Christopher Hamner: We're going to look at a couple of monuments today, and I want to approach it from this idea of what is it telling us about the moment and the way that Americans are struggling with their memory of a particular event. Think about the Mall. There will be a thousand people passing through Air and Space between 9am and 9:10 this morning; so in 10 minutes, that's a career's worth of people who may be getting all their history out of just going through those exhibits. The World War II Memorial, which we're going to visit in the afternoon, gets 4.4 million people per year. So in terms of shaping the way people think about events and history, this is really powerful stuff. And I think it's important to think about, well, who made this? And what did they make it for? And what were the circumstances under which this was put up and why does it look the way it looks? For my money, the one that we're going to look at first is the single best, most interesting, most fascinating memorial in the entire city. It's the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial. What makes it so interesting is that you can walk past it and only get a tiny, tiny piece of what's going on. You have to really study…you have to spend a little time kind of engaging the monument to kind of get the full experience. And one of the thinks that's so cool [is] that you can talk about it as a piece of history [and] you can also talk about it as a piece of art. And this is one of the neater sculptures, both on this side and on the other side. The sculpture is so well done that if you walk around it, it almost seems to move. You see different things at different spots as you kind of make the semicircle. So maybe we should start there. Just kind of start here—and just like we've been talking about, you know, images, music, all sorts of things that you can read closely—look closely for the detail and try to figure out what's going on here. Teacher 1: He's riding one of the horses. Each one. Teacher 2: There's two riders. Teacher 3: Are they both shot? It looks like this guy's shot over here; he's shot here. This guy's avoiding being shot just like these guys, they're ducking, they're using them as shields. Christopher Hamner: Alright, if you just look at it—if you're just standing here for example and you just take the most cursory look at it what does it look like? If you only spend 40 seconds like most tourists, you take a shot from here and you move on, what do you get out of it? Teacher 4: It's a wagon, going from one place to another. It's moving. Christopher Hamner: It's kind of the heroic—it looks like a standard—you've got the horses rearing back, it's soldiers, it's kind of heroic, there's a guy leaning back, he's got the U.S. artillery flag. It looks like a pretty standard war memorial. When you take a little more time to look at it, what's going on? What is it, first of all? We've got a bunch of guys on horses— Multiple Teachers: It's artillery. Christopher Hamner: It's horse-drawn artillery, it's got an artillery caisson, it appears to be moving up to the front someplace. Everybody got that, right? What's going on? Teacher 5: They're stuck in the mud. Teacher 6: They're under fire. Teacher 7: Yeah, they're in battle. Teacher 5: I got stuck in the mud and cold, suffering. Teacher 8: And this guy looks like he's getting shot. And it looks like they're avoiding being shot. Christopher Hamner: Okay, that's one way to interpret it. One thing, if they were close enough to the front that they were taking fire the battery would probably be disengaged and wheeled in. So it would be rare to get that close. But everybody's kind of gotten the sense that it's in the process of crashing. Right? Let's go around to the other side. What's happening over here? Teacher 9: From this side you can definitely tell that it's more tilted, the part where they're sitting. Christopher Hamner: Okay, so. Teacher 5: The axle is breaking. Christopher Hamner: The axle is snapping; you can see the slack in the tackle there. But notice there's a lot of slack here, they're rearing up, it's in the process of crashing. I mean look at the wheels are akimbo. I think what's happening here is not that these guys are getting shot but, the horses have reared, it's just at this moment—it's full of energy, it's just at this moment where it's about to crash. These guys, I don't know if they're ducking fire of if they're just tired in the back. Especially this guy on the right, I mean, that is just exhaustion in his face. These guys have been towing this thing around for months or years. But they're not even aware that in four tenths of a second the momentum of the artillery case is going to carry them into this huge mess of horseflesh. And these guys are trying to rein in the damage. But, this is a picture of a crash about to happen. Think of how different that is from what you would normally see in a heroic military monument. This isn't a tribute to efficiency, or a tribute to the sheer power of the army, so much as a honest portrayal of how easy it is for things to go wrong. I especially like the guys riding in the back, just the exhaustion there. And think about how atypical that is for a military monument. When do you think this was put up? Teacher 10: After Grant died. Christopher Hamner: Yes! When? So that would cover roughly 130 years. Teacher 10: I was thinking post-World War I. Christopher Hamner: Good! I like that. Post-World War I is a good guess, why? Teacher 10: Because we struggled with modern warfare there and lots of people came home, and Veterans Affairs was formed. Christopher Hamner: That is a great guess, but not correct. That's what's interesting about this. This is pre-First World War by like 20 years, which is really kind of unusual when you think of all the other Civil War statues that we've looked at. We looked at Stonewall Jackson, you know, superhero, Superman, steroids, muscles bulging—that's much more traditional, that's sort of heroic, he looks indestructible, he looks incredibly powerful. This is not indestructible. Teacher: On the right, on the back he's got both of his hands bracing him on the other side like he's getting ready— Christopher Hamner: This is kind of the sense of energy…there's nothing that these guys can do. This is going to go very badly for them in a second or two. And there's a kind of resignation and exhaustion and a realism that is really unusual. You don't normally see a country putting up a military monument that depicts a crash and I think it says something kind of interesting about where the nation was 25 years after the Civil War when they started putting this up. How do we want to remember this event? What are we going to put up? What are we going to show? How are we going to show it? Teacher: Maybe like you were saying, when you really look at war and teach it you should look at the tough side of it and don't glorify it. Like you were saying, it was a struggle, it broke our country apart. Christopher Hamner: I think that's exactly where we're going with this, there's even more interesting stuff on the other side. But think about how unusual that is. And it will become, I think, even clearer as we get to World War II, which does not have this kind of gritty realism to it.

Christopher Hamner: What's the kind of tone of the memorial? Teacher 1: Charge! Teacher 2: The cavalry is making a charge. Christopher Hamner: It's a cavalry charge and it's kind of got those iconic touches: there's the captain in front, he's got his saber up, and they're pointing forward, and there's flags streaming and there's muscles rippling in the horses. It kind of feels like a traditional, heroic celebration. What's going on when you look at it more carefully? Teacher 3: This guy on the side here he's shielding his face. This guy is about to get his day ruined. Christopher Hamner: What's happened to this guy? Teacher 3: His horse is down. Christopher Hamner: His horse has either been hit or has tripped. What is about to happen, what is the story that's going to unfold here? Teacher 4: It's going to be a domino effect. Christopher Hamner: There's a cascade of—the guys in the back are totally unaware of what's happened in front. And the officer leading the charge has got this heroic pose and a heroic look on his face, but is oblivious to the fact that this is, like the other one, kind of in the process of falling apart. What's gonna happen to this guy? Teacher 4: He's going to have his head stepped on. Christopher Hamner: There's a pretty good chance he's gonna be trampled because the horses are going to be unable to stop. That is supposed to represent Shrady, the sculptor, in fact, the face is modeled after his face, which is a kind of odd touch. He didn't live to see the entire thing cast and commissioned. But you've got the same kind of sense that there's energy coming, but if you look closely there is the beginnings of a sort of disaster happening. You have to look for it. If you just step back and say oh, standard cavalry charge, it looks a lot like the heroic monuments you would see at Gettysburg or Antietam; look more carefully and it's kind of brutal realism. Not everybody—the charges didn't always work, the horses fell down. What's going on on the ground in both of them? There's like mud in motion. How many monuments do you recall seeing where there's so much attention to the ground and how nasty—I mean, there's a chopped-down tree trunk on the other side. It recognizes that these Civil War battles didn't happen on a manicured golf course, that they happened in really nasty conditions and there's—it's all in motion too, it's mud that's being kicked up. It's kind of a dirtier, grittier, more realistic version of warfare. This is pre-World War I, and this is really, really different. If you look at most statues of generals, particularly from the Civil War, or a statue of Washington, they're turned out in their general regalia, their officers coats, and their insignia, standing erect and their chests are out—it’s a heroic celebration. This is something different. You get a little bit of that in the front, but it's kind of got this ironic twist in that this glorious charge that he's leading is about to meet with a sort of disastrous end. Teacher 5: I was noticing a few of the other elements that usually you don't see in statues. As you mentioned the mud and the tree back there, but look at the horses' mouths. About three or four of the horses they're exhausted, the tongues are hanging out, especially the one on the far side here. The one on the near side has a wide-open mouth. So they've been charging for a while, this isn't automatically happening, you know, we're not just starting it. Christopher Hamner: That one sort of looks terrified, too. In the horses and on the artillery side there's a sense that they're portraying the fear, which is a real part of the experience, that again you don't normally see. What do you think that the people who put this up, who donated money to it, who designed it, who cast it, who erected it—how do they want you to think about the war? Teacher 6: A more realistic view. Which is kind of before their time. Teacher 7: It's certainly—for me, I'm trying to contextualize it within the end of the Gilded Age and the beginning of imperialism and I'm trying to make sense of it and it doesn't jive with my preconceived notions of what to expect out of a monument during that time. They were in to stuff that was grandiose and heroic; and this is heroic in a very raw way. It's not— Teacherr 5: Raw. Raw, I like that word. Christopher Hamner: If—this should have been erected in 1918 or 1919, right? That would fit in with the narrative of how we understand that people kind of gave up their glorious view of warfare and adapted a more realistic tone. But it doesn't.

