Representing the Dead

Peter:  This is BackStory, the show that looks to the past to explain the America of today.  I’m your 18^th century host, Peter Onuf.

Ed:  I’m your 19^th century host, Ed Ayers.

Brian:  And I’m your 20^th century host, Brian Balogh.  We’re talking today about how political, social and technological changes over the course of our history have shaped the way we remember the dead.

Ed:  So here on Memorial Day, you think of places you go to celebrate Memorial Day, and if you think about it, there’s really quite an array of different ways we memorialize those who’ve given their lives for this country, and Peter, I wouldn’t know, frankly, where to go if I wanted to memorialize the dead of the American Revolution.

Peter:  It’s a great question.  You wouldn’t go to battlefields; you’d actually go to churchyards all over the country, particularly to Colonial cities that have survived in the heart of the great modern American metropolises, old Trinity Church in New York, and churches in Boston and Charleston, and in a way those places would be, I think, where we would evoke the memory of the Revolution.  I think that’s the way they function in American culture.

Brian:  So when did one place that symbolized one war.  When did that start?  That must have been the 19^th century.

Ed:  Well I think it’s Gettysburg.  We sometimes forget that the Gettysburg Address was given at the inauguration of a national cemetery at Gettysburg which was created in the immediate wake of the war.  So what Lincoln was doing.  Think about this – the Gettysburg battle was in July, he’s giving this talk in November, and when he came to Gettysburg, there were coffins stacked up at the train station.  So I think that’s the beginning of that.  It was building of the old ideas of park-like cemeteries, but here they’re making one on purpose, instantaneously, for massive numbers of bodies, and I think that lays the foundation for Arlington.

Brian: And the irony is that from that point on, up until today, our soldiers die elsewhere.  So we almost  have to have centralized places to commemorate this from then on, because our soldiers are dying in foreign lands.

Ed: Here’s a quiz:  Where do you guys think this first emerges?  Where did we start seeing the first centralized monuments to sacrifice for the nation?

Brian:  Civil War.

Ed:  Nope.  Even if you go to Gettysburg now, all the statutes and monuments are state based, and they kind of vie with each other and who has the biggest state monument.  I never would have thought about this.

Brian: I don’t know.

Ed: The War with Spain in 1898.

Brian: Bingo.

Ed: Because, there’s a couple of things:  one, the North and South are so happy to be fighting on the same side, so you can start having these monuments; but also, in the meantime, you’ve had the Franco-Prussian War and the emergence of these big nation states in Europe, and all the guys are putting up big monuments to the nations.

Brian:  Plus, we kicked butt.

Ed:  Exactly.  And it was our time, so if you look at proportion of the monuments to the actual war, the Spanish-American War is the biggest, and it turns out to be sort a rehearsal, unfortunately, of the great wars to follow.

Brian:  Do we have a monument for our invasion of Grenada?  Because that would be the ultimate test.  A gigantic, the largest monument for our smallest war.

Ed:  It’s an action item for our listeners.  Brian, it’s interesting if you think about the array of war memorials in Washington, D.C.  If you think about when they were built, you have the strange thing of the Vietnam War Memorial being built first, and then Korea, and then only most recently, WWII, how do you explain that?

Brian:  I think this proves, Ed, that they don’t teach enough history in high school.  That’s my first point.

Peter:  It’s post-modern chronology.

Brian: Chronology matters.

Ed:  Chronology is phrenology.

Brian:  A more serious answer, I think, is memorials represent what’s going on at the time that these memorials are planned.  It often takes them decades to actually build and complete them.  I’m guessing that if the WWII Memorial was opened in 2004, I’m guessing it started maybe 20 years earlier.  I associate that period in American history with a re-militarization of society, with Ronald Reagan increasing defense budgets, but more importantly, appealing to Americans’ patriotic sense, a sense of self-sacrifice, and surely, this is when the all volunteer Army was beginning to take off in the United States.  I also would add that how could we possibly have a memorial to one of the nation’s most unpopular wars, Vietnam, and not have one for, perhaps, the Nation’s most popular war, at least in retrospect, WWII.

Peter:  The great leveling thing about Vietnam, though, in the sense of making it a kind of good war in the sense that the people that gave their lives deserve to be memorialized, and that we should never forget that. That really abstracts sacrifice from particular contexts and that’s a really transcendent notion beyond time, beyond the occasional war, beyond what the war was about, for us to take a moment and reflect on the sacrifice.

Brian:   And didn’t that happen in the Civil War, Ed, I mean that abstraction, isn’t that one of the things that helped bring together North and South eventually?

Ed:  Yeah, in the early 20^th century.  It took a lot of time.  And I think it’s parallel to Vietnam, in that there’s a sense of why don’t we memorialize WWII. We memorialize it every day.

Peter:  Because it was a good war.

Ed:  Exactly.  And nobody questioned that, so the Vietnam War Memorial comes along, it seems almost like an oxymoron at the time, to memorialize something that a lot of people wanted to forget, and I think when the Vietnam Memorial came, not only are we not going to forget it, but here are the individual young people that died.

Brian:  We’re not going to forget these individuals, which is why the names are listed.  Whereas, you guys know, we’ve talked to WWII veterans, their first reaction when you thank them for their service is, in essence, to say “Gosh, I never even thought about it.”

Ed: Right, we were all sacrificing.

Brian: We were all sacrificing, whereas, in Vietnam, by then, Americans were thinking very carefully about whether to make that sacrifice or not.

[names of dead Vietnam War soldiers being read in the background]

Brian:  That’s tape from the reading of the names ceremony at the 20^th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in November, 2002.