ABSTRACT
In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which is about three hundred miles from Brooklyn, you can buy much-prized, if misnamed, Coney Island hot dogs for lunch, and I can remember my father-in-law reminiscing about the boxer Jack Johnson pulling up in a vast limousine before the unprepossessing Coney Island Hot Dogs, so that he could escort his white wife into the only restaurant in town that would serve them. It may not be too much of a surprise that someone did: in those days, the ancients who marched at the head of parade on Decoration Day had formerly turned out to get in Lee’s way on his road to Gettysburg, and their descendants retain a more optimistic sense of what the war had been about than do many of my colleagues, but if your grandfathers spent a few years singing about bringing the jubilee, and dying to make men free, it probably sinks in. I also remember my father-in-law explaining that those men were not “real Civil War vets,” just militia who had been brushed aside by the Army of Northern Virginia on its way to Gettysburg. The explicit comparison was to Meade’s men, who smashed up Lee a little further down a Pennsylvanian road and thus did have the right to be called veterans—a remarkably parsimonious definition, though pleasantly so, in this age of very cheap hyperbole. But my father-in-law had been a combat engineer in the Bulge, which probably created a different frame of reference.
