Memorial Mania: Fear, Anxiety and Public Culture

By Erika Doss

This article was published in Museum, March/April issue of 2008.

In the past decade or so, the U.S. has seen new memorials dedicated to dead astronauts and executed witches in Florida and Massachusetts; to the “greatest generation” in Virginia and Washington, D.C.; and to victims of terrorism in Oklahoma City, Boston and elsewhere. Recently, groups have also erected monuments that pay tribute to civil rights (in Alabama) and cancer survivors (Missouri), to Rosie the Riveter and the female defense industry workers of World War II (California) and to the Indian victors of the Battle of Little Bighorn (Montana).

Equally prevalent are temporary memorials, those makeshift offerings of flowers, candles, balloons and teddy bears that precipitate at sites of tragic and traumatic death—from highways and roadsides, where shrines commemorate some of the 43,000 Americans who die each year in car accidents, to those built at Columbine High School in 1999 and around the World Trade Center in 2001.

As these examples suggest, today’s memorials are wildly divergent in subject and style; few hold to the classicizing sentiments of former generations. Collectively, they represent a phenomenon I call “memorial mania,” a national obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent, excessive desire to claim—and secure—those issues in public culture. Controversies over construction of memorials reveal levels of anxiety about who and what should be remembered in America. The growing number of these memorials represents efforts to anchor, and resolve, those anxieties.

Sept. 11 certainly heightened the sense of urgency and anxiety surrounding memory and memorialization in contemporary America: Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, New York was filled with temporary memorials in parks and on street corners. Within days, the entire country was engaged in debates about how Sept. 11 would be permanently memorialized. Indeed, acts of terrorism in America especially drive today’s memorial culture. The competition to design the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a 3.5-acre, $29 million monument to the 168 people who died because of Timothy McVeigh’s murderous act of domestic terrorism, received 624 entries. Its dedication in 2000—five years to the date of the bombing—was nationally broadcast and included speeches by President Bill Clinton, who described the memorial as a “public stand against terrorism.”

Competitions for the nation’s three major Sept. 11 memorials—in Washington; Shanksville, Pa.; and New York—similarly saw thousands of entries. The Flight 93 and Pentagon memorials each received more than 1,000 proposals, and jurors for the World Trade Center memorial sorted through 5,200 proposals before picking Reflecting Absence, a tree-lined plaza punctuated by two huge spatial voids located on the footprints of the former twin towers. Inside the voids are recessed pools of water banded with the names of the dead; bordering the pools are ramps descending into an underground memorial center filled with artifacts recovered from the rubble. This site is slated for completion in the next few years. Throughout the nation, hundreds of Sept. 11 memorials have already been built.

How they get chosen, what they look like and what they mean are highly contested. The sister of a pilot killed at the Pentagon, for example, lambasted the possible inclusion of several museums at the World Trade Center memorial. “They’re trying to hijack the meaning of Sept. 11; we’re trying to rescue it,” she was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal, insisting that the 16-acre, half-billion-dollar memorial be solely dedicated to those who died there and not to cultural and economic redevelopment schemes more consistent with the trade center itself. Her public fury about “turning Ground Zero into a playground for culture and art” led to Take Back the Memorial, an alliance of Sept. 11 family members who insist that their personal trauma privileges their management of New York’s memorial. Issues of naming are especially contentious; plans to randomly list the victims’ names on the lower parapets of the monument’s pools—in a design architect Michael Arad termed “meaningful adjacencies”—are angrily challenged by those who feel that rescue workers, or first responders, should be accorded separate, special status and by still others who insist that victims be distinguished according to kinship and company affiliation.

