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'Is the memory of these things viable?' re-enactor asks
Robert Lee Hodge, the poster boy for hard-core Civil War buffs, is still fighting for accuracy.
BY BENTLEY BOYD
342-8812
July 29, 2007
He became the face of a new breed of re-enactor - a scowling, dirty face staring out from the cover of a 1998 best-seller by Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Horwitz.
Robert Lee Hodge holds a menacing blade on the cover of "Confederates in the Attic." He has long, bushy chin whiskers. And you can be sure that his buttons are accurate - even if he had to urinate on them to get the right corrosion effect.
"When the Horwitz book came out, I was a Civil War bohemian," he said. "I was waiting tables just to get enough money to buy Civil War gear."
Living History is Hodge's lifelong pursuit: Hodge's father came from Alabama and named his son for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee when Hodge was born on Gen. Stonewall Jackson's birthday. Hodge cut grass as a kid to get money for gear. He wore a Confederate kepi hat in his first-grade photo.
Many people join the re-enacting hobby because of family connections to past events, but Hodge became famous for deriding half-baked hobbyists. The Horwitz book spread his use of the word "farb" for re-enactors who wore wristwatches or used sunscreen or smoked cigarettes.
Hodge and his buddies were "super hard-core" for spending the night sleeping on the ground in the spooning position to keep warm - or for practicing how to look dead and bloated like the figures in Mathew Brady Civil War photos do.
"The book has always been a love/hate thing for me. I don't want to be known as the guy who mimics bloody corpses and urinates on his buttons," said Hodge, who lives in Sterling. "Some people in the re-enactment world really hate that book. I've gotten a lot of flak for the antics that the book publicized."
Nearly 10 years after the book's publication, he's still asked for autographs, but he's distancing himself. He doesn't do many re-enactments for fun anymore. Hodge was in Gettysburg, Pa., in the first week of July - not to re-create 1863's pivotal battle of the Civil War but to visit old re-enactor buddies and hang out at an inn, listening to Civil War music.
Hodge notes he was only 28 when Horwitz was doing his book research. "I'm 40 now," he said. "I pride myself at still being a kid at heart, but I also have to look at doing things that are important. Time becomes a great enemy. It's fleeting. Things change. There are books I want to get written and videos I want to do. There's a sense of urgency, a sense of mission."
Now he's one-third of the ownership of Wide Awake Films and is filming the story of a Jesse James bank robbery in Kansas City, Mo. He still has a dark, bushy beard, so he can appear in front of the camera when needed.
"It's a struggle in perpetuity for the minds of the people. Is the memory of these things viable?" he asked. "You're up against the shallow and superficial and meaningless search for a short-term chuckle or the adulation of a professional sports team. You're competing with 'American Idol' and 'Survivor.' "
Wide Awake has made "The Battle of Spotsylvania" and "The Battle of Franklin: Five Hours in the Valley of Death," which won a regional Emmy for Best Historical Documentary.
"I'd like to turn on a lot of kids to this who haven't been turned on to it before, through visuals and through colorful stories of these people," he said.
"People tend to think of people in the past as less intelligent. These people weren't cavemen. They weren't Cro-Mags (Cro-Magnons). When you look at their written words, I look at them as giants. We are pygmies, compared to what they endured."
Hodge visited Endview Plantation in Newport News in April with the Civil War Preservation Trust. He serves on the board of directors for several preservation organizations and writes a preservation column for a magazine, America's Civil War. Hodge has appeared on National Public Radio and the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and he worked on the series "Civil War Journal" that appeared on The History Channel. He worked on several Civil War volumes for Time-Life Books.
He remains passionate. He says anyone who doesn't recognize the civil rights effort that happened in the decade after the Civil War is "ignorant and shallow."
His eye now is on 2011, the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. He thinks that the centennial commemoration in the 1960s fell flat because American society got distracted by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War.
He's happy that Virginia has a committee planning now for 2011, but he calls the federal government's planning "underwhelming."
He said, "Do we value these things? I'm not convinced we do. I'm not convinced we don't. It's up to the kids. It's going to be up to generations I'll never meet."
Copyright © 2007, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
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