In Glory's Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, The Citadel, and a Changing America [Hardcover]

Catherine S. Manegold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 2000

The byzantine world of The Citadel is fully revealed in this gripping account of Shannon Faulkner's attempt to become its first female cadet.

In Glory's Shadow explores the history of a southern institution determined to preserve traditional lines of power and social influence while all around it America was changing.

In 1993, Shannon -- then a high school senior -- filed suit against The Citadel, the public all-male military college in Charleston, South Carolina. She claimed that by refusing to admit her as a cadet the school was defying the Constitution. For three years an ugly battle raged: Courtroom clashes over justice, educational styles and the training of young men and women alternated with small-town pettiness, death threats and the vilest expressions of sexism and hate. Catherine S. Manegold covered the landmark battle for the New York Times; now she gives us the story behind the story.

It starts in the antebellum South in 1822, when members of the white minority, terrified by the narrowly averted Denmark Vesey slave revolt, called for a citadel and hastily organized a private militia. Twenty years later that small home guard was remade into a school where white youths might gain access to a world of elegance, wealth and power. We see the school grow in size and reputation through two world wars until the last few decades, when, as America wrestled with chaotic calls to power from blacks, women, immigrants and homosexuals, The Citadel took the path the country as a whole was rejecting and proudly marched in place. The cadets clung to antique hierarchies born of slavery and war, employing careful courtesies in public while practicing archaic and often brutal rituals within their barracks.

This is the world Shannon challenged. When she arrived at The Citadel's gates and was turned away because of her sex, the stage was set for conflict. We watch her struggle to a triumph that was short-lived: She won her case but left The Citadel after a single week -- three years at the center of the storm, and fear for her family's safety, finally wore her down. Manegold illuminates the course -- historical, judicial and psychological -- of Shannon's fight and uncovers a striking American drama, a clash between those who would preserve the rigid structures of the past and those trying to chart a new course in a nation remaking itself.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

About half of Catherine S. Manegold's story in In Glory's Shadow deals with Shannon Faulkner's hard-fought legal battle to attend the Citadel, an all-male military academy in South Carolina that bills itself as the "South's West Point." (It is, most famously, the basis for the setting of Pat Conroy's bestselling novel The Lords of Discipline.) The other half, the "backstory" if you will, is a portrait of the Old South and old Southern masculinity, two venerated icons the Citadel has struggled to keep alive within its fortress-like walls. The Citadel was founded in the 1820s as a private training ground for an army intended to protect rich white landowners against insurrection by black slaves. The original recruits were mostly poor white men with no other chance to improve their class status. It became a school after the Civil War and settled into its role as a military college in the 20th century. The desire to ensure a successful future continues to draw students: Faulkner herself says she wanted to enroll for the discipline the academy provides, as well as the "brotherhood" she sees as a path to security. But what Manegold uncovers is less a family than a dysfunctional army, with a student-led tradition of physical and psychological abuse that seems to be supported by adult authority. (As one regimental commander's blackboard reads, "We are not hurting boys, we are disciplining men.") In Glory's Shadow is both a fascinating study of a changing South and a gripping account of an important legal battle. --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly

In 1992, Shannon Faulkner made national headlines when, having been refused admission to the Citadel, an all-male, state-funded military academy, she sued the state of South Carolina. After a four-year court battle that left Faulkner with a $6.15 million legal bill, she was admitted to the school, only to leave a week later because of the unbearable pressure and virulent antagonism she faced there. Using Faulkner's story as the backbone of her account, Manegold, who covered the case for the New York Times, devotes much of this book to an astute cultural history of the Citadel's actual and symbolic place in promoting Southern manhood, and of the personal and institutional violence that has been inseparable from that concept. Highlighting the Citadel's origins as a fortress built to punish and terrorize slaves in 1822 before it became a school 20 years later, Manegold argues persuasively that this tradition of violence remains alive today in the life-threatening hazing sanctioned by the school and in its reputation for racism and misogyny. Based on moving reportageAincluding an account of a freshman cadet who, in 1974, was pushed to the point of a psychotic break and killed his family, and the Citadel's nursing staff's claim that, in the '60s, the infirmary was "like a MASH ward" during the semester's opening weeks when hazing was harshestAManegold's portrait of male violence in the Citadel and in U.S. culture is devastating. Like Bernard Lefkowitz in Our Guys, Manegold fashions an important and insightful critique of American culture out, a story ripped from yesterday's headlines. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (January 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679446354
• ISBN-13: 978-0679446354
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,984,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

