World War II Memorial

Video Overview

What do the elements of the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, symbolize? Is the design effective? Who was the memorial built for? Christopher Hamner and Michael O'Malley try to answer these questions by contrasting the memorial with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Video Clip Name
warmemorial2.mov
Video Clip Title
World War II Memorial
Transcript Text

Christopher Hamner: You can’t really understand the World War II Monument, where it is and why it looks the way it looks, without understanding the Vietnam Memorial and the story of getting it built. The design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was open to everybody. It eventually got more than 1,400 submissions. They were handled anonymously so that the judging panels saw only the design and a numbered code and they went on 1,400 down to 300 down to 30 down to the winner who was very surprising when it was revealed. It was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale named Maya Lin.

Michael O’Malley: Problematic is so many ways.

Christopher Hamner:: Youth, ethnicity, gender. And it was the design that’s very close to what we now see on the Mall. One of the reasons that I suspect the World War II Monument looks the way that it looks, which is much more traditional, heroic, sort of celebratory. It seems to privilege sort of consensus and unity above everything else. [It] has to do with the desire to avoid that kind of controversy. One of the things that we pointed out was the fact that the ring of stones that sort of marks the outer boundary that are adorned with wreaths are dedicated to the states.

Michael O’Malley: Which makes no sense. The state-iness was not part of the World War II experience.

Christopher Hamner: Of all the ways you could possibly cut up World War II—

Michael O’Malley: It’s not like all the guys from Delaware were in one unit. They got drafted, they went down to some camp in the South and then they went back. I mean their was no state-iness attached to it.

Christopher Hamner: It’s a national effort to the extent that people identify with some smaller segment, it’s usually by branch or then by division. There are other ways that you could group it, but the one that makes the least sense is the states. It’s incredibly traditional, it’s white, there are wreaths, there’s a gold star at one end for every 500 combat deaths.

Michael O’Malley: So they want to have some element of what the Vietnam War Memorial does so well, which is individualizing. Really made graphic the extent of the loss. They want to have some element of that—

Christopher Hamner: But they don’t particularize it quite as effectively and that some of the teachers that we toured with said that that element of it had sort of fallen flat, that it did not—

Michael O’Malley: You actually came away thinking less people died in World War II than in Vietnam.

Christopher Hamner: I found as I walked around I spent probably half my time trying to figure out what the organizational strategy was. They were not in alphabetical order, they were not in the order the states joined the Union, they’re not grouped together. I mean I couldn’t tell. It didn’t look to me like it was sort of by population or the sort of number of soldiers from that state who perished over the course of the war and I started to suspect that it was just random.

Michael O’Malley: I mean the Vietnam Memorial takes a few elements and loads them with meaning. This thing takes a lot of elements and bleeds the meaning out of them.

Christopher Hamner: We also talked about the Korean War Memorial, which is a sort of interesting combination, right? That it’s particularized and personalized and that it’s slightly larger-than-life-size figures of soldiers that are in ponchos. They’re spread out and kind of making their way across a field but they’re not heroic in the way that soldiers a century ago would have been portrayed. You can feel the weight of the gear that they carry.

Michael O’Malley: And that wants to put you in the midst of it, I mean you walk through them. You’re right in the middle of that, so, where as in the World War II Memorial you’re in the middle of kind of nothing, you’re in the middle of some kind of empty abstraction.

Christopher Hamner: It has become more participatory at least during the daytime than it had been before because there are so many World War II veterans who are designated, who are kind of milling around the areas and who will engage with visitors and pose for photographs and talk about their experience so there is a sort of participatory dimension to it. But as Mike pointed out, these guys won’t be around forever, that cannot last.

Michael O’Malley: That’s an element of this thing that we got to in the discussion. There were some great questions, like who was this thing for? And there was really a sense that this was for veterans. Like this is here to make veterans feel good. It’s not about the nation remembering something. It’s a gift to veterans. I have nothing against giving gifts to veterans, but is that the purpose of a memorial? That’s a worthwhile question. And when the veterans are gone, what do you have? You have a gift for a person who is no longer around. It’s an odd construction of memorialization.

Ulysses S. Grant Memorial

Video Overview

According to Christopher Hamner and Michael O'Malley, the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington, DC, presents a uniquely active look at the Civil War. As a work of art, the memorial draws the eye to Grant, standing above the chaos of surrounding battle, but it fails to include any reference to slavery as a cause of the war.