Shanksville has been similarly fraught, mostly because the original design of the Flight 93 memorial was attacked as an “Islamic” tribute by some cyberspace conspiracy theorists. Unveiled in September 2005, architect Paul Murdoch’s design—called Crescent of Embrace—includes a curved concrete Tower of Voices housing 40 white wind chimes, a plaza marking the plane’s flight path, a marble wall listing the names of the 40 hijacked passengers who died in the crash and a grove of red maples planted in a bowl-shaped vale that a handful of paranoid blogospherists determined was actually a “Jihadist” symbol of “Islamo-fascism.” The same sort of keen visual insight informed similarly ludicrous post-Sept. 11 websites insisting that Satan’s face could be seen in the dark clouds of smoke surrounding the Twin Towers. Alex Rawls at Error Theory projected a detailed analysis involving reams of charts, topographical maps and polar coordinates that “proved” that the crescent-shaped design of the Flight 93 memorial was “pointed toward Mecca” and that its Tower of Voices was, in fact, an “Islamic prayer sundial.” “Someone at Paul Murdoch’s architecture firm is trying to plant an Islamic flag on the bodies of our dead heroes,” wrote Rawls, calling Murdoch “terrorist memorializing scum.”

Terrorism memorials are clearly among the most heated—and confused—sites of public culture in contemporary America. My primary interest as a cultural historian is in trying to make some sense out of these heated emotional states. Memorials are framed by feelings such as anxiety, grief, gratitude and shame.

I’m especially interested in the role of public feelings in the making and meaning of today’s memorials and the role of memorials in the fabrication of individual and collective identities. How, for example, are fear and anxiety mediated through memorial culture? How do memorials represent, and also repress, national consciousness? What does memorial mania tell us about how Americans understand themselves as Americans today?

Affect is omnipresent in contemporary America. Public life is marked by emotional appeal. Consider how public feelings have been mobilized and manipulated in recent elections, in ongoing debates over abortion politics, over Terry Schiavo, over the “war on terror.” These affective dimensions do not foreclose the possibilities of social and political transformation. But they do beg for a critical pedagogy of public feelings that recognizes how and why (and which) emotions shape historical moments, concepts of citizenship and understandings of self and national identity.

Terrorism dominates contemporary understandings of national identity and purpose. It certainly dominates current political discourse, from President George W. Bush’s declaration, shortly after Sept. 11, that his and the nation’s primary focus was to “rout terror wherever it exists” to the Justice Department’s declaration that protecting Americans against the threat of terrorism was “strategic goal one” for the FBI, INS, DEA and other agencies under its jurisdiction. Coverage of the war on terror dominates journalism; those federally mandated, color-coded “Terror Alerts” affect our daily public movement (we are currently at yellow). And it dominates public feeling: A 2005 survey by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness found that 78 percent of Americans were concerned that there would be more terror attacks in the United States, although 49 percent had confidence in the government’s ability to protect them.

National anxieties about terrorism are understandable because terrorism is repeatedly framed in national terms as “an attack on America.” Although people from 92 countries were killed in the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, their deaths were obscured within a largely uncontested appraisal of the World Trade Center as a symbol of only America, and of the attacks in New York (and Washington and Pennsylvania) as attacks on the entire nation. Further characterized as a “national trauma,” Sept. 11 was perceived as an assault on American innocence, a devastating blow that victimized all Americans and simultaneously mandated their shared therapeutic recourse in the war on terror. This sort of sweeping assessment renders all Americans the same and helps to perpetuate the notion that all share collective national history and identity. Localized tragedies become the index of an official national culture; acknowledging them becomes the purview of national political claims on their meaning and memory. As President Clinton announced in 1997, following the design selection for Oklahoma City’s terrorism memorial, “This tragedy was a national one, and the memorial should be recognized and embraced and supported by the nation.”

Terrorism memorials are the most visibly public sites where the nation remembers the victims of violent acts of extremism. For family members and survivors, they are sacred sites of bereavement and, often, burial. For politicians, they are ideological rallying grounds. For millions of tourists, they are “authentic” destinations marked by tragic death and traumatic loss. And they are among America’s top tourist attractions: The Oklahoma City National Memorial drew 575,000 people in 2001, and preliminary projections for the World Trade Center Site Memorial suggest that as many as 6.6 million might visit each year during its first three years of operation, starting in 2011. Even the Flight 93 National Memorial, remote in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, expects to receive some 230,000 pilgrims a year. Terrorism’s looming, anxious threat to self and nation is managed in these memorials through design elements and textual references that stress security, stability and heroism.