C. S. Manegold was a reporter with The New York Times, Newsweek and The Philadelphia Inquirer before turning her attention to longer works. As a foreign correspondent, she covered Southeast Asia and reported from the Middle East during the Gulf War. When she joined the New York Times in 1992 she wrote frequently for the Week In Review and the Sunday magazine, covered the U.S. military intervention in Haiti and the case of Shannon Faulkner v. The Citadel, a battle that would become the most expensive civil rights case in American history, and the subject of her first book. Winner of numerous national awards, Manegold was part of The New York Times's team recognized with a Pulitzer Prize (staff award) for the paper's coverage of the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, an event which, horrific as it was, would be tragically eclipsed on 9/11.
Manegold's first book, "In Glory's Shadow," was published by Knopf in 2000 and cited on the Los Angeles Times' list of best non-fiction for that year. Work on her second book, "Ten Hills Farm" was supported by grants and fellowships from Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. In 2001, Manegold moved to Atlanta to become the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. While there, she taught journalism history and ethics, narrative non-fiction, South African history and contemporary issues and business reporting. She left that position in 2006 to focus exclusively on "Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North," Princeton, 2010.
Now at Mt. Holyoke College, she continues to concentrate on narrative non-fiction and journalism ethics. When not teaching or writing she is either wheeling about on her beloved bike, making pottery, doing the great American juggling act with her busy family, or mucking about in the garden.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A feminist take on a unique school and lawsuit, February 2, 2000

By 

W. Speers (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Glory's Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, The Citadel, and a Changing America (Hardcover)

The author goes into considerable detail on The Citadel's brutal plebe system. As one who successfully passed through The Citadel's Plebe System in 1964 - 1965 (Fourth Battalion, R Company), as one of the Class of 1968 who left that institution at the end of my Third Class (second) year, I thought she tapped pretty well into what for me was the most interesting conundrum of life at The Citadel, namely the disjunction between the ideals of honor, character and integrity as expressed in the school's Honor System, and the need of the cadet corps to keep entirely to itself what actually goes on in barracks. She quotes one source who expresses what I have long thought, that is, that there are three systems in operation at The Citadel, the system that feeds the public with the approved story of cadet life, the delusions of the officers who bear the responsibility for the administration of the Plebe System, and the reality of life as a "knob" in barracks, subject to the whims of upperclassmen. The author gets a few facts wrong (for example, Jenkins Hall was called the "tool shed" when I was there because it housed the ROTC officers, active duty career officers, "tools" all to the cadet mind, not because it houses the Armory; rifles are issued to cadets and kept in their rooms during the school year). But these errors are, in general, minor ones.

Where the book falls down is in its superficial treatment of the court battle to open The Citadel and VMI to women. That battle is worth a more detailed account than it is given in this book. Another failing is the author's tendency to see the lawyers who fought for Ms. Faulkner as heroes (although she does have some harsh words to say about the behavior of the attorneys who handled the suit of Ms. Faulkner's predecessors) and those who fought to retain The Citadel's all-male tradition as hidebound chauvinists. This seems to me to be a biased view. Of course, the author does not pretend to be writing a wholly objective account.

Still, those of us interested in cadet life at schools such as The Citadel and VMI get our money's worth.

There are some feminist assumptions about the devolution of such concepts as masculine honor and institutions that foster the male virtues that detract from the book, and the constant characterization of cadets as "boys" while Shannon Faulkner, their contemporary, is characterized as a "woman" is annoying. But the author's argument that The Citadel system is hypocritical, destructive and toxic at root has a lot of merit.