Christopher Hamner: Turn around and take a look at U.S. Grant up there. There's some interesting stuff going on with the depiction of Grant, just the way he's portrayed. But there's also the relationship between the two lower pieces, the cavalry on this side and the artillery on the south side and where Grant is located. What do you know about—what is your sort of thumbnail understanding of Grant as a Civil War general. This is after his presidency, which is generally regarded as something of a disappointment. So he's depicted here in his more successful incarnation as a general. You can kind of work backwards from there and one of the reasons that Grant accepted the surrender is that he was the victorious general, he is the general after that incredibly torturous process of trial and error, plugging these guys in and we cover this a little bit in the summer, that there was this revolving parade of generals who had been disastrous—you know, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, these guys who just could not get it done. And then in the summer of 1863 Grant distinguishes himself at Vicksburg, comes west, and it's Grant who is the head of the armies in the last two years of the war. And who finally grinds down the army of Northern Virginia and forces its surrender. How does he do that? Teacher 1: He picked up on the war of attrition. Christopher Hamner: The thing that Grant did differently that none of the generals previous to him did—So many of those generals were about maneuver and about trying to get behind Lee's army or trying to get between Lee's army and Richmond and trying to win the war without fighting a really bloody battle. Grant was one of the first to embrace a more modern sensibility that said you cannot win a war in this day by capturing the enemy capital, you have to win the war by destroying the enemy army and they only way you can do that is by meeting it on the battlefield and fighting it. Remember the Union had that huge advantage in its, the manpower pool it could draw on, its productive capacity; and the South didn't. The South had a much smaller population and they had much less capacity to produce ammunition and weapons. What had happened in the first two years of the war in a general way is that there that would be a big battle and both armies would kind of pull back. That allowed the South to keep fighting for a long time. Grant is the first commanding officer who really understood that they were going to have to fight them and keep fighting them. Remember when we did the campaigns of 1864; there is just horribly bloody battle after horribly bloody battle from May to July of 1864. They are fighting a massive, deadly engagement every couple of days, this is the Wilderness qne Spotsylvania Courthouse. There were more than 60,000 Union causalities in a six-week period during that point. That’s—they're fighting a major battle every couple of days. Remember, we were talking about the bottom-up experience, what it's like not just to be a soldier, but to be the wife of a soldier, or the mother of a soldier, someone on the home front, and imagine what it's like to get that newspaper every other day and to flip right to the back page, which was called the "Butcher's Bill," and to read over the individual names and be praying that it's not your loved one that's going to be listed there. And that's kind of an interesting contrast to our 20th-century experience. We do a lot of the same things today, but in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts four deaths in a day is a horrible tragedy—and it is—but imagine that there are 400 deaths every day and that it just keeps going on and that there are 4,000 deaths some day. It's a kind of warfare that reaches into Union homes, homes in the North, in a way that was really unprecedented. Grant was extraordinarily unpopular. They began to get a real kind of respect for Grant—who was the total antithesis of a lot of the generals they had had before. McClellan was a little Napoleon, he was always very turned out in polished brass and very much looked the part of a general. You can see that Grant doesn't. A lot of the soldiers saw him as someone that was more relatable. At the same time this is a guy who's continually plunging them into battle. In the spring of 1864 it's not at all clear that that's going to have a successful conclusion.

Christopher Hamner: What's coming across here about him as a general? What is the tone or what adjectives would you use to describe how he's being portrayed. Teacher 1: Alone. Christopher Hamner: Where do you get that? Teacher 1: Well, obviously there's no one else up there with him. You just see the sight of him looking straight, he's in his own thoughts, his own world, he's battling the elements, the wind is blowing past him, the horse's tail is swept; yet he's going to stand fast, like he's determined to have whatever he has in his mind fulfilled. Christopher Hamner: There's like three or four things we can dig into there. First in terms of him being alone, look at how separate he is from the troops that he's leading. He is, what is that, 30 feet? Maybe more? He is physically separated from them; he is also 30 feet above them. He's away from them on this axis and also on the vertical axis. Teacher 2: He could theoretically have been placed in one side or the other in terms of the way that they portray him in his dress. Teacher 3: All of these guys on both sides they don't look like they're wearing like summer—they look bundled up like the weather is bad. I mean, the mud, the rain. Christopher Hamner: And Grant's got that going on too. The adjectives that you guys threw out—resolute. But he's lonely up there. And he's not interacting with the soldiers. Teacher 4: He's in the middle of it all; he's in the weather. You have the same type of weather theme being done, but he's still somehow above it all. Christopher Hamner: Literally above it! Right? He's kind of figuratively above this but he's also literally above it. There's a kind of sense of determination, he's got a fist on his hip. You get this sense of how resolute people wanted to imagine him as. This is a guy who understood that there was not a way to win the war except to do a lot of fighting and an incredible amount of dying, and you can kind of see the weight of that on his shoulders. Teacher 3: He sort of famously internalized a lot of the—I feel like you can see that, his shoulders are kind of hunched forward. Teacher 2: He's not postured the way that you see Stonewall Jackson. Teacher 5: He seems kind of hunched forward. Christopher Hamner: And remember, they had 20 years to think about this. They did not decide to raise the money for the statue on Monday, throw it together on Thursday, and commission it on Friday. There were 20 years of planning and artist models that they work a lot in clay on miniature before they cast something in bronze. There were all sorts of different potential ways to portray Grant. They didn't have to do it the way that they did it. And unlike other kinds of historical texts, where you can say sure you can change that, it's not written in stone—this is written in stone and cast in iron! Teacher 6: One thing that's striking me is that he's also surrounded by four lions. And typically what is a lion known as? The king of the jungle. I think that's speaking out to me right there, too. Christopher Hamner: Well, and then there's something else we haven't talked about, there's the sort of relief that's on the pedestal. Can you guys make out on both sides? Teacher 3: The cavalry again. And then the infantry on this side. Christopher Hamner: The soldiers are present, they're there. And again, that's a little more of a realistic depiction of the soldiers. Teacher 1: Thinking about both sides of the relief, they could have put that relief anywhere. But look where they put it. And what is the relief supporting? Grant. So the underlying message is his men supported him and his decision that he's making on that horse right now. Christopher Hamner: And you notice it's got this kind of realism that I think is really unprecedented, particularly for the time and it's still pretty rare. But, was it Brian pointed out the lions, there's the kind of marble pedestal. It's not the Korean Memorial where you can actually walk around the figures, it still has these nods to more traditional, classical form. But it also incorporates the stuff that's new and I think that makes it just so complicated and so interesting. There's a series of choices here and I think they tell us something about where the nation was at the close of the 19th century and remembering this war and figuring out where it fit into our national narrative.

