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

Eleanor Finch

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."

Simon Carver

Oh, Whitman got his tribute in fast! [chuckles] Didn't he actually send a ten-dollar bill to the newspaper along with the poem? Talk about rapid-response poetry.

Eleanor Finch

Exactly ten dollars. [matter-of-fact] 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 Seventh Cavalry carried a saber into that battle.

Simon Carver

No swords? [perplexed] 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.

Eleanor Finch

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 Gen. George A. Custer." Whittaker compared him directly to Napoleon and declared "there is no spot on his armor."

Simon Carver

A spotless knight. And to keep that armor shining, Whittaker 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.

Eleanor Finch

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 Custer'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."

Simon Carver

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.

Eleanor Finch

Precisely. Facts were entirely secondary. And Custer's widow, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, spent the next fifty 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.

Simon Carver

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. [pauses]

Eleanor Finch

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, civilizing sacrifice.

Simon Carver

But then, Eleanor, the wind shifts. If the late nineteenth century needed a perfect martyr of progress, the twentieth 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 Frederic Van De Water in 1934.

Eleanor Finch

Ah, yes. His biography "Glory Hunter." [thoughtfully] That title alone tells you everything. Van De Water 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.

Simon Carver

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 fifty years praising Custer, suddenly hailed Van De Water'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.

Eleanor Finch

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 nineteenth century who "got what was coming to him."

Simon Carver

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. [exhales sharply]

Eleanor Finch

It was a mirror for the Vietnam quagmire. [measured] 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.

Simon Carver

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.

Eleanor Finch

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 civilizations—remains entirely obscured. The public has never wanted Custer the human being. They only want Custer the symbol.

Simon Carver

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?

Eleanor Finch

A question well worth chewing on. That's all for our quick take today. We'll see you next time.

Simon Carver

Take care, everyone.