I say the above as one who is proud of having survived my own "knob year," but whose growing cynicism at the hyprocrisy caused me to leave before I graduated.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Worthy Subject Deserves Better, April 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: In Glory's Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, The Citadel, and a Changing America (Hardcover)

As a Citadel graduate, I was always irked that the college presumed to speak for all alumni in resisting pressures to convert to a coeducational institution during the Shannon Faulkner era. It seemed to me, and I'm sure to many other graduates, that The Citadel squandered a priceless opportunity to accept women into the Corps of Cadets in a sensible way, much as VMI and the national service academies did, and to participate responsibly in a society of equality under the law. After seeing women in childbirth, world-class female athletes in competition, and single mothers raising their children under sometimes heroic circumstances, I would put nothing beyond the capabilities of their gender. In fact, it was with a good deal of admiration that I noted Nancy Mace's graduation from The Citadel in 1999 as its first alumna. Nor, it seemed to me, could any victory against a coeducational student body be worth the public spectacle the school made of itself in the 1990s. In arguments before the Supreme Court, when told that admitting Faulkner would forever change The Citadel as we have known it, Justice Stephen Breyer replied, "So what?" The college has yet to answer that question to the satisfaction of society or some of its alumni.

Against this backdrop, I had high hopes for Catherine Manegold's book, particularly after hearing her articulate commentary on NPR this past March. I anticipated a scholarly treatment of the Faulkner case and how an institution reconciles its traditions with the demands of contemporary society. In that regard, I was as disappointed in In Glory's Shadow as I was of my alma mater's response to the greatest challenge in its recent history.

A fairly short book to begin with (317 pages excluding the index), less than a third of its pages are devoted directly to Shannon Faulkner. So, obviously, an in-depth analysis of her case is hardly possible. Manegold's would-be social/legal analysis compares poorly, for example, with Jeffrey Toobin's skillful books on the O. J. Simpson trial (The Run of His Life) or the Clinton-Lewinsky affair (A Vast Conspiracy), two recent volumes on other prominent legal cases with contemporary societal implications. Manegold is much more intent on recreating an image of The Citadel as an oppressive institution rather than presenting a balanced treatment of its recent history. She concedes The Citadel no virtues that I could find. Not one.

Instead, Manegold attaches great significance to the fact that The Citadel can trace its history to the establishment of a youth militia to suppress slave uprisings in the antebellum South. She also gravely notes that the Charleston workhouse for unruly slaves had "a strikingly similar design" to the architecture of the modern Citadel. From this distant past, she proposes that a "master-slave" relationship emerged between freshman cadets and upperclassmen at the school, and has been perpetuated at The Citadel up to current times. In reality, The Citadel's fourth-class system as well as its Honor Code owe far more to the model practiced at the national service academies, particularly West Point, than it does to what went on in the antebellum South.

Also troubling is Manegold's manipulation of language and imagery in a way that robs the book of intellectual honesty. Cadets are invariably described as "boys," and not very appealing boys at that. Instead, we read about "a lanky senior with deep scarring left behind by teenage acne," "awkward boys," "bony kneed studies in dark blue," "gawkish clusters," "a tall knob with acne," "a sea of acne." They are variously "pale and silent," "stiff and yellow," "rail thin," "foundering and frightened," or "hollow-cheeked." One could only assume that the kind of individuals The Citadel attracts are wimps who need to prove something to themselves or the world. Faculty are referred to as SCUM (the unfortunate acronym for South Carolina Unorganized Militia, their parent body). The Assistant Commandant is "white-haired and chinless." The emphasis is clearly on using these irrelevancies to create mood and tone rather than dwelling on fact. In other words, mock the appearance or superficial traits, and the reader's sympathies tend to follow. It's a formula that movie directors have been using for years.

Some of Manegold's descriptions border on the homoerotic, which I found puzzling. She notes that "knobs" (referring to freshmen cadets with buzz haircuts) "is a term signifying the tip of a man's penis". (To quote Stephen Breyer, "So what?") She describes hazing where "naked boys with shaved heads and shaking bodies (were) packed into the showers, flesh to flesh." I lived for four years in two different barracks at The Citadel, and never witnessed or heard of a scene like that.

Manegold's thesis that the inmates are running the asylum at The Citadel has some connection with the truth. When I was a cadet, lack of adult supervision in the barracks led to the occasional excesses that could be expected in any system entrusted to eighteen to twenty-one year olds. There's always someone who doesn't know where to draw the line. The idea was captured vividly in Pat Conroy's novel The Lord's of Discipline in the person of the white-trash Cadet Fox (based on a real person, by the way, who was two classes ahead of me). In fact, I found it surprising that Manegold didn't interview Conroy, probably The Citadel's best known contemporary alumnus, and one of its most iconoclastic. But, this is hardly a book that prizes scholarship. The Citadel may have its problems, but make no mistake, In Glory's Shadow is a caricature.

