# Glory (1989) Edward Zwick's film about the [[54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment]] and its assault at the [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] — the single most influential popular account of Black military service in the [[American Civil War]], and the reason most Americans who know the 54th know it at all. It is in the KB for two reasons: it did more than any monument or textbook to put Black Union soldiers back into public memory, and it reproduced, in 1989, the exact narrative structure the [[Shaw Memorial]] had encoded in 1897. ## Production | | | |---|---| | Director | Edward Zwick | | Screenplay | Kevin Jarre | | Released | December 15, 1989 (limited); February 16, 1990 (wide) | | Budget / box office | $18M budget; ~$27M worldwide | Jarre's screenplay drew on Lincoln Kirstein's *Lay This Laurel* (1973), Peter Burchard's *One Gallant Rush* (1965), Luis F. Emilio's *A Brave Black Regiment* (1891 — Emilio was an officer of the 54th), and Shaw's own letters. **Cast:** Matthew Broderick as [[Robert Gould Shaw]]; Denzel Washington as Private Trip; Morgan Freeman as Sergeant Major John Rawlins; Cary Elwes as Major Cabot Forbes; Andre Braugher as Corporal Thomas Searles. **Every major Black character is fictional** — Trip, Rawlins, and Searles are composites invented for the film. The white officers are historical. ## Awards Nominated for five Academy Awards, won three: | Award | Winner | |---|---| | Best Supporting Actor | **Denzel Washington** | | Best Cinematography | Freddie Francis | | Best Sound | Donald O. Mitchell, Gregg Rudloff, Elliot Tyson, **Russell Williams II** | Nominations: Film Editing (Steven Rosenblum), Art Direction (Norman Garwood, Garrett Lewis). **Russell Williams II** won again the following year for *Dances with Wolves*, making him — per The HistoryMakers — "the first African American to win more than one Academy Award in any category." That a film about the 1863 fight for Black recognition produced that particular 1991 first is a coincidence worth noting, and it sits directly on the KB's time-to-recognition thread. ## What the Film Gets Wrong These are documented criticisms, not quibbles, and each one bends the history in the same direction. **The regiment is portrayed as largely composed of escaped slaves. It was not.** The 54th was recruited nationally through the abolitionist network and was made up mostly of **free Black men already living in the North** — literate, employed, politically organized men who chose to enlist, including two sons of [[Frederick Douglass]]. The film's substitution converts *volunteers making a political calculation* into *fugitives seeking deliverance*, which is a materially different story about agency. **The story is told through Shaw.** Roger Ebert put the objection most directly: > "Why did we see the black troops through his eyes — instead of seeing him through theirs? To put it another way, why does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor?" **The Black characters are invented; the white ones are real.** Historical Black soldiers of the 54th — [[William Harvey Carney]], Sergeant Stephen A. Swails, Lewis and Charles Douglass — were available and documented. The film used composites instead. The asymmetry is structural: named history for the officers, representative fiction for the men. ## What the Film Gets Right Worth stating plainly, because the criticisms above are sometimes read as a verdict: - **The pay strike is in the film**, and treated as a moral center rather than a subplot. Most popular Civil War narrative omits it entirely. - **Fort Wagner is depicted as a defeat**, not retconned into a victory — the film ends with the assault failing and Shaw buried in the mass grave with his men. - **It moved the needle.** *Glory* is credited with a measurable surge of public interest in the [[United States Colored Troops]], with Civil War reenactment by Black participants, and with the research that fed the 1990s retroactive Medal of Honor reviews. It put roughly 200,000 Black Union soldiers back into a national conversation that had spent a century arranging not to have them. ## Why It Matters for the KB **Correction and reproduction are not mutually exclusive.** *Glory* corrects the Lost Cause erasure of Black military service and simultaneously reproduces the Shaw Memorial's framing — white officer foregrounded, Black soldiers rendered as composite types behind him. Ninety-two years apart, a bronze relief and a Hollywood film made the same structural choice. **That recurrence is the finding.** When a story can only reach a mass audience through a sympathetic white protagonist, the reach is real and the cost is real, and the KB should record both rather than picking one. **It is the counterweight to [[Birth of a Nation]] in the vault's film material.** Griffith's 1915 film is the founding text of Lost Cause cinema and did direct political work — it revived the Klan. *Glory* is the closest thing to a mass-audience answer, seventy-four years later, and it had to route its argument through a white lead to get made. Comparing what each film was permitted to assume about its audience is more informative than comparing their politics. **Popular culture is where the memory fight is actually settled.** The KB tracks monuments, base names, and textbook fights because they are legible. But more Americans learned about the 54th Massachusetts from two hours of Edward Zwick than from every plaque and curriculum standard combined. Any theory of how [[The Lost Cause]] persisted — and how it is contested — has to account for the mass-market screen. ## See Also - [[54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment]] — The regiment the film depicts - [[Second Battle of Fort Wagner]] — The assault the film builds to - [[Robert Gould Shaw]] — The colonel, played by Matthew Broderick - [[William Harvey Carney]] — A real soldier of the 54th the film did not depict - [[Shaw Memorial]] — The same framing, in bronze, ninety-two years earlier - [[United States Colored Troops]] — The 180,000 the film brought back into view - [[Birth of a Nation]] — The Lost Cause film this one answers