He came down the stairs on the right: a man in his late-60s or early 70s, walking slowly, with a slight stoop. He passed the long stone slab bearing the names of the fallen from right to left, from West to East, from 1973 back in time, pausing briefly two or three times before stopping before the names for 1967. He stood there, lost in thought, for several minutes before turning and exiting up the stairs to the left.
I was on the Chicago Riverwalk to photograph the Vietnam Memorial Plaza, moving outward in widening circles. The man had waited until I was as far back as possible, giving him a few minutes of privacy in a highly trafficked public space, alone with the names etched in stone. Or at least one name in particular; I went down to the wall after his exit. He had left behind a folded photocopy of an obituary from 1967, for one of the engraved names.
That scrap pf paper marked the intersection of numerous narratives with history and geography: the cold, black-and-white newspaper report of a death from a half-century past, a personal memory of the life cut short, the enormity of the loss of thousands of American servicemen and women, the conflicted emotions of patriotism, guilt, anger, pride, that are still evoked in the memory of Vietnam. The war was a historical event – a fact of history – and the memorial is at a specific location – the convergence of coordinates – in the physical world. But what happened at that moment was more profound than place and history, and it is well that we remember it on Memorial Day.
Public memorials, like Chicago’s Vietnam Memorial Plaza, are places where the pasts of memory and history meet. As Pierre Nora wrote in Realms of Memory, history and memory are, in many respects, opposed. “Memory is life, always embodied in living societies, and as such in permanent evolution,” he observes. “History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.”
Memory structures history. It determines which events, people, values and ideas are included in the historical narrative, and elides others. Consequently, a public memorial is a profound, permanent, articulation of power. Often built and maintained with public funds, occupying public space in heavily trafficked, or economically important locations like the National Mall in Washington, or the heart of New York City’s financial district, they stand in the way of passersby, and enjoin us to remember. Memorials inscribe memory, and therefore structure history, physically and geographically. They interpellate space and individuals in a communal narrative:
A memorial exhorts us to remember, but to remember in a specific way.
In Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, the historian Jay Winter observed that the war memorials constructed in Europe after the First World War – the first great period of modern European memorial building – were initially intended to be public places of private grief. But once “the moment of initial bereavement had passed, once the widows had remarried, once the orphans had grown up and moved away, once the mission of veterans to ensure that the scourge of war would not return had faded or collapsed, then the meaning of war memorials was bound to change.” Indeed, a subsidiary meaning of these memorials, as “sites of symbolic exchange, where the living admit a degree of indebtedness to the fallen which can never be fully discharged,” became dominant.
A notion of belonging is implicit in this exchange. There is no “nos morts” without a “nous.” We can only commemorate “our honored dead” by first defining who we are. Thus, pubic memorials perform a kind of dialectical alchemy, interpellating the community in memory to structure its history, while authorizing the very existence of that community by its history.
This has been at the root of the controversies over Confederate Civil War memorials in the United States over the last few years. The fact that torch-bearing American neo-Fascists were willing and able – in substantial numbers – to march, and kill to defend the public commemoration of a failed, treasonous, white supremacist rebellion says a great deal about American history. That those memorials were constructed at all, and maintained with public funds, in public spaces for decades, if not a century, says much more.
It is not surprising that controversy erupted over these memorials; what is remarkable is that it has only erupted now. It marked the breakdown of a national consensus on citizenship and belonging that had existed since the late-19th century. As David Blight noted in Race and Reunion, the process of national reconciliation following the Civil War, the recreation of national belonging, was founded upon the production of a “sentimental romance” that “imposed unity and continuity” on the war. Gilded Age patriotism and citizenship recognized an equivalence of heroes. Men in blue and grey uniforms marched together at the ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. “They were at once the embodiment of Civil War nostalgia,” Blight notes, “symbols of a lost age of heroism, and the fulfilment of that most human of needs—civic and spiritual reconciliation.”
