History, politics, protest, conflict, and journalism. This is a part of our state's political history. And for a week this summer it was a group of southern Missouri elementary students who were holding the microphones and cameras to experience living history, and testing their First Amendment rights at the Stars and Stripes Museum and Library’s second annual Journalism Camp.
Organized by Sheila Porter, a retired local school teacher who serves as the Museum and Library’s education director, this year’s camp centered on an intriguing theme: The war of the 1860s versus the war of the 1960s.
Porter, who participates in Civil War reenactments herself, arranged for some of fellow re-enactors to visit the students and discuss the roles they played in the 19th century conflict. Both Union and Confederate soldiers were represented, appropriately, since Bloomfield, the town where the Stars and Stripes Museum and Library is located, teetered back and forth between the two sides for the duration of the war.
Meanwhile, Museum and Library Executive Director Laura Dumey arranged to have two local Vietnam veterans speak to the students. One is a member of the Museum and Library board. Porter recruited a former Vietnam War protester.
The request to have diverse viewpoints on both conflicts represented came from the Missouri School of Journalism, which provided journalism instruction and loaned camera and audio equipment so the students could get a sense of what it’s like to be a reporter, juggling heavy gear and the equally heavy responsibility to faithfully represent conflicting views.
They learned about the “five Ws” that structure news stories — Who, What, When, Where and Why — and practiced camera techniques and interviewing skills on each other before meeting their interview subjects.
The kids turned out to be more unabashedly nosy than most professional reporters: After one provided an inventory of all her exotic pets and confided that she soon hopes to add a snake, her interlocutor exclaimed:
“That’s a lot of animals! Is your family wealthy?”
“You know, we’re not extremely rich but we’re also not scraping pennies for a cheeseburger,” came the reply.
“So, basically, middle class,” concluded the reporter.
Motivated by daily scavenger hunts designed by Dumey, the students took multiple tours of the Museum and Library’s collection. It celebrates what is arguably one of the most powerful weapons America’s troops carry into battle: a newspaper that embodies the First Amendment right to speak truth to power, and that has been doing so since the Civil War.
Stars and Stripes is an institution that astonishes most foreigners who study the press. It is published by the Pentagon but is free to bite the hand that feeds it. The paper does so with enough regularity — investigating bureaucratic shortcomings that affect the troops — that Congress sometimes has had to intervene to protect the paper’s editorial independence.
Stars and Stripes is an institution that astonishes most foreigners who study the press. It is published by the Pentagon but is free to bite the hand that feeds it. The paper does so with enough regularity — investigating bureaucratic shortcomings that affect the troops — that Congress sometimes has had to intervene to protect the paper’s editorial independence.
The paper was founded on Nov. 9, 1861 when troops commanded by Ulysses Grant were on their way to take Cape Girardeau, about 40 miles southeast on the Mississippi River. In Bloomfield, they found a printing press that had been abandoned by the publisher, a Confederate sympathizer, and used it to create the very first edition of the Stars and Stripes. That gave birth to a newspaper that went on to serve troops in World War I, World War II and every subsequent conflict that involved U.S. troops. Today, it publishes daily, online and in-print, for American troops around the world.
The students were captivated by the many great cartoonists featured in the display cases – including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Bill Mauldin, whose scruffy “Willie and Joe” caricatures of World War II GIs so infuriated General George Patton that “Old Blood and Guts'' threatened to have the then 25-year-old sergeant jailed. Eventually, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces had to intervene: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower reminded Patton that he was not to interfere in the troops’ newspaper – a reminder that the U.S. Congress, from time to time, has had to reiterate to the Pentagon brass.
The students heard more about the Stars and Stripes’ independence from Chris Carlson, a manager with Pacific Stars and Stripes, who spoke to them via a Zoom call. They were amazed to learn that it was already tomorrow where Chris was sitting in Tokyo.
Stripes cartoons and the GI poems from the paper, also featured in the museum displays, became inspirations for the students’ work. They tried basic photography and audio recording and even got a taste of AI: To make transcripts of interview recordings, we used an automated transcription service that is powered by artificial intelligence. For anyone who has ever had to create his or her own interview transcripts, it’s a marvel of speed. The student journalists, however, were less than impressed by how much work the AI left for them to do. After being asked to read over transcripts of the interviews they did with each other for errors, they renamed the software AD for, you guessed it, “artificial dumbness.”
Because dissent and discord are part of our nation’s history – as well as a big part of what journalists are called upon to cover -- that became a major part of the lessons. Civil War reenactors, representing the Union and Confederate sides, presented sharply different accounts of a supposed 1863 “Christmas Day Massacre” that Confederates claim was visited upon them by bloodthirsty Union troops and that the Union loyalists insist never happened. Vietnam veterans Earl Metcalf and Melvin Boyers talked about their experiences as soldiers, while Dawn Spervy delivered an a cappella rendition of “Cruel War,” one of the anti-war folk tunes she said she sang at anti-war protests.
Because dissent and discord are part of our nation’s history – as well as a big part of what journalists are called upon to cover -- that became a major part of the lessons.
A demonstration of Civil War-era toys by Abigail Warren, daughter of Civil War reenactors Chris and Twyla Warren, inspired the students to add a toy review feature to their camp paper.
If there was an overarching theme to be taken from the week, it probably was best summed up by Dalton Bilderbeck, a commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who reenacted the Confederate colonel Timothy Reeves.
“The best thing I can say is to learn from what happened, and try not to be so, as extreme in your views,” he said when asked what lesson he hoped the students would take from learning about the Civil War. “Be more, I guess, open-minded. You know that we're all Americans, and that we're all in the same boat together, and that we need to stick together.”
We made a few corrections for grammar, spelling and caught the stray factual error. Here and there, we added a notation that we thought might help readers understand historical context. Otherwise, these stories are as our young journalists wrote them, the better for you to appreciate the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which they approach the world that they are about to inherit.
Kathy Kiely is the Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism and a member of the National Stars and Stripes Museum and Library board of directors. Audio for this piece was produced by Miriam Saidi.