By comparison, Carol Barkalow's very useful 1990 book, In the Men's House, describes with far greater integrity than In Glory's Shadow how women coped in a hostile male domain. Now a major in the U. S. Army, Barkalow tells how she and other women fared as members of the West Point class of 1980, the first to include female cadets.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disjointed and Polemical, September 5, 2001

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Glory's Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, The Citadel, and a Changing America (Hardcover)

This book sets out to be many things. It succeeds at none of them. As a result, it's is not only disjointed and confusing, but soaked through with bias as well.

One the one hand, author Catherine S. Manegold, a defense reporter for the New York Times, writes of the fight over the admission of Shannon Faulkner to The Citadel as a metaphor of South versus North. At the same time, she presents the chronology of a legal battle. And a biography of Ms Faulkner. And a sociological study of life at a military college. If Ms Manegold had concentrated on any one of these things, the book might have been more successful.

But apparently she couldn't decide which tack to take, and so the book ends up muddled. Long biographical introductions are given to people who end up playing minor parts in the drama. Lines are drawn for a conflict of cultures -- hidebound, traditional, inbred, hypocritical Charleston versus dynamic, hip, multicultural, liberal New York City -- but this allegory is abandoned as soon as it's developed. The central legal battles are disposed of in a series of 'the lawyers said ... the judges said,' and then, presto!, Ms Faulkner is in the door.

Ms Faulkner herself is the central figure in this drama, but at the end of the book, many questions about her remain unanswered. Did she apply to The Citadel purely on a whim, as it seems at first? Did she want the luster that comes with a Citadel ring (the ring is practically totemic), the 'network' and 'connections,' without understanding that the network depends on the shared experience of surviving the Citadel? Were her energies so focused on the legal fight that she was unprepared for what she found when she got in? When she left The Citadel, she complained that she had no friends in the school or the Corps. Was she really so naïve as to expect the school she and her lawyers had spent years attacking to offer her a warm embrace once she battered the doors down? None of these questions are adequately answered. It's not even clear whether the days Ms Faulkner spent in the infirmary were due to heat stroke, a mental or emotional breakdown, physical collapse, or something else entirely.

Instead, we get strange asides, like the bizarre suggestion that harassment of Ms Faulkner was connected to Caribbean voodoo rituals. Or four irrelevant pages rehashing the charges against one of the Left's favorite targets, the School of the Americas.

Interestingly, two of the most evocative sections of the book -- a harrowing account of Hell Week and the strangely moving epilogue 'Fear is like a Tree' -- contain barely a mention of Ms Faulkner at all.

Most Americans probably don't have real strong feelings about The Citadel one way or another. On the extremes, though, are people who really, really love the school, and others who really, really hate it. It's pretty clear whose side Ms Manegold is on.

Unlike Dr Laura Fairchild Brodie, who wrote about the 'assimilation' of women at VMI, Ms Manegold is not 'the band director's wife.' Not, that is, someone who knows the story from the inside. She seems not to have even residual sympathy for The Citadel as an institution, for the young men (and women) who attend it, or for the administrators wrestling with how to adapt to a society that has rejected nearly everything they value. Considering the patronizing, even sneering, tone she sometimes takes toward the military and people who serve in it, it's surprising Ms Manegold could have endured a career as a defense reporter.

As Ms Manegold tells it, the original sin of The Citadel was to have been founded for the purpose of training militias in the suppression of slave revolts and the perpetuation of the planter-dominated caste system. The Citadel apparently is tainted by this sin forever, and neither the school nor the author can ever overcome it: she mentions it frequently, often gratuitously. After the War and the end of slavery, The Citadel turned inward, and cadets practiced on one another the social suppression and physical abuse they could no longer impose on slaves. This is what passes for sociological analysis in this book.

That's too bad, because there is clearly an interesting and important story here. Maybe someday, someone will find a more effective, less polemical, way to tell it.