folklore. Beneath the layers of legend, however, a living human being, possessed of a remarkable range of human faults and virtues, made his brief mark on the history of the United States.

This article was written by Louis Kraft and originally published in the June 2006 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today

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