Terrorism memorials in Oklahoma and elsewhere share a redefined minimalist aesthetic that manipulates normal understandings of space and time in order to evoke trauma’s dissociative affects of fear and anxiety. Towering monoliths, angled walls, recessed forms, reflective surfaces and gridded units strewn throughout enormously scaled sites lend these memorials their purposely disconcerting impressions. Pits, voids and an aesthetic of “absence” further their destabilizing sensibility; tensions between their overwhelming spatiality and their simultaneous emphasis on intimate experientiality heighten their anxious, discomfiting aura. In many cases, longstanding representational edifices were moved to make way for pared-down structures, such as the Green Bay, Wis., memorial that replaced a fiberglass statue of a Green Bay Packer receiver that was moved down the road to a local brewery.

Yet each of these memorials is also framed by sociotherapeutic notions that trauma can be represented and must be cured, hence the affirmation of hope, healing, renewal and closure in design elements such as reflecting pools, waterfalls, manicured lawns, clusters of trees and “beacons of hope.” At night, for example, the glass bases of the 168 chairs in the Oklahoma City memorial are illuminated by small lights that designers Hans-Ekkehard Butzer and Torrey Butzer describe as “beacons of hope [that] will inspire Oklahoma City, the State and Nation, to rebuild and prepare for tomorrow.” However informed, in other words, by minimalist tropes of disruption, experientiality and radical transformation, these solid, obdurate monuments are intended as lasting, fixed and highly selective national narratives.

Sigmund Freud defined anxiety as a reaction to danger, a fear of “being abandoned by the protecting super ego.” Manifested in nervousness and confusion, anxiety is an untenable state of insecurity. It is often abated, or controlled, in comforting and safe spaces—in the familiar setting of the home, for example, or in the routine and order of the workplace. The anxious insecurity generated by the violation of these safe spaces is then especially jarring, and efforts to restore them are quick: Less than a month after Sept. 11, for example, the Department of Homeland Security was created to “coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”
Implicit within the narrative of security is the notion that the self and nation are in danger, at risk, under attack. Security narratives embody efforts to tame and control these threats, to prevent their repetition and to restore harmony and order: to work through the trauma of terror, among other national insecurities, and generate closure. While anchored in specific historic realities—like Sept. 11—contemporary terrorism memorials focus on explaining danger and resolving it through particular design elements and security narratives. Paradoxically, of course, they also depend on generating fear, on feeding crisis and perpetuating national insecurities.

Security narratives evoking national unity, innocence and heroic sacrifice are central to contemporary American terrorism memorials. Assumptions of innocence have long been central to American national imagination, liberating the nation and its citizens from a legacy of historical and moral misdeeds and sustaining a state of blissful ignorance. Tropes of national innocence permit a lack of culpability in matters requiring adult moral agency and encourage a self-righteous consensus that pits American exceptionalism against an evil and dangerous “outside” world. There is, of course, an enormous difference between the trope of national innocence and the actual murder of innocents. The people who died in the bombing of Oklahoma’s Federal Building and the people who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks were innocent victims of horrific acts of terrorism. Yet from the moment of their murders, their deaths were manipulated to sustain politicized assumptions of national innocence and to legitimize national security agendas of revenge and recovery—including the war on terror.

A visit in fall 2005 to the temporary memorial for Flight 93 revealed a site drenched in patriotic war mongering. Parking lot railings were covered in handwritten slogans such as “God Bless America” and “I Love My Soldier” and bumper stickers reading “United We Stand” and “It’s Not Just a Flag, It’s a Way of Life.” At Shanksville, a site of tragic death is reframed in terms of flag-waving vengeance, political self-righteousness and fundamentalist Christianity. Other bumper stickers at the site read “Red State Insurgency” and “Back to the Bible Or . . . Back to the Jungle!” The temporary memorial itself includes a large wooden cross surrounded by American flags and religious mementos.

Heroic sacrifice is a related security narrative reproduced in hundreds of permanent Sept. 11 memorials already built in the United States. While stylistically diverse, they share an urgent agenda to remember the victims as national heroes. Commemorating the trauma of Sept. 11 is perplexing in America because there is no particular memorial vocabulary for the subject of trauma (except perhaps that realized in Holocaust memorials). As a result, many memorials appropriate the commemorative codes of 20th-century American war tributes—like the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery—and remember the trauma of terrorism on similarly heroic terms.

