Piehler, Guenter Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Paperback reissue. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1995.
Sometime in the first decade of the 21st century I was on a phone call with a young academic in the field of communication. He told me his area of research was in the rhetoric of memorials. I asked if he knew the work by Kurt Piehler. He did indeed know that work. That’s a standard work in the field, he said. That gave me a tingle of satisfaction, or a warm glow, or something. At least, I recall that conversion after all these years and feeling pleased at what he had said. Kurt and I had begun our graduate studies at Rutgers, on the same day in the late 20th century. We became good friends, and remained in contact over the years even though our careers have taken us to different parts of the U.S. Kurt is currently Associate Professor at Florida State University and Director of the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience. Before he left Rutgers to take his first tenure track position he was the founding researcher of the Rutgers Oral History Archive, which began as an archive of the experiences of Rutgers alums in World War II. Kurt and I discussed our research while we were still at Rutgers, and even later when I was still able to visit. But, I have to make a confession. Kurt, if you are reading this, I only got around to reading your entire book in the last few weeks. There are reasons for that, of course, but I’m sure no one in the Blue Monkey universe cares.
How to remember war, how to memorialize the dead, provoked controversies even before the war of independence concluded. Many officers of the continental army began to ape the styles of their British counterparts, arrears in pay be damned. (Bouton, 65) The pipeline to a semi-aristocratic society of the Cincinnati had already taken shape, and from there into support for a nascent Federalist political movement. Admiration, in fact adulation, of George Washington played a key role in Federalist ritual, and equestrian statues memorializing the war already held a place in the Federalist iconography. Common soldiers had little role in Revolutionary memorials, an analog of Hamilton’s plan for funding the national debt without any anxiety about ordinary farmers and artisans. Even so, the commemoration of war assumed more and more of a republican form, including parades of veterans on the 4th of July and, eventually, pensions.
By the time of the Civil War, recognition of the average soldier had become a settled part of war memorials and the rituals of memory, in the North as well as the South. The conflicts around memory of the war, in fact, tended to divide North and South. Southern memorials by the end of the 19th century were part of a larger project to erase slavery as the core conflict of the war. Rather, Johnny Reb became the same hometown hero as Billy Yank, and equestrian statues rose to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as well as to U.S. Grant. This surrender to the southern narrative that a bitter war had grown from theories of state sovereignty did not proceed in a straight line. But by the turn of the century, the Civil War battlefields acquired by the federal government would include memorials to southern insurrectionists as well as soldiers defending the United States.
Also, by the time of the Civil War, remembering the war had attracted new interest groups. Both professional sculptors and memorial companies added their contrary perspectives to the controversies of memory. Sculptors wanted classical memorials created by professionals with classical training. The memorial makers had less expensive wares to offer, often statues on pedestals, iconic drama substituting for artistic interest.
With World War I, another layer of controversies emerged. After the Civil War, national cemeteries for the war dead became an accepted element of American memorials of war. But with many dying overseas, the question arose whether the United States should support overseas cemeteries, burying American dead where they had fallen. This issue was settled with compromise, as it would be again in the second global war–-families could decide to repatriate their dead or to allow for burial in foreign lands. Stateside, a Progressive ideal provoked another controversy, claiming memorials in concrete and stone should be replaced by living memorials, structures that contributed to the lives of Americans, like libraries, playgrounds, even bridges.
Debate over the proper memorials to war continue to the present. Most readers will know the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., clearly one of the most powerful testaments to service members. Yet when it was first proposed, opposition came from a range of groups that saw the memorial as too modernist, too simple, too somber. Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, opposed the memorial until additions were made to his taste (he was wrong about this, as he was about so much else).
How, and whether, to remember war continues as a live issue among Americans. Even though the national media and political speeches tend toward some kind of rare unanimity in claiming that veterans are all heroes, there is palpable ambivalence both left and right as to the heroic nature of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia. Americans will unhesitatingly remember service in the Persian Gulf states and Afghanistan, but seem inclined to forget those places for all other purposes.
An older example may lend us some ideas about American ambivalence toward remembering war. In 1846, soon after American troops crossing the Nueces River provoked an attack by the Mexican border patrol, U.S. volunteers quickly rallied round the flag. The war went relatively quickly, with a peace treaty forced upon the Mexican government by 1848. This was, apparently, a brilliant success both for President Polk and the U.S. military. U.S. territory grew by a third, with few battle losses. But by 1847 the work of Congress had already descended into chaos as a consequence of Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot whose funding amendment (proviso) sought to exclude slavery from any territory acquired in the war. Congress, and the government generally, would lurch from chaos to crisis for another 12 years (including terroristic violence in Kansas territory) until the Civil War broke out. Generals and senior officers from both north and south had seen service in Mexico, a war that U.S. Grant recalled in his memoirs as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
.
Buena Vista Furnace, Ghost Town Trail near Dilltown, PA
The Mexican War was far from our finest hour, and one that received little official recognition. I can only recall having seen one memorial to the war, in New York City, near Madison Square Park. (There are probably more official memorials to the Mexican War in Mexico City than in the entire United States.) And yet, on my travels along the rail trails of Pennsylvania I regularly pass Buena Vista furnace, built in 1847 and named for an early victory in the war. And I often go for coffee at a shop on Buena Vista street, part of a warren of streets in Pittsburgh known as the Mexican War Streets (including Monterrey, Jacksonia, Palo Alto streets, Taylor and Sherman Avenues). And even a casual search will find more Buena Vistas, in places where the actual Spanish pronunciation seems to have never occurred to anyone (pronounced Byoona Vista in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and also presumably in Virginia, Delaware, Minnesota). But this is less an insight than the raw material of a question. How are wars remembered outside the realm of public memorials and without the careful study required of history?
Near the end of his work, Kurt notes that no memorial rose to the anti-war movement that opposed the Vietnam war. In fact, where are the memorials to peace? That may seem a ludicrous question for a country born in war, and that expanded by taking land from indigenous, often by force, and from the war against a sister republic noted above. Yet between major wars, the ideals of most Americans had consistently remained pacific if not pacifist. In both our wars with Great Britain (which, recall, was the most powerful state of the day), our leadership expected an easy victory once the British were denied American resources.* This was the view taken by Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, a historically influential tract that seemed to have had no influence at all in the British ministries that launched against the 13 rebel colonies the empire’s largest combined arms assault before World War II. Our army was so small in 1916 that the threat of American intervention earned the contempt of the German high command. Yet, since World War II, the belief that the U.S. must have the most powerful military in the world has become a bi-partisan orthodoxy. And even though the debacle in Vietnam seemed to cause some reevaluation of our militarized foreign policy, that pause quickly passed and made way for a growth of our military, and our trust in it, in time to prepare for endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. I’m fairly certain that a monument to peace would have changed little in recent U.S. policy. But memorializing peace, perhaps creating a national peace college, might prompt some needed study and reflection on how a super-power leads in a world where war seems endemic even as the stakes of losing the peace rise higher.
*The American strategy of “denial of resources” failed again in the War of 1812. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury until 1814, when he became a member of the delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war, wrote in frustration on the rampant smuggling his port collectors could not interdict, that if we didn’t feed them, the British couldn’t keep the war going.
References
Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy : “The People”, the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. New York ;;Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
bluemonkeyreview 