Sarah Jencks: First take: What are some of the things you notice, both about the content, what he’s saying, and also about the way he goes about saying it? Just a quick phrase or what words or phrases stick out to you here? Teacher: Well, there’s some old Biblical references. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, he calls on the Bible a lot, absolutely Teacher: That’s strange for us in the 21st century Sarah Jencks: And he also, it’s clear he assumes people know that those quotes are from the Bible, right, because he doesn’t say these are Bible quotes, he just does it. What else? Teacher: He brings sort of a why he said some things in the first inaugural address and how this is going to be different, lays out and prepares for what he’s going to say. Sarah Jencks: He definitely starts off by saying this is a new day, this is a different time. Absolutely. What else? What other things do you notice in here? Yeah. Teacher: Malice towards none is sort of the start of the Reconstruction. Sarah Jencks: So yeah. So at the very end of the speech, he’s definitely moving forward and he’s setting a tone for what his expectations are. Absolutely. What else? Teacher: I think he reaffirms the notion that we’ve seen since the Emancipation Proclamation, that originally the war was about preserving the Union, but now he’s very clear that it was about ending slavery. Sarah Jencks: Absolutely. Yeah, he really states it. He even goes further than that. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. What else? What else do you notice? Anything about the structure? Teacher: I’m just struck by the rather severe comment that God wills the retribution. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, there’s nothing light or casual about this middle paragraph. Anything else? Okay, let’s try to take a second pass at this, and as we’re doing it, I want you to think about those things, about the references, the Biblical references, and let’s also—we’ll pay attention to these different paragraphs. He starts by saying it’s a new day, then he goes into talking about what it was like in the country at the beginning of the Civil War in the next paragraph, and then he goes into this really intense paragraph about slavery and about why this war—he’s got an idea why this war happened. And then moving us towards post-war times. And just quickly I want to remind you, do you all know what the day was that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated? Do you remember? [Murmuring answers] Sarah Jencks: April 14th. He was assassinated on the 14th, he died on the 15th. And what is this date right here? March 4th. So it’s how much earlier? Yeah, just like a month and a half. It’s not much. He hardly had a second term. Teachers reading: Fellow-Countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. Sarah Jencks: Okay, let’s stop for a second and talk about some of the things he’s doing in this first paragraph. It’s funny, I’ve been doing this for three years, and I just noticed a new thing, so what, what are some of the—he’s very skilled in the way he’s structuring this. What are some of the things that he’s doing in this first paragraph. How is he—what is he trying to do as he introduces this speech? What do you see? Teacher: Well, ’high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.’ Like, he has a plan, he’s not quite sure how it’s going to go and how it’s going to be accepted. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, and, you know, that’s the part that I just noticed something for the first time. He doesn’t ever say in this speech, and the Union is going to win, which was clear by then. It was clear by March 4th that the Union was going to win. Why wouldn’t he say that? Why might he choose not to say that in this speech? Given what else he knows? Teacher: He feels he’s a president of all the states. Sarah Jencks: He doesn’t want to stick it to the South. He’s specifically saying no prediction is ventured, I’m not going to go there. It’s an interesting way for him to start this. Teacher: So he’s already thinking about healing. Sarah Jencks: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, we’re not going to start this speech by saying we’re winning, we’re doing it. Teacher: Well, he even has sense before, ’reasonably satisfactory,’ he doesn’t go jump and say that we’ve won, pretty much, it’s very— Sarah Jencks: I just heard, I’m sorry, I don’t know—yes. Yeah. And very measured. He’s very careful how he does that. Teachers reading: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. Sarah Jencks: Okay, let’s stop again. Um, he’s still talking about the previous inauguration and the beginning of the war here, and he does a lot of this ’then and now.’ If you notice, in the first paragraph, he says ’then the statement seemed fitting and proper, now, we don’t need it anymore.’ So, what do you notice about this paragraph, what are some of the things you notice about what he’s saying at this paragraph? I’m going to say one—are there any hands back there that I’m missing? Yes. Teacher: I was just going to say he’s very balanced. He’s not placing blame. And, you know, in these last few sentences, he states what one party did, then what the other party did, and then response one party did, and the other party did. He’s very—it gives a very balanced perspective. Sarah Jencks: And what’s the—this is just a little grammar thing that I sometimes do with kids when I’m looking at this. In that very last clause of the paragraph, who’s taking the action? Teacher: The war itself. Sarah Jencks: Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? It’s not a person on either side. It’s the war is the subject. Teacher: And he also does a similar thing by saying that insurgent agents, he’s not saying the whole South, the government, you know, or the leaders of the South, like agents, like I know it’s not everyone, it’s just these few. Sarah Jencks: And he also says in that second sentence, notice the way he says all dreaded it, all sought to avert it. Nobody wanted war. Teacher: I think he does nail, though, who he feels started it. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, yeah. It’s true. Teacher: Makes it clear. Sarah Jencks: It’s true. He says one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive. And the other would accept it. No, you’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely right. I mean, he’s not saying nobody’s responsible here, but he is really being careful about the way he phrases it. Um. We’re ready to keep going. Teacher: Okay. Sarah Jencks: Okay. Teachers reading: One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Sarah Jencks: Okay, I’m going to stop us here, because this is a really long paragraph. What’s he doing here? He’s moving on from talking about what happened at the beginning and who was responsible. He’s going a little deeper here. What’s he doing? Teacher: He’s kind of always said that the cause of the war was to save the Union, but here he’s saying that even though we always said it was to save the Union, we knew that this was slavery and this institute had something to do with it. Sarah Jencks: And who knew? According to him? Teacher: Everybody. Sarah Jencks: Everybody. He does it again. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of war. He’s not letting anyone off the hook here. What else? Do you recognize any language here, from other studies of slavery or anything? Teacher: A peculiar institution. Sarah Jencks: Exactly. A peculiar and powerful interest. Absolutely. And I think it’s really interesting the way he says to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object to which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war. I love that image, his use of that word, to rend the Union, because I always think of sort of tearing fabric or something. Teacher: He’s also in the next part of that sentence talking about, you know, I didn’t say that I was going to abolish slavery at the beginning, I was not—I was going to let the states deal with it, the territory. He says, hey, you know. Sarah Jencks: Other "than to restrict the territorial enlargement." Part of what I like about this speech also is that it sort of like gives you like, the whole history of, you know, the early part of the 19th century. He addresses so many issues that you can then make connections to. Okay, let’s keep going. Teachers reading: Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Sarah Jencks: Okay, stop for just a second. What is he saying here? He’s addressing something that happened in January 1865 here. The cause of the conflict should cease before the conflict itself should cease. Does anybody know? Do you remember from down— Teachers: The Emancipation Proclamation. Sarah Jencks: The Emancipation Proclamation, yes, that was in 1863. January 1865, the Congress passed the 13th Amendment. And so it hadn’t been ratified yet, it wasn’t ratified until December 1865, but it had been passed by Congress. And so he lived to see that happen, and that was yet another sign that it was—we were in the endgame.