Admittedly, some Sept. 11 memorials consist of modest plaques and stones that list the names of the dead and quietly mourn their loss; some are also associated with the “Living Memorials Project,” an initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, and feature groves of trees and tasteful landscaping. But many include pieces of the World Trade Center. New York gave away tons of steel I-beams and other scraps to hundreds of towns anxious to acquire genuine artifacts from Ground Zero. Justifying his city’s request for a piece of the Twin Towers, the mayor of Lake Charles, La., remarked, “Why wouldn’t we? Sept. 11 didn’t just happen in New York; it happened to America.” Obtaining debris from both the World Trade Center (two 12-foot steel beams) and the Pentagon (a 700-pound slab of limestone), he explained to New York magazine that “these pieces of history are visible reminders of the tragedy of Sept. 11” and that his town would “use them as symbols of the strength, determination and resolve which unites us as one nation, and of our dedication to the principles of liberty and justice for all people.”

For many Americans, the mangled remains of the Twin Towers are potent cultural touchstones that embody national pain and sacrifice and thereby assume the sacrosanct dimensions of holy relics. “Sometimes it takes a physical reminder to convey the spiritual feeling you have for an incident,” said Martinez, Calif., Mayor Mark Ross, who secured a few pieces of World Trade Center steel for his small town. “It speaks to your soul.” Some Sept. 11 relics have been expressly consecrated. Chunks of I-beams acquired by Albuquerque’s Sacred Heart Church were blessed with holy oil by its Roman Catholic bishop. Symbols of loss and sorrow, these venerated artifacts are also informed by narratives of national rage and revenge. As the designers of Austin's Texas State Cemetery September 11 Memorial forcefully put it, “We want people to feel the relics that were washed in the blood of the innocents. We want people to recognize the horror, understand the sorrow, the righteous wrath, the resolve and remembrance.”

In Austin and elsewhere, the sacralization of Sept. 11 relics sanctions the war on terror. At a 2003 Kid Rock concert for U.S. troops in Iraq, a piece of “recovered metal” from the World Trade Center was passed among soldiers who, one observer relates, “lunged at the opportunity to touch the steel that symbolized what so many of them felt was the purpose of their mission.” Similarly, at a prowar rally held near Ground Zero a month after U.S. Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, New York Gov. George Pataki told the crowd, “Let’s melt it down. Let’s bring it to New York and let’s put it in one of the girders that’s going to rise over here as a symbol of the rebuilding of New York and the rebuilding of America.” As he declared, “The war started here on September 11, 2001.” Multiple memorials are framed by merged narratives of Sept. 11 and the war on terror. Fusing sacred relics of Sept. 11 with notions of unity, innocence and sacrifice, such memorials justify the retaliatory wrath of the United States and pointedly frame the memory and meaning of Sept. 11 in terms of righteous American military response.

While some memorials use minimalism to propagate such nationalistic fervor, others are figurative, couched in an aesthetic of verisimilitude that legitimates their reverential and romantic narratives as authentic history. A precisely modeled bronze sculpture of a Sept. 11 rescue dog features a dramatically posed German shepherd on an I-beam, outfitted in protective vest and booties, intently searching for survivors in World Trade Center rubble. Erected on the campus of New York’s Farmingdale State University, the eight-foot sculpture includes recovered materials from Ground Zero and commemorates the heroic “willingness and loyalty” of Sept. 11 rescue personnel, human and animal. Likewise, We Shall Never Forget in Pennsauken, N.J., features bronze figures of a stockbroker on a cell phone, a fireman, police officer, emergency medical technician and rescue dog, all posed on a pedestal featuring the words “hope,” “bravery” and “peace.” A local newspaper quotes the artist as calling the piece a “tribute” rather than a “memorial,” a portrait of “heroism rather than grief.” Walkways around the memorial are made of “signature pavers” ($95 each) that provide “an opportunity for you to express your respect and love not only for all those who gave their lives on September 11, 2001, but also for those heroes in your life, family or town who have displayed exceptional caring and courage.”

