A Walk in the Park

Ed:  It’s often been said that modern medicine, modern wars, really, our whole modern way of life, had made death less and less visible.  Less a part of our daily lives.  Now a lot of people will say that the invisibility of the war dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, is more of a political issue than a cultural one, and that may very well be the case. But even so, the result is the same.  A world increasingly sanitized of death and dying.

Peter:  And so for the rest of the hour today on the show, this is what we’re going to be looking at.  How have we, over the course of American history, learned to live with the dead.  The war dead, but also with those who die ordinary deaths, here at home.  Is it true that we’ve lost touch with death? Or has our relationship with it simply changed?

Ed:  It’s hard to think of a better place to ponder those sorts of questions than among the dead themselves.  And so on a rainy afternoon a few weeks ago, I headed up to a hillside overlooking the James River in the city I call home, Richmond, Virginia.  It’s the site of Hollywood Cemetery, opened back in 1849, and made famous a decade later, when the remains of former-President, James Monroe, were dug up in New York, shipped down to Richmond, and re-buried there.  A few years later, of course, the Civil War came, and with that war, Hollywood Cemetery became a busy place indeed.  Many thousands of soldiers were brought across the battlefield to be buried there, along with 28 Confederate generals, and later, Jefferson Davis himself.  My tour guide for the afternoon was local historian, Hunter McGuire, Jr.  We started at Presidents’ Circle, the spot where Monroe and his fellow Virginia-born President, John Tyler, are both buried.

Ed:  So this is a pretty eminent spot here, and what would make this such prime real estate that two United States Presidents would want to be buried here, to the extent that anybody wants to be buried.

Hunter McGuire: Well, the geography is what makes it outstanding.  Let me say a word about the garden rural cemetery tradition.  It began in Paris in a site of a monastery, the Perre LaChez [?], and city cemeteries were getting overcrowded, so they decided to make a cemetery in suburbs of Paris.

Ed:  When was that?

Hunter McGuire: That was in 1804.  To attract people, they went off to get celebrities, and they first dug up Moliere and moved him there, and then Abelard and Eloise, they dug them up and brought them there, and with that, everybody sort of rushed in.  The people of Paris loved coming and walking through these beautiful grounds.  So people in Boston copied that with Mt. Almond Cemetery, which was another rural, pastoral cemetery, a beautiful one that overlooked the City of Boston.  That was, in fact, copied by Frederick Law Olmsted when he developed Central Park, because they then discovered that people in cities needed public walking spaces.

Ed:  But the idea of a park in a city began with a cemetery, then.  Wow.  OK.

Hunter McGuire: And then, up and down the East Coast, New York developed Woodlawn Cemetery; and Philadelphia, Laurel Hills Cemetery.  The architect of Laurel Hill came to Richmond and designed this cemetery.

Ed:  And perhaps our listeners who would be interested in just hearing –  this is on a tombstone, a little more explication than we’re used to today.  “Endowed with extraordinary intellectual powers, he touched life at wide varying points:  scholar, soldier, author, a commanding figure in industrial affairs, from prime of youth to the kindly winter of old age, he kept in violet, the chastity of a pure and stainless life.  Peace well earned.”

Hunter McGuire: Wonderful.  And that’s one of the beauties of a garden pastoral cemetery of this era.  In the Victorian times, people wrote beautiful epitaphs all over the place; most of them beautiful, sometimes they were a little snippy about their former wives, but for the most part, they were wonderfully romantic Victorian things.

Ed:  Are there black people buried in Hollywood Cemetery?

Hunter McGuire: Very few I know of.  A few clergy, and a few servants, but cemeteries tend to be segregated for the natural reason people want to be buried with their families.  Once a family tradition starts, people will flock to be there.

Ed:  So was this cemetery for the well-to-do?

Hunter McGuire: I think they were happy to sell lots to anyone who could pay for them.  And that was not easy at first.  What really sort of turned it on was, well, President Monroe helped, but then when the Civil War came . . .

Ed:  . . . by dying.

Hunter McGuire: By dying, yes.  When the Civil War came, and this flood of casualties started coming in, then Hollywood really became popular, and there were people floating in and out for funerals all the time, lots of flowers, and lots of flags.

Ed:  I think, in fact, that I’d like to go over to the Confederate part of the cemetery, if we could, and talk about that a little.  [The sun’s kind of coming out…] So we’re standing in front of a very important monument that, in some way, signals the beginning of the Memorial Day movement after the American Civil War.  If you can imaging a pyramid 90” tall, 45” wide, made of really rough-hewn granite from down along the James, brought here, stacked without mortar, in 1869. All around this statue, this giant pyramid, are buried 18,000 Confederate veterans.  That’s because many of them died in Richmond because we had a giant hospital based here, so others were shipped by railroad from the battlefields all across the state, where we saw about half the battles of the Civil War within a hundred miles or so of here.  So this was the best monument that they could think of to make with materials at hand, in the immediate wake of the war when the city had been burned to the ground and was devastated. It’s kind of a haunting place.

Hunter McGuire: At the early Memorial Day and for many Memorial  Days after that, really up until WWI, Memorial Day would bring 5,000 people from Richmond with their picnic lunches to listen to the bands play, to the oratory of Confederate veterans, some with empty sleeves and peg legs, but they all came out to celebrate.  Some of them felt like it was the lost cause, and they wanted people not to remember what they’d sacrificed, and others felt like what they contributed to, along with their northern  brethren, was the birth of a new nation that could win WWI and WWII and those sort of things.  Memorial Day’s a great event, whichever way you look at it.

Ed:  That was Hunter McGuire, Jr., a former board member at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond Virginia.  He also happens to be the great, great grandson of the surgeon who amputated the arm of General Stonewall Jackson.

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Brian:  We’re going to take a short break now, but when we get back, historian Drew Gilpin Faust will explain how widespread death of the Civil War altered Americans’ attitudes about life.  We’ll also hear from some of you listeners.

Peter:  More BackStory coming up in a minute.

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