But this could only happen through the elision of African American slavery, and thus of African Americans, from historical memory and the national narrative. F.L. Barnett ruefully noted the absence of any mention of African Americans – let alone African Americans themselves in anything other than menial positions – at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition: “Theoretically open to all Americans, the Exposition practically is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’ in the building of which the Colored American was allowed no helping hand, and in its glorious success he has no share.”
The memorials to the dead of the defeated side of the War of the Rebellion (as the Civil War is known in official US government documents) explicitly exclude African Americans from a racialized American citizenship widely embraced throughout much of American history. How else to explain the Confederate war memorials in Franklin, OH and at the Finn’s Point National Cemetery in Pennsville, NJ or, more trenchantly, at Arlington National Cemetery, America’s “most hallowed ground?”
The white nationalists and Klansmen at Charlottesville were defending a lost privilege – racialized, white citizenship – articulated, indeed embodied in Confederate memorials. That they have become, instead, embodiments of an intolerable memory, a violent racism inscribed in our public spaces and body politic, is evidence of an important dimension of public memorials: They “have had no fixed meaning, immutable over time,” Winter writes. “Like many other public objects, they manifest what physicists, in an entirely different context, call a ‘half-life’, a trajectory of decomposition, a passage from the active to the inert.”
These shifting meanings make public memorials enormously rich, if emotionally and politically fraught, historical texts. They exist not just at the juncture of history, public, and private memories, narratives of power and belonging, but at many different registers of intentionality and interpretation. They are physical, geographical intertexts that mark coordinates in physical space, but in shifting maps of intersectionality. Public memorials are both lenticular, presenting different views from different perspectives, and multidimensional, existing in a cultural space defined by history, memory and identity.
And they are everywhere in America. When I first came to the United States (from Canada) more than fifteen years ago, I was struck by the ubiquity of public commemoration. We have memorials in Canada, of course, and elsewhere in the Commonwealth. Most communities of any size have a war memorial – the cenotaph, or empty tomb – and my high school and university had plaques bearing the names of classmates I never knew who had died in the Great War, World War II, and Korea. But these were always collective memorials for “War” as a universal experience, an abstraction.
The United States marks public memory differently. The traumas of war, but also of disasters, tragedies, and loss in peacetime, are very specific, and very particular. There are memorials every few blocks where I now live, just north of Boston. There were eight public memorials commemorating five different traumas, within one mile of my former home in northern New Jersey. If I expanded that radius by only two more miles, the number jumped to over a dozen.
To walk in my neighborhood, or to go for a morning run in the nearby state park, is to continually interrogate the shifting meanings of American history, community, and citizenship; the American landscape itself interpellates all of us, immigrant and native-born alike, in a conversation with memory.
Yet, here we are, marking Memorial Day with a long weekend and sales at online stores and brick-and-mortar shops newly-released from pandemic public health restrictions. Conventionally, the weekend also marks the unofficial beginning of summer – socially, if not astronomically – with crowds flocking to beaches, picnics, and backyard barbecues. The grim weather in New England has scotched that this year, however, and doubtless prevented more than a few super-spreader events.
My first Memorial Day in the United States left me confused. I had come from a culture that remembered the cost of war with solemn observances at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month every year. The time and date commemorated the ceasefire that ended the bloodbath of the First World War and was still called Armistice Day in my youth. What we now call Remembrance Day coincides with the date of Veterans’ Day in the United States, and while we paused for two minutes to recall our war dead, in America there are triumphant parades and events celebrating the living men and women who served, and still serve their country.
Memorial Day is much closer in spirit to the Remembrance Day I grew up with, but it arrives on what is usually a glorious late-spring day, and not in the somber grey of late-fall. It was all a bit disorienting at first, although I adjusted soon enough; once I negotiated the cognitive dissonance, I was able to recognize the gravity amidst the sunshine and celebration.
