Troopie from Muskogee

Strange fusion today: Merle Haggard’s good old days with the reenactors of Fort Snelling, Minnesota. It is like to mix fried chicken and clam chowder. It sounds terrible, but indulge me, there is “wisdom and absurdity mixed up together! Reason in madness!”[1].

The good work of Amy M. Tyson[2] indeed brings us into the world of Haggard and Shakespeare, because the principal characters of this book are on stage. From the early sixties to present time Fort Snelling every summer hires a group of reenactors for the season. They are not professional actors, not professional historians, not full time employees, but surely bring passion to a job that offers numerous challenges, starting from the recognition of a professionality that is undermined by both the fact that they work in costume and receive a meagre wage. The professional recognition of the reenactor is a major problem if we think also about the difficulty in acknowledging the numerous skills that such workers need to have, skills that are obviously exploited by the manager, but that don't produce a better job, which remains seasonal and highly volatile. A situation that increases the stress of the workers, already challenged by the bipolar nature of their lives, half in the past, half in the present, a difficulty that in some cases created very bad results, both in the workplace and in the "real" life of the workers. 

A big part of the book analyzes the concrete problematics that these workers have confronted in the past sixty years, describing aspects that should be known by historians when they are planning for events and locations where reenactors participate into the education of the public. In this the book is very interesting and with no doubt useful.

In addition to this almost technical instruction, the book illustrates many other problematic issues. One, common in every public history project that deals with the past, is the real difficulty in showing the dark aspects of past society: the situation of woman, of slaves or of minorities such as the Indians if represented properly in such reenactments is likely offensive for the public and can ruin the whole experience of the trip; the public, after all, is enjoying relaxation and vacation. 

The second problem is directly connected to the first: if the public has to be entertained and the reenactors must smile at every person, showing the joys of candle making and showing happy soldiers and happy women in a fort that did not host women and with all probability did not host even happy soldiers, what history is represented?

But, you know, the good old days of the happy troopie from Muskogee.

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[1] Shakespeare: King Lear; Act 4, Scene 6, page 7.

[2] Amy Tyson, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor On Public History's Front Lines, Public History in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).