By contrast, consider Tumbling Woman, a larger-than-life-size bronze of a naked woman in perpetual free fall that Eric Fischl sculpted to honor a friend who had worked on the North Tower’s 106th floor. Intended for temporary public display on Rockefeller Center’s lower level, Tumbling Woman was seen for just eight days (in September 2002) before it was screened off and then removed for being “shameful” and “exploitative.” In a New York Times Op-Ed titled “A Memorial That’s True to Sept. 11,” Fischl observed, “The experience [of Sept. 11] led me to think about what constitutes an appropriate expression for tragedy. As an artist and an American, one question still preoccupies me: If we cannot face what happened, how can we move past it?” Yet his realistic portrait of vulnerability and loss, and the actual circumstances of death for many in the Twin Towers, was deemed aberrant in a post-Sept. 11 America that prefered national narratives of heroic rescue and survival.

One of the many terms popularized by Sept. 11 was first responders. They became the heroes and the focus of gratitude. As Elaine Tyler May notes in September 11 in History, contemporary anxieties about national security have not only “created new heroes among fire fighters and law enforcement officials” but have revitalized Cold War gender constructions of “heroic men and dependent women.” One-third of those who died in the World Trade Center were female, a number that includes several female first responders. But most memorials, including many dedicated to firefighters and the all-male cast in We Shall Never Forget, reify “an image of reinvigorated manhood.” In a time of war on terror, that image is hardly surprising; like the “standing soldier” Civil War memorials produced in the latter decades of the 19th century, Sept. 11 memorials featuring first responders help inspire patriotic fervor.

They also embody national narratives of heroic sacrifice—of spilling blood for America. Freedom’s Flame, a memorial proposed in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., exemplifies blood sacrifice, whereby such patriotic sacrificial imperatives as dying for the flag are naturalized as fundamental facets of national purpose and identity. Featuring a 35-foot wall set on a round platform and wrapped by exit stairs filled with victims (moving down) and firefighters (moving up), Freedom’s Flame is oriented so that each Sept. 11 at precisely 8:45 a.m., a symbolic shadow falls across its façade. As its mission statement reads, “The supreme sacrifice of the men and women dedicated to public safety and the victims of the World Trade Center Attack, when consumed by freedom’s flame only serve to steel the resolve and strengthen the character of America.”

The blood sacrifice of American victims of terrorism is memorialized, too, by Congress: In 2003, the House passed the True American Heroes Act, which awarded Congressional gold medals to every government employee who died in the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, and every passenger and crew member on Flight 93. In 2005, Illinois Congressman Mark Kirk introduced the “American Heroes Act,” which authorized a national statue commemorating Flight 93 and 50 additional “American hero statues,” one from every state in the nation, to be displayed in the vastly expanded gallery space of the new underground U.S. Capitol visitor center. This veneration of American victims as heroes and victimhood itself as a state of being is concomitant with post-Sept. 11 efforts to represent the U.S. as an invincible force. However problematic, not just because it diminishes truly heroic acts and accomplishments but because it denies the historical realities of victimization, it is a dominant national security narrative. In both political and memorial cultures, those killed by terrorism on Sept. 11 are not remembered as murder victims but as the price all Americans must pay to defend their way of life.

Flight 93’s permanent memorial is guided by the phrase “A common field one day. A field of honor forever.” The Flight 93 National Memorial is an immense, $57 million project that circles the crash site and occupies 2,200 acres. Yet speculation persists about what passengers and crew actually said and did during their doomed flight. “Let’s roll,” the legendary call to arms announced by one passenger and used by President Bush to justify U.S. bombing in Afghanistan, was probably, the Sept. 11 Commission later found, the phrase “roll it” and referred to moving an aisle-blocking airplane service cart.

None of this, however, has altered now legendary accounts of Flight 93’s “collective acts of courage and sacrifice,” popularized by books, movies (like United 93 in 2006) and TV miniseries. The fact that 40 people were murdered and four others killed themselves in a suicidal act of terrorism is overwritten by a national narrative of heroic patriotism. In a speech at the Shanksville site on Sept. 11, 2002, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said “America is grateful” to the 40 victims who “won the first battle” in the war on terror. He added, according to CNN, “Faced with the most frightening circumstances one could possibly imagine, they met the challenge like citizen soldiers, like Americans.” Not all of those murdered on Flight 93 were American, yet they are remembered as American heroes. Ridge’s use of the phrase “citizen soldiers” aligns them with the U.S. troops celebrated in Stephen Ambrose’s World War II popular history of the same name and similarly casts the “war on terror” as a “good war.”