The roots of Memorial Day reach into the dark soil of the American Civil War. Even before that conflict ended, killing more than 620,000 soldiers on both sides and maiming hundreds of thousands more, families of the fallen began a practice of visiting and decorating graves. After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a white nationalist terrorist in April 1865, Decoration Day, as the observance became known, was fixed in springtime.
Although it would not become a national holiday and officially renamed Memorial Day until the 1960s, the observance gathered momentum throughout the late-19th century as Americans sought reconciliation through shared loss. What would become Memorial Day was one of the principal vectors for the narrative of northern and southern moral equivalence that elided American’s history of slavery and racism, and indeed the very citizenship of African Americans in the “Blue-and-Grey” myth.
The fact that Gutzon Borglum, a Ku Klux Klan leader and the creator of the monument to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis at Stone Mountain, GA, was hired to build the “Wars of America” memorial in Newark, NJ’s Military Park without comment or criticism is only evidence of the power of the myth. “The monument dedicated today is intended to express, as nearly as can be done in bronze and stone, our sense of obligation to the soldiers and sailors of the United States, not only in the World War, but in all previous wars,” intoned Mayor Thomas Raymond on a rainy Memorial Day in 1926, setting the racist narrative in bronze and stone.
War memorials everywhere are deeply ideological texts that demand we remember the dead in specific, ritualized ways – and always our dead, not their dead, nor the unclaimed and unnamed dead. Yet, in their historical specificity, American war memorials are particularly prescriptive; for they invariably celebrate the goals of the wars and adventures in which the fallen died.
There is a Spanish-American War memorial in a small park a quarter of a mile from my home which features a sculpture of an American soldier standing resolute with his rife in hand. The plaque on the plinth depicts two other soldiers, the rifles at the ready, standing before a Cuban or Filipino woman who kneeling with her arms wide in either gratitude or supplication. In remembering the “Spanish War Veterans of 1898-1902,” we are enjoined also to celebrate American imperialism and the subjugation and genocide of the very people were claimed to have liberated.
The storm that erupted in 1981 over Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington exemplifies the interconnectedness of memorialization and jingoism in America. Then an architecture student at Yale, Lin meant the memorial to be a site of reflection. Vietnam had been America’s longest and most divisive conflict and, inspired by the memorials for the Great War – those public places of private grief – Lin conceived her design as “an interface, between our world and the quieter, darker, more peaceful world beyond. I chose black granite in order to make the surface reflective and peaceful.”
Peaceful reflection, however, could not be permitted, and Lin’s design became the focus of controversy in the resurgent American nationalist discourse of the 1980s. Many critics felt cheated of a heroic monument. Writing in The Washington Post, Vietnam veteran Tom Carhart denounced Lin’s design as “a black gash… of dishonor and shame.” He proposed, instead, that the wall of names be built to stand above, and not within, the ground, of white marble to put it “in beautiful harmony, rather than stark contrast, with the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.” Above all, he demanded that it be capped with the flag.
Ronald Regan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt refused to let construction of the monument proceed unless changes were made, and to appease the rising chorus of critics, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund commissioned sculptor Frederick Hart to install “The Three Soldiers” on the site, a patriotic statue in bronze recalling the imperialist figure of the Spanish-American War memorial, and Borglun’s “America’s Wars.”
Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was inaugurated in 1982, monuments to memory in the United States have invariably avoided controversy while highlighting American glory. Lin’s mute wall of names has so become the standard for commemoration, and endlessly copied, that it is almost a cliché. Yet, the names rarely appear alone; in Chicago, the black stone slab is flanked by military insignia – symbols of martial valor, lest visitors forget what these deaths served.
On an occasion when Americans traditionally recall the tragedy of war and the sacrifice of generations of young men and women with barbecued hotdogs and burgers, beach volleyball and sunscreen, and deep holiday discounts on consumer good, it behooves us consider what we are permitted to bring to mind – and what we are enjoined to forget. For this is how America remembers.
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Photo © Matthew Friedman