Video Clip Name
warmemorial1.mov
Video Clip Title
Ulysses S. Grant Memorial
Video Clip Duration
3:30
Transcript Text

Christopher Hamner: Grant was fantastic and Mike has actually written a little bit on just why that is such an unusual piece of sculpture and it’s such a subtle piece of artwork and that if you look at it—if you don’t scrutinize it too closely it does look somewhat traditional and that it’s men on horseback and cannons and—

Michael O’Malley: Right you see it from a distance and you just start yawning before you even get close to it and you don’t even look and you go oh there’s a guy on a horse, wow, haven’t seen that before—

Christopher Hamner: You get close and you see that on one side it’s the beginning of a disaster. And I think more than the other two monuments that we visited, we looked at the Grant Memorial, not just as historians but also as a work of art. And it’s really very moving. And on the south side where it is sort of in the first moments of what looks like it’s going to be a horrific crash, just the sense of motion that is conveyed by this—

Michael O’Malley: Well so much—the guys on the back haven’t yet figured out what’s about to happen—

Christopher Hamner: You can see the tack on the horses going slack which tells you that this forward momentum has stopped but it has not yet gotten to the two guys who are riding the caisson—

Michael O’Malley: And they’re about to get jolted off or they’re about to fall off—

Christopher Hamner: And they’re sort of oblivious to what’s going on in the team and for something that’s frozen in metal the sense of power and emotion that’s not completely controlled, really came through to me.

Michael O’Malley: It’s a very powerful piece of art with a particular vision of war as grim endurance, not as discipline, triumph but as you know grim endurance against chaos—

Christopher Hamner: There’s heroism there, but it’s not the kind of heroism—

Michael O’Malley: It’s not the kind of heroism of the single mighty ideologue. Although maybe in Grant, right? Grant looks grimly ahead and if you read Grant’s memoirs he’s completely unflinching in his condemnation of slavery. He’s not some kind of flag-waving Garrisonian but you know it was a terrible cause, the worst cause men ever fought for.

Christopher Hamner: And they did a great job I thought at capturing Grant who was not McClellan, who did not show up in his battle finery—

Michael O’Malley: And peacock around—

Christopher Hamner: He’s there in a sort of—the kind of gear that he wore, his head’s down, he’s looking in the distance, shoulders are a little bit stooped. I mean you get the sense of the weight that’s been on the man and as you pointed out the two statues that are closer to ground level that involve the actual fighting troops are both focused on Grant—

Michael O’Malley: But he’s ignoring them.

Christopher Hamner: Much higher.

Michael O’Malley: He’s paying no attention. That’s not his problem. One of the students pointed out that Confederates are really present by their absence which is really interesting.

Christopher Hamner: It’s a great insight.

Michael O’Malley: They’re the cause of this chaos. They’ve just instigated these events which look to be pretty awful but they’re not actually shown. Which is very clever about it. It’s a very active monument. I think we both agree that the sad thing about it is it can’t get slavery. It can’t get the cause of the war. The war is a tragedy, but the political cause— You know there’s plenty of people that would say it’s not a tragedy, slavery is over. If your ancestors are slaves it’s not a tragedy at all, that’s great! Slavery isn’t depicted at all in the cause of the war so it depoliticizes it and that’s also the historical moment. You couldn’t do otherwise in America in 1913. It was the only political discourse available, I think.

Robert Gould Shaw

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Question

As I understand it, Robert Gould Shaw's parents decided to leave him buried in the mass grave near where he was mortally wounded at Fort Wagner. Is he still buried in that location beneath the sand? Is it now under water? Is there some sort of marker designating the burial spot?