Obviously, heroic response to danger—rather than passive acceptance—is a preferred personal, and national, narrative. Still, however virtuous heroism is, sweeping assumptions of collective national courage undermine the actual heroic acts of individuals and reinforce assumptions of blameless national innocence. There is nothing heroic about being murdered in a terrorist bombing or aboard a hijacked airplane. To suggest otherwise is to spin the murder of innocents into the martyrdom of self-sacrificing citizens and to justify their deaths as the highest call of American patriotism—which is, of course, how terrorism memorials operate.

Yet memorial culture itself isn’t this straightforward; this is memorial mania. Battles over New York’s Sept. 11 memorial, for example, are beset by confusing and competing notions of what to remember and how to manage those memories. Initially, Sept. 11 generated a sweeping sense of national unity. Glued to their TVs and their computer screens, Americans were uniformly unable to stop looking at repeatedly visualized images of crashing planes and dark clouds of smoke. Such images shaped a national narrative of fear that cast all Americans as traumatized participants in a three-act performance: first as the victims and/or survivors of an attack on the nation; second, as rescuers responding to the tragedy through an enormous collective demonstration of help and generosity (offers of aid, of money, of blood); and finally, as flag-waving patriots vowing revenge. Yet even as that third act was being staged, national unity began to disintegrate as some Americans began to ask why Sept. 11 had happened and questioned such governmental responses as the quickly manufactured Patriot Act. Today, while the shocking imagery of Sept. 11 remains fixed (and fetishized) in American national consciousness, there is no single shared narrative about Sept. 11 itself, which means that its representation is fiercely contested by those who feel that their stories and feelings are being neglected.

Consider the conflict over race and representation regarding New York’s first responders. Early plans involved commemorating the 343 firefighters who died at the World Trade Center with a $180,000, 19-foot bronze based on newspaper journalist Tom Franklin’s photo of three of them hoisting an American flag at Ground Zero—Sept. 11’s version of Iwo Jima’s iconic flag-planting. But these plans were scuttled because the proposed sculpture represented them on multiracial terms (white, Hispanic and black), rather than as the three white guys they really were (like 94 percent of New York’s fire department). Bombarded with complaints of “political correctness” and “rewriting history,” the New York Fire Department and donor/developer Bruce Ratner, who had said he wanted to pay tribute to all the firefighters who died on Sept. 11 (including 24 people of color), withdrew the commission. As the attorney hired by the three firemen put it, the heroic trio was “disappointed” that the memorial had “become something that is political as opposed to historical,” as was reported in the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post.

Becoming something crassly commercial, however, was just fine. The vast merchandizing of Franklin’s photo drew little or no debate, save the haggling between lawyers for the three firefighters and Franklin’s newspaper over issues of intellectual property and profit. Reproduced on T-shirts, teddy bears, snowboards, Christmas ornaments, humidors, pocket watches, pocket knives, bank checks, jigsaw puzzles, pajamas and phone cards, the image was also recreated by Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in a multimedia extravaganza called “Tribute to the Heroes of Sept. 11,” which opened in 2002 in Times Square and then traveled to several theme parks. For high-end customers, $10,000, 40-inch bronzes titled “To Lift a Nation” are available.

Heated public debates about terrorism memorials—whether of firefighters in New York or “Islamo-fascist” crescents in Shanksville—are indicative of a larger national pathology about Sept. 11itself. Memorializing Sept. 11 is beset by the nation’s inability to conceptualize Sept. 11 on discursive rather than fractious and self-aggrandizing terms. Americans do want to visibly mourn the victims of terrorism. A 2005 survey commissioned by the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation showed that 94 percent of those polled felt a Sept. 11 memorial should be built at the site of the World Trade Center, and 65 percent felt every American should visit it once it was built. Perhaps the solution lies in memorials that hold a presence for their subjects without reifying tropes of national innocence, blood sacrifice, military reprisal and racism—but that is a subject for another article.

Erika Doss is a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame. This article was adapted from a 2007 talk given at Goucher College and her forthcoming book Memorial Mania: Self, Nation, and the Culture of Commemoration in Contemporary America.