Teachers reading: Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Sarah Jencks: I love that sentence because the kids often, they think, they’re not used to these words being used in such a powerful way. A result less fundamental and astounding. Just changing the whole country. Keep going. Teachers reading: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Sarah Jencks: Okay, let’s stop again. So he’s making a transition here from determining what the cause of the war was to what? What’s going on here? Teacher: It’s in God’s hands. Sarah Jencks: It’s in God’s hands. Where do you see that? Teacher: It’s just the [unintelligible] that I’m getting from the actual—the whole Bible and everything else, it’s just kinda like this is fate now. Sarah Jencks: He’s doing something more here with that. The way he was using 'all' before, he’s using—do you see he’s using that here as well? What words does he use here to bring people together? Teacher: Neither. Sarah Jencks: Neither and also—does anybody see anything else? Both. Yep, neither and both. He’s bringing everybody—he’s saying, we may not be seeing this from the same perspective, but we’re all seeing it together. Teacher: And I take that both sides here have lost. Neither side is jumping for joy. Sarah Jencks: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And he really is bringing everybody together. Let’s talk about that dig for a second. What’s his dig here? Teacher: That the prayers of both could not be answered. Sarah Jencks: The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. They could—we can’t—we’re not—we’re not going to be satisfied. What’s he—his previous sentence, though, may seem strange. Teacher: Yeah. Sarah Jencks: What’s going on in that sentence? Anybody want to read it aloud again? Somebody just go ahead. Go ahead. Teacher: Uh, okay. ’It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.’ Teacher: Is that a dig against slavery, then? Teacher: Yeah. Sarah Jencks: What’s he—how do you take that? Teacher: You’re making money from someone else’s work. Sarah Jencks: Yeah. But who do you think he’s talking to there? Teacher: I think to the South. Sarah Jencks: You think he’s talking—okay, tell me more about that. Teacher: Slaveowners. Sarah Jencks: Slaveowners. Okay. And the workforce. Think about the Northerner here, for a second. Why might that sentence—and I’m just thinking of this right now, so don’t think I’m so far ahead of you here. Why might that sentence be addressed to a Northern audience? Teacher: He’s critical in that the Northerners really didn’t maybe speak up more loudly against it, that they even have labor issues themselves. Sarah Jencks: Remember he quotes the Bible here, though. He says it may seem strange that slavery exists, but, let us judge not, that we be not judged. So yeah, he’s bringing up issues of labor in the North, and he’s saying hey, you Northerners, you abolitionists, you may think those Southerners are pieces of white trash, but let us judge not so that we be not judged. You’re not God. It’s interesting because he’s got many many audiences here, and we’re going to be playing with that in the minute. Teacher: I was thinking similar to the reference that he used, let he who casts the first stone be without sin, so, you know, it seems like another Biblical reference or reference to that part of the Bible. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s keep going. Let’s go. Teacher: Woe— Sarah Jencks: My apologies for cutting you off. Teacher: It’s okay. ’Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ Sarah Jencks: What does this mean? What does this Biblical quote mean? Let’s break it down, because it’s not an easy one. ’Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ Teacher: I mean, to go back to the Biblical language, he’s saying something along the line of it’s a shame that we have to live in a world of sin, this is a sinful world, so we should feel sorry for ourselves, and this is a place where sin is going to happen, but God help the sucker who commits the sin. Teacher: Yeah. Teacher: Bad things happen, but this could have been avoided. Sarah Jencks: Right, and also you’d better not be the one who’s actually doing it. Yeah, absolutely, and what he’s doing, it almost looks here like he’s setting up the South, but then let’s see what comes next. Teacher: You wonder if there’s a little confusion in the speech. He starts out saying it’s about saving the Union, then he ends up saying, well, this is really about retribution for slavery. Which is it? Sarah Jencks: It’s the big question of the Civil War, isn’t it? Teacher: It strikes me, realistically, you can’t have it both ways, even though he wants it that way. Teacher: Couldn’t you read it, though, as more of a superficial understanding— Teacher: Superficial is my middle name. Teacher: No, no, I mean, the whole thing about preserving the Union, that sort of, you know, the reading of it, initially, but then, you know, we spent the whole week studying Lincoln and how he agonized over this stuff in his summer retreat and then at a deeper level, he’s looking for a more meaningful way to frame the whole thing, so that it’s not necessarily contradictory, but just deeper readings of the same situation. Sarah Jencks: I would throw out to you also that Abraham Lincoln was the consummate politician. He was a great leader. That’s separate from his having been a great politician. And that he was very conscious of the laws of the land and the way that he handled this war in the first half of the war. And in the second half, he started to become much—he was looking for a deeper meaning. For himself, with the death of his son and the death of all of these soldiers, whom he was mourning. And he really started drawing on—looking for a deeper meaning in a different way. So that doesn’t answer your question. Teacher: Back in the 19th century, didn’t most Americans, or at least, you know, the elites believe that democracy was a divine act? I mean, Reagan wasn’t the first person to say that United States was a city on the hill. You know, you’ve got Melville[?] and all these other guys referring to it that way, so for Abraham Lincoln, couldn’t that also be the case. That to preserve the Union was to keep God’s purposes, God’s will going on Earth, because as long as democracy was there, justice could be done. Sarah Jencks: That’s really interesting. Yeah, and that was, it was Winthrop, it was that early on, the city on the hill concept started. Teacher: Remember that, yesterday, talking about how the Declaration of Independence was the apple, yeah, the Constitution is the rain. Goes right back to that. Teachers reading: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Teacher: I mean, this is what brings the whole thing full circle. From the introduction, what Mike said about it started out trying to preserve the Union. Yes, slavery was a major part of it, but, I think, you know, events change people. You’ll have a belief when you’re a younger person and then as you get older and as experiences start to mold and shape you, you start to—especially having a child or something else—it makes you think differently. And this war, with the loss of his own child and the loss of all these mother’s children, changed him. So he needed to get back to a place that brings us back together. Sarah Jencks: I see also that he’s using this whole Biblical kind of exegesis almost to set up what he says in the last paragraph. Because if none of us are responsible, then we have to move forward, we have to strive on with malice towards none and charity for all. We can’t hold it against anyone. Teacher: Especially when he said back a few sentences before that both sides have committed sins during the course of this war. Teacher: Yet does he really say that nobody’s responsible, or does he say that we’re all responsible. I sort of get the sense he’s saying that we’re all responsible. Sarah Jencks: Yes, I agree with you. I totally agree with you. We are all responsible. Teacher: But he still names the insurgents. Sarah Jencks: Yes. Teacher: We’re still pointing the finger somewhere. Teacher: I still wonder, to what degree does Lincoln himself take personal responsibility for all this tremendous loss. I mean, in the first inaugural, I lot of you are remembering, he said, I’ve taken an oath to preserve the Union. So I’m this passive agent, essentially, and I must follow my oath. But of course he didn’t have to follow his oath exactly as he saw it. He had other choices. Teacher: And I think— Teacher: What do you think? Teacher: He wasn’t passive. You know, he used the Constitution to his benefit and that other times he expanded powers in it and stretched things and kind of toyed with it in order to achieve a goal. And you’re saying he’s a master politician, he wasn’t just—he wasn’t, in my opinion, this ’I’m a moral person that’s just following my oath,’ he was very deliberate in what he did, he was very calculated in what he did, and the way things that he followed in the Constitution, things that he chose to kind of stretch a little bit, it was all for his kind of for his goal to win the war. Teacher: Very Machiavellian. Ends justify means. Sarah Jencks: One of the phrases that I find really powerful from—I don’t know if you all are ever trying to make these connections, I can’t imagine you’re not, but I’m always looking for those threads that sort of go through the 19th century or follow from the Declaration, you know, the different political threads, through to the Civil War and beyond, and Lincoln was a great follower of Daniel Webster, the Whig politician. And one of Webster’s phrases, or his sayings, which is actually on the wall of the National Constitution Center if you ever get to go up there in Philadelphia, it’s ’one country, one Constitution, one destiny.’ And they were struggling with these same issues in, you know, the middle and the early part of the 19th century, too. It didn’t just happen. Teacher: [Unintelligible]—time we were a country— Sarah Jencks: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. And so Webster said that. Well, if you go down to the coat in the lobby, Lincoln had those words, ’one country, one destiny,’ embroidered in his overcoat. Literally, an eagle of the Union, with the words ’one country, one destiny,’ embroidered in his overcoat.

