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

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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.

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.

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.

Acording to Manegold, all Citadel Cadets learn during their four years, is how to scream and bully younger people. As a rising junior female cadet at the Citadel, I can tell you I haven't lerned that, nor have I seen that. What I have seen is young men and woman who address their elders as "Sir or Ma'am", show up on time, get things done, and "do not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do." I found this book to be one sided. Manegold, and a lot of New York lawyers who never went to military schools or served in the military, seem to think that just because Faulkner was admited to The Citadel that the administration should have bended the rules for her to stay. I was treated professionaly by my cadre, (the upperclass cadets in charge of trining freshmen)I was never hazed or beaten. Nor will I haze or beat the knobs that I will be training later this summer. Insted of griping about The Citadel, and bemoaning it's existance, Manegold should have asked Cadets and graduates why they came to The Citadel, and why they stayed. She should have asked Knobs who quit, and Faulkner why they came and then why they quit. My classmates came to The Citadel because they wanted "to take the road less traveled" they wanted their college years to mean something. This book does have it's good points, I found the history of the school to be interesting

Title sounded like a good book for our AAUW book group - a woman facing an all-male educational establishment in the conservative South. A great deal of Southern/Charleston history thrown in - interesting, but besides establishing what most students of history already knew, had little to do with Ms. Faulkner's story. Never got to know her as a person, and court dialogue not included at all in this book. Where were the taunts, controversy, the meat of the trial? Was Ms. Faulkner suffering from heat exhaustion (and if so, why was she so physically out of shape, given she'd had 3+ yrs. to prepare for Hell Week), or was it an emotional breakdown/letdown after all those years of fighting?
Manegold writes like a journalist, giving facts, but little insight to the feature character's final days at the Citadel. Most disappointing! I will not recommend this to my book group.

This book is well written and, at least in part, appears to have been well researched, as well. It chronicles the history of Charleston, S.C., and that of its bastion, The Citadel. It loses energy, however, in describing what happens to the human subject of the book, Shannon Faulkner. The biographies and physical and personality quirks of attorneys, members of The Citadel administration, professors, alumni, and students are discussed in probably more detail than we would like, but the lawsuit and trials held in an attempt to admit the first female cadet to the school are only described in bits and pieces.

What actually occurred with regard to Shannon during the week she spent as a prospective "knob" is written about rather vaguely. The author implies that Ms. Faulkner suffered a break down after being approached in her home town by a man who threatened the lives of her parents, and then hearing his voice again once she arrived on campus, but we are never given any more information about this (e.g., Was any attempt made to identify and discipline this person?), except that Shannon did not tell her parents about these events until months after they happened. It would seem that if these details had been made public at the time they happened (or when Shannon finally acknowledged them), the world would have been more sympathetic to her leaving The Citadel, and the catty critisms regarding her weight and other physical and mental shortcomings may have been squelched.

I found the historical details of the city and the school interesting, and was riveted by the descriptions of Citadel life, as well as by the legal machinations involved in her case. The author dogmatically (and, at times, redundantly) rails against the (lack of) integrity of The Citadel's administration, cadets, and so forth, throughout much of the book. She fails, however, to devote the same energy in chronicalling the events surrounding Shannon Faulkner, her family, and the young women who were able to enter The Citadel in the wake of the Faulkners' heartache and sacrifices, which is disappointing.

Catherine Manegold's work has much that is valuable to say about how boys are raised to become men in American society. Manegold details the horrific hazing rituals at the Citadel, but she views them in light of the history of the institution, formed as it was after the failed Denmark Vesey slave revolt. Manegold has the vision to see that these hazing rituals show that the school is still fascinated with the civil War paradigm of mastery and subjugation. Upperclassmen get to play the masters and the lowerclassmen the slaves, and the next year the sophomores get to do it to the next bunch. In this way, patterns of abuse get perpetrated. Cadets who stay give then what they got. Although this is a tragic cycle, it has great ramifications for relationships between men and women and for our understanding of domestic violence. Are not in these hazing rituals the cycle of domestic violence being played out, with the young men playing both sexes? And if so, what does the four-year experience teach Citadel graduates about entering into loving relationships with intimate partners?

All persons interested in domestic violence and relationships between men and women should read this extremely provocative work, that opens up new ways of thinking about the many ways that violence against women is taught and reinforced in our society. Highly recommended.

I am amazed at the content of this book. What Miss Faulkner did is important. It was the proper time for women to be admited to The Citadel. However Miss Faulkner was the wrong women. She repesented her entire gender horribly when she arrived at the school. She was not at all prepared for the hardships of knob year. She was a embaressment to all women. Miss Faulkner stayed at the actual Citadel for 4 hours before she quit. The rest of her hell week was spent in the infirmary where her tender nerves were attended to. She did this to prove a point and all she did was embaress herself and her gender. The author takes a view of someone who has heard only the bad facets of the school, but that is to be expected considering who provided her information.
StevensJ@citadel.edu

In Glory's Shadow tells of Shannon Faulkner, who attempted to become the first female cadet in the all-male military school of The Citadel in South Carolina. Her struggles for admittance raised questions ranging from Constitutional rights to standards of excellence and admittance for men and women. She eventually won her battle for admittance - but left the school after only a week, fearing for her family's safety. An eye-opening saga of modern prejudice and struggles.

I found the history of the Citadel very interesting, but the story of Shannon Faulkner ultimately disappointing. To surrender to threats after all she had been through to become a cadet didn't seem in character with the stubborn, proud, and gutsy Shannon we saw in most of the book. Of course, I couldn't understand why she would want to go there in the first place. The atmosphere at the Citadel doesn't seem one to produce the new kind of leaders we need for present day situations, and I wondered how the "knobs" ever got any academic work accomplished.