Answer

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863) was the young white Civil War Union army officer who commanded the otherwise all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was killed while leading a fierce but unsuccessful charge by his troops on the sand and earth parapets of Fort Wagner on Morris Island near Charleston, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863. The 54th Massachusetts lost many men that day, with a casualty rate of over 50%. The other Federal units in the attack suffered heavy losses as well. Union casualties for the day numbered more than 1,500. Union Brigadier General Quincy Granville sent an inquiry to the Confederate commander of Fort Wagner, asking about the disposition of Shaw’s body. The reply was that Col. Shaw had been “buried with his niggers,” in a common grave, a trench along the island’s shore, close to the fort. Indeed, this was where all the Union dead were buried on the tiny island. Whether or not the Confederate commander thought of this as inflicting a particular insult on Shaw, this is how it was taken in the North, especially because Shaw’s fellow officer, Col. Haldimand Putnam, commanding the 7th New Hampshire Infantry, who also died in the attack, “received all the honors of sepulture which the circumstances of his death permitted, from the fraternal hands of his West Point classmate, General Robert H. Anderson, of the Confederate Army,” although his body was not recovered. Nevertheless, even in the few days immediately after the bloodbath, Shaw had become, in the North, an uncommon martyr for the principle of black emancipation, and sentiment sprang forth to exert every effort to exhume his body and rebury him back in his hometown of Boston as a hero. Shaw’s parents, however, prominent in Boston as strong abolitionists, resisted this sentiment. His father sent instructions to the officers of his son’s regiment, writing, “We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave & devoted soldiers, if we could accomplish it by a word. Please to bear this in mind & also, let it be known, so that, even in case there should be an opportunity, his remains may not be disturbed.” By September, the decomposition of the bodies in the trench had begun to contaminate Fort Wagner’s Confederate defenders’ fresh water supply, and they abandoned the fort as a consequence. Union soldiers immediately moved in, but, guided by Shaw’s parents’ wishes, did not exhume Col. Shaw’s body. Morris Island is smaller than 1,000 acres and is subject to extensive erosion by storm and sea. Much of the previous site of Fort Wagner has been eroded away, including the place where the Union soldiers had been buried. However, by the time this had happened, the soldiers’ remains were no longer there because soon after the end of the Civil War, the Army disinterred and reburied all the remains—including, presumably, those of Col. Shaw—at the Beaufort National Cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina, where their gravestones were marked as “unknown.” The Boston area has at least three memorials to Robert G. Shaw. In 1897, the Harvard Memorial Society erected a tablet on Massachusetts Hall, which had long served as a dormitory, that listed some of its past student residents who had gone on to fame. This tablet included Shaw’s name (he had been a Harvard student, but had withdrawn before graduating), along with such other notables as Artemas Ward, Elbridge Gerry, Francis Dana, Joseph Story, Jared Sparks, and Francis Parkman. The Shaw family also placed a bronze tablet in memory of Robert Gould Shaw on an earlier-installed cenotaph in its family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. The most well known memorial, however, is the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial. It is a bas-relief of Shaw and his men, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and placed on Boston Common, across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House, in 1897. The memorial was the focus of attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s, concurrent with the making of the film Glory, that depicted the actions of the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner. It occasioned a public reassessment of the fact that, beginning from the immediate aftermath of the attack, a significant portion of the sentiment of white Northern abolitionists had elevated Shaw’s place as a determined sacrificial martyr to the cause of black emancipation far above the level of the other men of the 54th Massachusetts, almost as if the black men of the 54th could do nothing by themselves without a white savior in the person of Shaw. Abolitionist Eliza Sedgwick’s 1865 poem about Shaw contained the lines: “Buried with the men God gave him—Those who he was sent to save; Buried with the martyred heroes, He has found an honored grave.” Shaw’s mother and father did not have a patronizing view of the relationship between their son and his men and indeed shared a sentiment of African American empowerment that was embodied in a line from Lord Byron that abolitionists often quoted—“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” They objected to the original design for the memorial because it showed their son on horseback, elevated above the figures of the enlisted men around him on foot. Nevertheless, a public commission funded Saint-Gauden’s bas-relief, which portrayed this design, and it was dedicated as a memorial to Shaw. The public reassessment of the 1990s eventually refocused the memorial on the 54th Massachusetts as a whole, rather than on Shaw in particular.

For more information

The National Gallery of Art’s website on Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, which features lesson plans for grades 3-12. Teach History’s blog entry on “Colonel Shaw, Sergeant Carney and the 54th Massachusetts,” by Ben Edwards.

Bibliography

Russell Duncan, ed. Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Peter Burchard, One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Michael G. Kammen, Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Charles Cowley, The Romance of History in “the Black County,” and the Romance of War in the Career of Gen. Robert Smalls. Lowell, Mass: 1882. Lydia Maria Francis Child, ed. The Freedmen’s Book. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865.

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