Sarah Jencks: So what I’d like to do is to start off by looking at some of the things, specific things that might have been, you know, when we hear presidential speeches and other speeches today, commentators and even regular people can see things, and then you think, oh my gosh, I see they said that, that’s going to be—that’s a buzzword or there’s that kernel of an idea, it’s going to keep going forward, I know it’s going to be an issue. And so the idea here is to partner up and to look for, to try to articulate, we’ve talked a lot about these, but the theory, the sort of proposition about the war that Lincoln makes, and then, secondly, what the policy is that he’s proposing. He makes a statement of a proposition of what the war was all about, and then he proposes a policy. Teacher: These two people get along fantastically—this person didn’t want to fight the war at all. This person didn’t want a war that would disrupt the institution of cotton and slave [uncertain], because his livelihood would be Teacher: Right— Teacher: But he could always turn a blind eye to how the cotton was being produced. Teacher: Alright, so the theory we’re going with is that there’s blame to go around, right? Teacher: Right, and the South is not going to be punished. And I guess that’s what she was getting to, in order to understand what happens next, why Lincoln’s assassination was a tragedy is because we know that Reconstruction went in a million different directions. Teacher: The war is God punishing us for slavery. Teacher: No, all parties are [unintelligible]. Teacher: Right. Because, I mean, he’s really not talking a lot here about the war to preserve the Union, to preserve states’ rights, he’s really focusing on the slavery issues a lot more. Sarah Jencks: I call these the POV cards, your point-of-view cards. I want to first ask you, does anybody feel particularly good about what you wrote, not to show off, but you feel like you could—you’d be willing to share with us either your theory or your policy and/or did it bring up any questions that anyone wants to raise with the— Teacher: We kind of felt that people of the North who really felt that they were sort of fighting to fight would see this as controversial. What do you mean we shared the blame, you know, we don’t have slavery, we’re trying to preserve the Union, and now you’re telling us that we’re partly to blame. I think maybe that’s where some of the controversy lies. Sarah Jencks: Interesting. Okay. Yes. Teacher: We also felt that neither the North, kind of going on what Nancy said, that neither the North nor South is going to be happy with his plan of no blame and that, you know, he wanted to move quickly, like the South now is going to be forced to join the Union, which they’re going to be upset about, and the North is going to be angry that they’re not, you know, held as this victorious winner, that he’s really got enemies on both sides now. Teacher: Northerners don’t want to accept Southerners, Southerners don’t want to accept Northerners, and that 10% loyalty cutoff[?] of which 90% of the population in that Confederate state doesn’t want to be there. Sarah Jencks: Did any—I don’t know how much you all got to talk about or you read about in the basement museum the election of 1864. What were Lincoln’s chances? What happened? Can anybody sort of revisit that? Teacher: I think it depended on victory. Teacher: Yeah. Sarah Jencks: I’m sorry, say it again? Teacher: Well, it depended on victory. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, military victory. So, how was he doing before Sherman started succeeding in the fall? Yeah, it was not looking good. It was all over. And there are amazing images, again, of what happened on the Library of Congress website and on other places, in Atlanta and Savannah. And at the same time just remember, you know, if he hadn’t done that, where would we be? It’s a conundrum. It’s a little bit like the conundrum, when you investigated, of should we have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Teacher: Well, Grant as well. I mean Mike was talking about should Lincoln take the responsibility of the death toll, where if you look at a Sherman or a Grant, their strategy was attrition and just keep throwing bodies at the problem until they run out of bullets. Sarah Jencks: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of controversy over what the best military practice is here. We do a play called The Road from Appomattox and it’s a meeting between Grant and Lee the day after the surrender, which we know took place. We don’t know what happened in it, but we know it took place. Or at least in their memoirs they both say it took place. And one of the things that Lee says is this is the last war that will ever be fought according to conventional rules of war as we know them. And I think that was true in many ways. So. Sarah Jencks: What else? What else is coming through here, in terms of the controversy of his theory, his controversial theory, or what his proposal was. What is the policy that he’s beginning to articulate here? Maybe we can move on to the policy. Yes. Teacher: The whole ’malice towards none, charity for all’ is remarkable. Sarah Jencks: So what’s he saying there? If you were thinking of it from policy terms? Teacher: Well, it’s directed towards the South. We’re not going to hang the leadership like many wanted to do up north, and after four years of hell, that’s pretty remarkable, that he would keep that focus, on reuniting the country. Sarah Jencks: Just to repeat myself, is it just directed towards the South, do you think? I mean, what about those Northerners? Teacher: Stop looking for revenge. Sarah Jencks: And the border states, it was a really big issue. As you begin to look at Andrew Johnson, one of the issues that we come up against with Andrew Johnson is that he was from a border state. He had been holding out for four years, as a member of the Union, as a legislator and a senator from a state that, essentially, had seceded. But he was maintaining his presence, which was why he was named vice president in the 1864 election. From a state that essentially had seceded from the Union, Tennessee. He was full of vengeance. He couldn’t have been more the opposite of Lincoln.

Sarah Jencks: So having thought about these two, having articulated this theory and then the resulting policy he’s proposing, I want you to take a look at these different Americans—almost all of them are Americans, one is not an American—that you have in front of you on these POV cards. And by the way, I have one more—if anybody needs one, I have one more. And take a moment to think both about how they would have responded to the speech and then, as a follow-up, how they would have responded to the assassination. Abraham Lincoln’s family was from Kentucky, originally, and they—his parents left their Baptist church because it was pro-slavery and they were not. So these are—and even if you can’t make a clear decision, start to think of what the questions are, you know. Okay, in his very last speech before he was assassinated, Lincoln proposed that what he described as ’very intelligent Negroes’ and those who had fought for the Union should be eligible for the vote. Teacher: Okay. Sarah Jencks: So. . . . Teacher: That would give hope, but— Teacher: Yeah. Teacher: But this is after the assassination, right? Sarah Jencks: What happened in South Carolina afterwards actually was that it became the state with the most black legislators during Reconstruction. Teacher: Right. Sarah Jencks: Right, so. . . . Teacher: And that only lasts about 10 years. Sarah Jencks: Right. Not even. Alright, so. Good questions you guys are bringing up, though. I’m not going to ask you to tell—to go around and say what your person would have thought. But instead, if you want to reflect on some of the questions that you were struggling with or that came up or some of the issues that you had to ask— Teacher: How about if we know what the person would have thought? Sarah Jencks: If you know? If you feel certain, then I think you should say what were some of the things that made you know. Okay? Alright. Go ahead. Whoever wants to start, raise your hand or just shout out. Anybody? Okay. Teacher: Well, we got Andrew Johnson the [unintelligible] legislator from Tennessee, so we already know that he was a little angry and wanted revenge, but was politically-minded enough to go with Lincoln until, you know, his time came. But then because I mouthed off, she gave me another one. And this one was a white merchant in San Francisco, formerly of Delaware. Apparently Delaware was a very small, slaveholding state— Sarah Jencks: Yeah, but border state. Teacher: —and this gentleman moved to San Francisco, obviously probably during the Gold Rush, so our idea was we really don’t think this guy cares. He’s in San Francisco, he’s trading, he’s involved with all sorts of ethnic groups and nationalities and he’s there just to make money. So I really don’t think his political opinions are going to be very strong, since he moved from a very small state to a state with more people where there could be more opportunity. Sarah Jencks: But California came—was strongly in which camp during— Teacher: In the free state category— Sarah Jencks: In the free state category. Teacher: —since the Compromise of 1850. Sarah Jencks: Okay. Excellent. Good thoughts. What else? Who else? What did you—what were you thinking about as you were going through this process? Teacher: Right. We were a white Georgetown DC dockworker. We’re wondering why we were unable to fight, but— Sarah Jencks: Maybe you had like a leg that had a—you broke your leg when you were little. Teacher:: You have to build your character. Teacher: Our options are really limited, so we’re really worried now with the freeing of slaves, because all this cheap black labor is going to be coming up from the South and if this—if what you’re saying is basically our case, we have very few options economically to turn to. So if we lose this job. . . . Sarah Jencks: Not to mention that the Potomac River is about to silt up and there isn’t going to be a dock in Georgetown in 10 years, but you don’t know that. Teacher: Man. Sarah Jencks: What else? Teacher: I just thought it was interesting how you guys think about their reaction to the speech and then to the assassination, and the role that we had was a Massachusetts writer with strong abolitionist ties. And we have very different reactions to the speech and the assassination, that, you know, they’re disillusioned by the speech, and this is not enough. You know, you’ve soft-pedaled down, you’ve taken more of a centrist stance. But the assassination still devastates them because this is, you know, your revered leader who did speak out. Sarah Jencks: Interesting. Teacher: We also struggled as an abolitionist with the idea of, you know, having a religious sort of approach to this whole thing, would we have been insulted that, okay, now we’re being lumped in with the sinners who perpetrated this horrible institution, and how dare you try to make us be with them. And then maybe we become more zealous once Lincoln was assassinated—see, now you didn’t want to punish them, now they killed the president on top of it, just sin upon sin on the South, and I’m not part of that. You know, even more stronger regional identity of not wanting to be seen as part of that bigger— Sarah Jencks: Yeah. Very interesting. Teacher: And one of our controversies was, just because you’re an abolitionist didn’t mean you believed in equal rights. Sarah Jencks: So true. That’s so true. Absolutely. There were a lot of Northerners who did not—we sort of tend to say that the Northerners were oh, they were antislavery. Not so much, you know. That was unusual. Absolutely. So the last thing I want to ask you all is if you were to take this into your classrooms, what kinds of things might you want to do to enhance your ability to assess students and/or to develop this into something that would actually work for you. And I know this is really fast, but let’s just quick do some popcorn ideas about this. And the last piece is if you were to use this, is there anything that you feel like you would need to do to scaffold it differently? Yeah. Teacher: I mean, I teach global, so we were thinking of ideas, possibly doing this with, like, the French Revolution and giving out different characters, or Caesar or any revolution for that matter, and really, you know, coming up with different types of characters and seeing what the kids do. Sarah Jencks: It does require some research, though. Because as you noticed as I was going—it can be your research or the kids’, you can decide, sort of. You can use it as an assessment tool, or you can give it to them and then say you need to go find out more about these people. Teacher: We had an Illinois regimental soldier, [unintelligible] Taylor, and we were trying to think what battles that soldier would have fought in. So that would be a springboard to do a little more research about that regiment, get background on— Sarah Jencks: One thing that has occurred to me just while we’ve been doing this here is that you could potentially do this in part as a Google map activity. You could use Google maps to actually pin where each of the different people were from, and to upload, you know, something so that you’re creating a class project as a result that might allow you to—everybody can make use of it as a tool, ultimately.

Christopher Hamner: We're standing right in front of the World War II Memorial; how many of you have visited it before? Okay, great. I want to talk a little bit about why it's here and what it looks like, and then give you some time to explore a little bit. But I don't think you can really understand why the memorial looks the way that it does without knowing a little bit about a totally different memorial—the Vietnam War Memorial. So how many of you have been to the Vietnam War Memorial? Okay, great, just about everybody. What have your experiences been? Teacher 1: Very somber. Christopher Hamner: Okay, somber, absolutely. Teacher 2: Dark. Christopher Hamner: Yeah, no, it's somber, it's dark. Teacher 3: Emotional because it has the little book with the names and relatives. Christopher Hamner: Yeah, I mean draws you in, it can be incredibly emotional because it has become a destination point for a lot of the people who served in the Vietnam conflict, people leave things there, they'll take rubbings of people they knew—it's interactive in a way that not many memorials are. It has its own really interesting story; the story of the Vietnam Memorial goes back to the mid-'70s. It was a project started by a veteran of the Vietnam conflict who saw the movie Deer Hunter, which took him back to his own experiences fighting in the war. He said he stayed up all night and that the next morning he told his wife that he was going to dedicate himself to raising money for a memorial to the people that he had served with in Vietnam. The monument that you think of as the Vietnam Memorial, which is the wall—that V-shaped wall that sort of starts low and rises to a peak of I think 6 or 7 feet and has the names inscribed on it—is actually only one of three Vietnam Memorials that are in the same place. And in 2012, we know this as one of the most moving monuments, a place where people will come from across the country to connect with it. It was incredibly controversial at first, and that's a part of the story that we often tune out. But it has a backstory. As they raised money they began to solicit designs for the memorial. And I talked to you guys this morning when we were at the Grant Memorial, and we've talked a lot of times about all sorts of historical sources, that things are made, they don't just appear, and they're designed by a person or a committee who wants to get an idea out there. The Vietnam Memorial is a little unusual in that they opened a design contest nationally. And somewhat atypically they did the jury review blind. Architecture—architects and designers could put forth a plan for what the memorial might look like, and then they submitted it. They all went out to a big hanger like at Dulles Airport. But all the information about who had designed it and who they were and what their background was was all stripped off, so that the judges were only looking at the idea itself. And the design that you know of as "The Design" was one of the last two dozen and then one of the last nine and then the last three and it was ultimately the one that was selected. The selection and the unveiling of the design—before it was even built—went off like a bombshell. One of the groups that was most opposed to it was Vietnam War veterans. They were opposed to a number of things. One was the design of it. It is a somber memorial, it is black, it is anti-heroic, I think, in some ways. Did anybody see as we were walking over here on Constitution, happen to look over at the statue of the gold arm holding up a sword with flames? Okay, so what was that? Anybody catch it? Teacher 4: St. Michael or something wasn't it? Teacher 5: World War I, was it Second Division? Christopher Hamner: It was a monument to the Second Infantry Division and its losses in the First World War. You saw the arm holding up the flaming sword and then a list of all the battles that the Second Division fought in. That's much more of a kind of typical, classic war memorial. You put up a leader, or you put up something—a lion or an eagle or wreathes or something that has classical overtones and celebrates the heroism—and that is not what the Vietnam Memorial is. It was designed very specifically. The designer said that it was designed to get people to interact with it; it has the names of all of the people that were killed during the decade or so of the conflict. How are they organized? Teacher 6: The middle is the earliest and then it goes out to the side. Christopher Hamner: They’re organized chronologically in the order that the people died. So you cannot go and just alphabetically find the person that you want to find. That design forces you to look at a lot more of it than you would if you could just go right to the person you were looking for. You have to look over all of the names, or a lot more of the names, and it forces you to engage with it. What's the finish like, can anybody remember? Multiple Teachers: It's reflective. Christopher Hamner: The finish of the black marble is highly reflective. So as you're looking at the names you can also see your own face reflected in it. That's by design too. None of this was done accidentally. It encourages you to put yourself in the middle of these people and to think about the sacrifice and to think about it in very personal terms. The other thing that became a big issue with the design was the identity of the designer itself. Her name was Maya Lin. She was a 20-year-old Yale architecture student—so she was very young to win such a prestigious national competition—she was female, and she was Asian. None of those things sat particularly well with a vocal group of Vietnam veterans who felt that everything about the memorial was wrong—the location of it, the tone of it, the somberness of it. You can absolutely see where they're coming from. If you look around at most war memorials and you see that they celebrate heroism and glory and sacrifice, you might think this is not how I want my time, my conflict, to be remembered. This isn't what I want people thinking about. That was a really legitimate point, but it opens up this whole question of: Who is the memorial for?

Christopher Hamner: So despite the fact that the Second World War was fought after—or before the Vietnam War by 25 years or so, the World War II Memorial was actually started 15 years after the Vietnam Memorial. To my eye, a big part of what the World War II Memorial is about is not being controversial. That they did not want to open a similar can of worms about how are we going to celebrate this, how are we going to commemorate it, who is it for? It bends over backwards and goes to great lengths not to be controversial. And in a way kind of just dilutes it to a point where it doesn't say anything controversial, but I also don't know that it says all that much. People have pointed out that it's very classically derived. Curiously it actually looks like a lot of the memorials that the German architect Albert Speer built in Berlin during the Second World War as part of the Nazi government. Which is weird, because it's a memorial that looks a little bit like the architecture of the country that it's built to celebrate the defeat of. But you notice it's got 50-some plinths and they each have wreaths. Has anybody who's seen this before noticed how the plinths are organized? Teacher 1: By state, that's all I know. Christopher Hamner: By state, so every state and then some of the U.S. protectorates, Guam, the Virgin Islands. When you’re standing you can take a little bit closer look, there's Wyoming, Washington, South Dakota, Nevada, Kansas, Minnesota. That's interesting as a historian in that the states really had nothing to do with the way the war was fought. In the Civil War that was more true, people went off with the people from their home state, from their home town. But the Second World War deliberately didn't do that. They mixed people from Iowa and Florida and Alabama and Massachusetts in the same units. So it's not like the states went forward to fight. And it's not like the state governments had much of a role in the Second World War. The Second World War was very much the federal government's achievement. So to organized the wreathed tributes, which are the big outer ring, why do you do that? Teacher 2: It could be honoring the dead from each state. Christopher Hamner: It could be. I'll buy that. Why not do it by the different military units that fought, you know, the First Division, the Second Division, the Fourth Division. Teacher 3: It could be just underscoring that it's the United States, as opposed to— Christopher Hamner: And the circle, I think, does that and pulls it together. Teacher 4: It sounds like they designed by committee. Christopher Hamner: Yes, which is exactly what this was. The committee was formed in the mid-1990s, there was a real push by members of Congress who were World War II veterans themselves, and who said—quite reasonably—that this generation is not going to be around forever; we need to celebrate and commemorate their sacrifice and their achievement while they're still here to appreciate it. Then the design went through a series of committee decisions, which the Vietnam Memorial didn't, you know the Vietnam Memorial is one person's vision. Partly the decisions here reflect a desire to make sure that there's just nothing controversial about it. If you put it in by state and there's really nothing to—that could possibly be controversial about that—because everybody came from a state or a protectorate—but at the same time it doesn't really say much about the war. It just sort of recognizes the fact that there were four dozen entities that are there. Then you've got the big arches—one represents the European Theatre, one represents the Pacific Theatre, the two big fountains, it's like the freedom palisade. But everything is, I think, kind of homogenized in a way to make sure that it's not too controversial. There's not much in there that would get somebody saying this is an inaccurate way to portray my experience. Teacher 5: The order of the states, is it like— Christopher Hamner: I have no idea, I have not been able to figure that out! Teacher 5: Well I was wondering is it the same thing like on the Lincoln Memorial. Teacher 6: No, there is an order and it's in the brochure. Teacher 7: It says they alternate to the right and left of the field of stars based on when they entered the Union. Delaware was the first state. Christopher Hamner: So it is the order that they entered, but it goes back and forth… Teacher 6: That's bizarre. Christopher Hamner: That's just weird. For those of you who were with us this summer when we talked about the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian. That was 1995, the big brouhaha about how are you going to display the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Air and Space Museum is right over there. And remember, that was a hugely controversial issue, they never wound up mounting the exhibit, several people who had backed it lost their jobs. That's in the recent memory of the people who are putting this together. Who I think wanted to make a memorial that could be the center where people could gather, something that was inoffensive to veterans, and to the families of veterans. But as a result I just don't think there's all that much there.

Christopher Hamner: Make your way around the outside and then the inside. On the inside there are reliefs that portray different facets of going to war—from the bombing offensive over Europe to the home front. Interestingly, everything is covered. Again, I think the goal was to be really inclusive and to try to make sure that everyone's war experience was represented in some way. There are two Easter eggs. There's a little surprising piece of graffiti—if you look for it you can find it—that is the one thing that breaks the very somber, classical architecture, you've got wreathes, you've got eagles, you've got very somber-looking white marble plinths. There's two pieces of graffiti that are hard to find, but that are much more about—are they in the brochure? That's cheating—but they're much more reflective of the soldiers' experience. Then the other thing to check once you've gotten down into the lower level is the field of gold stars, which is an interesting—[it] kind of borrows a little bit from the Vietnam Wall. There were about 56,000 deaths in Vietnam; there were more than 400,000 deaths in the Second World War. So it's obviously not possible to put every name on the World War II Memorial. So what they did instead, as you can see from here, it's sort of directly behind me, there's a fountain with a gold star for every 500 deaths. So each star represents 500 people who lost their lives fighting the Second World War. To me it has a really interesting effect. When I'm here I often hang out by the fountain to listen to tourist responses. One of the ones I hear the most is my first response, which is, "That's not as many stars as I thought." 400,000 is a huge amount of loss of life and sacrifice, and each one represents 500 families who are missing a son or a father or a brother. But for some reason the number 500 divides it in and it doesn't seem like as much as I would have thought, which I think is exactly the opposite of the intention they wanted to have. I don't know exactly how they made that judgment, but you might want to walk down and see what response you get to that. As a historian I've always thought it's just weird to have it organized by the states. It's very interesting to me now when I come back and visit and I'll watch people interacting with it, especially World War II veterans make a beeline right for their home state and there will often be World War II veterans standing around acting as interpreters and they'll be wearing their uniforms and they'll often ask if you'd like to hear a little from them. And they go right for their home states too, so on some level it's worked a lot. It's just to me it just doesn’t resonate because that's one category that didn't organize the war in any way. It would be like a monument that said, this part of the monument is for guys from 5'0'' to 5'3'' and this part is from 5'3'' to 5'6''—it doesn't really say much. The other question to be asking yourself is who is this for? It was expedited in Congress and the fundraising and the construction with the thought that it was very important to have something memorializing the sacrifice of the veterans' generation while some of them were still alive. That's not always the reason we commemorate things, memorials go up for different reasons. The Vietnam Memorial is a really good example because there's a memorial that at first the most vocal opponents were Vietnam veterans themselves who said we do not want that, that does not represent us. And in the 1980s, they said, well, it's not just about you. It's about the whole country's experience in Vietnam and the way it affected everyone besides just the people who fought. You can think about which parts of this are for servicemen and -women, which parts are for their families, which parts are for just regular Americans, what part of it is teaching—which is a useful tool that monuments do—and which part is just commemoration or celebration. But the most interesting way to look at this is in conjunction with the Vietnam Memorial and the Korean Memorial, which is another interesting outlier. Those of you that have seen that, it's like a large field of slightly larger than life figures, but the real tone there is realism. It is not a sort of idealized version of the war which you often see, especially with Civil War monuments when you're driving around DC—you'll see the guy on horseback and he's got the gleaming gold braid and the horse is rearing back and they look larger than life. The Korean War these guys are slogging across a field, they're in their winter gear and they look tired. You can see the weight hanging in their shoulders, they're humping pieces of gear, some of them have mortar tubes and machine guns slung across their shoulders, and you can see the fatigue in their faces, you can see the exhaustion in their bodies. That's a really different kind of portrayal. There isn't that level of realism here, there isn't that level of representation and I don't think they're trying to have that here. So different memorials that are all talking about the same basic thing—which is what does this country do when it goes to war?—still have really different designs. You can learn a lot about where the country was at the time the memorial was being designed and built by taking a close look at what it looks like and thinking about how it might have looked different.

Christina Chavarria: So just kind of look around. What feeling is evoked? Is there anything that might remind you of something? Or maybe nothing at all. Visitor 1: We were just taking [about] the stairs. Almost as if you can be kind of spread out, and then as you go up closer you have to bunch together to file in. I've never seen stairs that do that, it's weird. Christina Chavarria: Okay, that's true. And when you mention that I think of also the train tracks and how they're kind of elongated and they fade and they seem to become more narrow the further away they become. Anybody else have any thoughts about the architecture, the building? Visitor 2: I think it's overwhelming. It makes you feel small. Christina Chavarria: That's very true. That's a very good point. Because, like I said, going back to the importance of the individual in this history, one of the things that we do with teachers is that we really encourage that you translate statistics into people, that instead of focusing solely on the millions of victims or the thousands who may have died in one place, you take those individual stories and you pull them out using primary resources. Christina Chavarria: What the purpose of these cards do, especially in a teaching standpoint, is, again, they focus on the individual. How many of you have somebody who is not Jewish? Anybody have somebody who is not Jewish? Okay, who? Visitor 3: I have Lucian Belie Brunell. He's born to Catholic parents, he's a priest. Christina Chavarria: Okay, we have a priest. Anybody else have somebody who is not Jewish, somebody who is Roma? Disabled? Okay, how about does somebody have—how many of you have somebody from Poland? Germany? Austria? Italy? France? Denmark? The Netherlands? Greece? Yugoslavia? Okay, any other place that I did not mention? Visitor 4: Romania. Visitor 5: Lithuania. Visitor 6: Hungary. Visitor 7: Czechoslovakia. Christina Chavarria: So another purpose of these is for us to see the range of geography. That this did not happen solely in Germany, even though it began there. This did not happen only in Poland. That it spread geographically. It spread all the way into Northern Africa and other parts of the world were impacted, even if they were not occupied by Nazi Germany. Christina Chavarria: Look at the monitor. TV Documentary: "—called in by radio, said that we have come across something and we're not sure what it is. It's a big prison of some kind, and there are people running all over—sick, dying, starved people. You can't imagine it, things like that don't happen." Christina Chavarria: So as we go through, as I mentioned downstairs, I'm not going to point out everything to you, but there are certain elements that I want to point out because we will talk about them in the afternoon. This, in particular, I think is very striking for us as teachers, as social studies teachers, as teachers in the United States. You notice at the top it says, "Americans encounter the camp." We don't use the word in this picture—we don't use the word "liberation." Why not? You couldn't just walk out and go home, first of all. And liberation has that connotation of being free, and yet the obstacles that lay ahead for those who did survive will be so vast—the obstacles, the challenges, for the Allied forces and relief workers who come into the camps. So, we chose that word "encounter." And this was not, as we know now, this was not the first that we knew of the camps. It was the first maybe that we had seen of the camps with our own eyes, but we will see that. When you look at this history again we define it the years 1933–1945. Christina Chavarria: Where you all came in, we call that the Eisenhower Plaza. This quote up here that's on the side of the building, of the museum structure. Because if you look at it, I think this is an excellent quote to use with students because it takes us back to that theme of anti-Semitism and that theme today of Holocaust denial.

Christina Chavarria: I think as teachers here in the United States, the issue of race science, which was very popular in the United States, it was not only in Nazi Germany. If you look at your own states—if each individual state looks at its history—you can look and see the laws that were on the books regarding sterilization, regarding who could marry whom. So, again, looking at U.S. history, especially in the latter part of the 19th century and the eugenics movement and how this became so popular. And the whole notion of race, the definition of race, and categorizing people. This is very, very relevant. Christina Chavarria: What are the questions that your students ask when you're teaching this? How many of you have taught about the Holocaust? Visitor 1: They want to know why; they want to know how could this have started? They want to know, you know, why is Hitler so anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic? They want to know the root of it all. Visitor 2: They want to know, too, why they willingly were prisoners. You know, 7th grade, why, I would have not done this— Christina Chavarria: I would have fought back, right? And they did, that's a very good issue to bring up. They did, and we have to teach about resistance. One of the questions related to that is: Why didn’t they just leave? Why didn't they just pack up and go somewhere else? Well, again, the complexities of this history—don't avoid those questions when they ask you. Why didn't, why couldn't they just pack up and leave? We look at the Évian Conference, which is where we look at the failure of other nations to respond to the growing crisis in Europe. And this symbolizes that, this political cartoon. This appeared in the New York Times, July 3, 1938, just before the Évian Conference was to begin. So we can take this image and we can deconstruct this, and what do we see happening here? Visitor 3: The guy's at a stop sign with no place to go. Christina Chavarria: The stop sign is on what? Multiple Visitors: A swastika. Christina Chavarria: Every point, every direction ends with that halt—you can't, you can't go. And who is this person? Visitor 4: Non-Aryan. Christina Chavarria: Non-Aryan, presumably Jewish—the kippah. And what's on the horizon? The Évian Conference invited nations to attend to discuss the growing refugee problem. So 32 countries send representatives to this conference, but, yet, they're also told we're not going to ask you to take any more people in. So the conference was basically a failure before it even began because only one country stepped forward and said, "We're willing to take in more refugees than what we have on our quotas, listed as our quotas." Does anybody know what that country was, what that one country was? It's right down here. The Dominican Republic. This also revealed a lot of anti-Semitic thought from leaders of other nations. Some countries said, "We don't have a Jewish problem and we don't want to import one." Some said, "We're going through our own issues." And that's very true, because we've got to contextualize this from what happened in the 1920s, what happened in 1929, the economic—the Depression as well. But, yet, we also have to factor in anti-Semitic sentiments because who are these refugees? Well, they're mostly Jewish, they might take our jobs, they might take—we don't have money to support them.

Christina Chavarria: Looking at the whole idea of refuge, and the search for refuge, where do you go when nations have closed their doors to you? Where do you go? What kind of documentation do you need to get out of Germany? What documents do you need? What kind of money do you need to emigrate? These are all issues that you have to bring up with your students so that they understand why they were trapped in Europe. Christina Chavarria: This chart that we see here, this is the forced immigration chart that Adolf Eichmann's office produced to show how it was able to expel, within three years, most of Vienna's Jewish population. After the Anschluss, after Kristallnacht, this is when Jews in the occupied territories—Germany, Austria, parts of Czechoslovak—after Kristallnacht, they realized that they can no longer stay. Life is just not bearable any more; in fact it's dangerous now. In many cases, many of them actually bought visas to get out. Some countries made money, some diplomats made money selling fraudulent visas that turned out to be no good. And that is what happened with the voyage of the St. Louis. Out of the 937 passengers who were on the boat, almost—I think all but maybe six to eight of them were Jewish. They needed to get out, and Cuba was the destination of this ship, the St. Louis. It was owned by the Hamburg line, Hamburg America. They had acquired visas to go to Cuba, where they were planning to stay until their numbers came up to come to the United States. But before they reached Cuba, their visas were rescinded; in fact, many of them were fraudulent, only about 28 of them were actually valid. So when they got to Havana, they were not allowed to dock. Only those who had valid visas, which was just a miniscule number out of the over 900 those people were allowed to stay, and the rest could not get off the boat.

Christina Chavarria: Here you see newspapers from some of the major cities across the country reporting on the front page certain events that were taking place in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. Right here, for example, the Dallas Morning News: Kristallnacht, November 1938, front page. This was not a secret. Christina Chavarria: This is called "The Tower of Faces." This is one thing I want to point out to you because—just take a couple minutes to look around at the pictures. This represents one shtetl, one Jewish community, in Lithuania. The little girl right here is Professor Yaffa Eliach, she lives in New York. She went back to this shtetl, Eishyshok, and she gathered the 10,000 photos, many of which you see here, and which we have online. Again, what this does, we look at the individual; we look at the victim not as a "victim," but as a vibrant human being. I think anything we teach, whether it's the Holocaust or any other topic that we're looking at in history, we have to look at the individuals. Christina Chavarria: This milk can is one of three milk cans that was used to bury documents and chronicles of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. And in 1950, two of the milk cans were excavated as well as the other metal boxes. Within them they found a very rich documentation of what life in the ghetto was like. Christina Chavarria: Actual barracks that are on loan to us from Poland, they are not replicas. Right over here we have a large-scale model of the process of going through the selection, going to the gas chambers, because we don't have any photos of the actual gassing, of course. Christina Chavarria: The diary, the quote, and the armband, take a look at that. The diary is the first diary that was donated to us by an American in captivity. Most of the diaries that we see they were written when they were in hiding or before they had to leave, but he was able to keep his diary while he was in the camp. It's also striking because Anthony Acevedo—he's not Jewish, in fact he's the son of Mexican immigrants. He is—we consider him to be a survivor, because of the fact that he went through a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Christina Chavarria: This is one of over a thousand citizenship papers that was found in somebody's attic in Switzerland. In a suitcase were these documents, these citizenship papers, issued by El Salvador that stated that the individuals who were named in the documents, whose pictures appeared on the documents were citizens of El Salvador, when in reality they were not—most of them were Hungarian Jews. This is 1944, Hungary is invaded in the spring of 1944 by Germany, and out of about 500,000 Hungarian Jews, over 430,000 died at Auschwitz in a very short period of time.