Sacred Ground: Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center
At both Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, rescue workers attempting to recover bodies soon realized that most of the bodies would never be recovered. They had simply disappeared in the force and intensity of explosions and physical collapse. At Pearl Harbor, 1177 men died in a massive explosion of the battleship USS Arizona, about half of the total killed in the entire attack. It is for that reason that the national memorial to the Pearl Harbor attack is called the USS Arizona Memorial, and is built spanning the remains of the sunken battleship at the location where it was moored on December 7, 1941. At the World Trade Center, where more than 2,800 people died in the September 11, only about 1100 have been identified. The remainder of the victims disappeared without a trace.
Thus, in radically different environments, both the USS Arizona and the World Trade Center have become cemeteries and shrines to the dead and missing. They have become “sacred ground” and host to ritual practices that express reverence for those who died there (Linenthal 1993). And people did not only die at Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, they died violent deaths as citizens or residents of the United States. Thus, remembering the dead becomes a task for the nation, a focus for imagining national community. The significance of these places as sites of national memory is perhaps more evident in the case of Pearl Harbor, given the military status of the dead, who perished on a naval base in the opening event of a conventional war. Those individuals are now listed on the wall of the USS Arizona Memorial, with indications of rank and military service. It is virtually certain that whatever design emerges for the memorial complex at the WTC, the names of all 2800 of the dead will be prominently inscribed. For example, one proposal for a design that entails a wide corridor running east and west through the site, would have rows of signposts along the walkway, each bearing the name of one of the deceased.
But elements of the nationalization of memory are also evident at the World Trade Center, even though several hundred of the victims were not citizens of the United States. This is particularly evident in the ritual practices that have marked various phases of the recovery effort. For example, during a ceremony conducted to mark the end of the clean-up phase in May 2001, an empty stretcher with a flag draped over it symbolized the victims whose remains have not been recovered. It was carried out of the pit by firemen, police, and construction workers, and was followed by the trade center’s last steel beam, loaded on the back of a flat-bed truck and draped in black cloth and flag. The ceremony was punctuated by bagpipe music and patriotic songs such as “God Bless America“.
At both Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, questions of how to memorialize the dead have led to debates about what would be most appropriate for those who died. Even though there was no clear consensus about whether or how to construct a memorial in the years following the bombing, by the mid 1950s fundraising was underway for a memorial that would be dedicated in 1962. [Note: one important issue of difference: payment to survivors, court cases, big settlements pending in 9-11.]Today, the USS Arizona Memorial is a national historic landmark and shrine and has become the institutional center of Pearl Harbor memory (Slackman 1986). Managed by the National Park Service in cooperation with the Navy, the Memorial is the most frequently visited tourist destination in Hawai’i, with nearly 1.5 million visitors each year. The US Navy and the National Park Service conduct memorial services at the Arizona every Memorial Day and December 7th (the day of the bombing). The Navy also conducts enlistment ceremonies and hosts official visitations at the Memorial.
Whereas the production of national memory at the Arizona Memorial is now quite routinized (even if still contested and evolving), the meanings of the World Trade Center site remain raw and undigested. Ritual practices conducted to memorialize the dead have had to be invented. There simply is no precedent. Whose meanings, emotions, and perspectives will be accommodated in such a diverse and contentious universe as New York City? From September 11 onward, groups of people big and small have engaged in spontaneous acts of remembrance and commemoration. One of the functions of ritual and ceremony is to create a context in which meaning can be produced for audiences who feel connected to the places and events at hand.
Within days, even hours of the attack, work began on plans and proposals for various kinds of memorial. The Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, wrote an editorial suggesting that the last piece of wall left standing at the site and evident in photographs be preserved as an iconic reminder of the destruction. That jagged section of wall, with its eerie similarity to the listing conning tower of the USS Arizona, and even the skeletal remains of the atomic bomb dome in Hiroshima, now sits in storage awaiting plans for memorial architecture.
The City of New York commission charged with reviewing plans for redesigning and rebuilding the WTC site has overseen a contentious debate about the nature and degree of memorial space to be constructed there. As the process moved forward, families of those killed in the attacks have been extensively involved in the consultation process. Some wanted the entire 16-acre site to be used for a Memorial, seeing a return to commercial use as a denigration of the memory of those who died (see “Blueprint for Ground Zero,” New York Times, May 4, 2002). All of the proposals reviewed initially set aside approximately seven acres of the 16-acre site “as sacred ground” to provide a way to “incorporate some tangible reminder of the towers themselves into the memorial design.” The remaining 9 acres would be rebuilt as commercial space. The design recently selected, produced by the German firm Studio Libeskind, calls for a 4.5 acre memorial park 30 feet below street level preserving the footprints of both original towers.
As is the case for the USS Arizona Memorial, the focal elements for a World Trade Center memorial will be the people who died there and those who survived. The deaths of thousands have already been lamented in myriad ways (such as in the daily pages of the New York Times that for months published biographical sketches of lives cut short, told in touching personal terms elicited from loved ones). This personalization of loss is a tactic of remembrance characteristic of national memories of war generally, evident in literatures and films of war that humanize the inhuman by telling the stories of individuals caught up in deadly events. Phyllis Turnbull has described this approach in the small museum of the Arizona Memorial, with its preference for displaying letters home and other memorabilia from the doomed crew of the USS Arizona (Turnbull 1996). The personalization of historic events in this way heightens their moral and emotional significance, working not only to nationalize memory but to emotionalize the nation.
Conclusion
In this paper I have focused particularly on the ability of war memory and memorial practices to create powerful forms of national identification. Everywhere the experience of war is enlisted to the cause of nationalism, to mold personal subjectivity as part of an imagined national community mobilized for war. The great irony or contradiction of the era of globalization at this turn-of-millennium moment is that the very forces that traverse and dissolve national boundaries through economic and technological flows have served to accentuate and deepen nationalisms and movements of cultural revitalization. Nowhere are the boundaries of the nation more clear and inviolable than in its sacred sites—spaces that mark the death of citizens and in so doing mark a kind of limit of national subjectivity. Burial sites of violent death and loss become inviolable spaces that link personal memory with national history. In particular, collective rites of remembrance work to meld the personal and intimate with the collective and public.
If the history of Pearl Harbor memory is any indication, we may predict that September 11 will continue to be represented in new and revised forms as it is adapted and (re)circulated in future years. Representations of Pearl Harbor have evolved steadily throughout the 60 years of postwar history, marked by the release of the feature film Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970 and reaching a peak during the fiftieth anniversary in 1991 (Dingman 1994; White 1997). Whereas some might have expected that interest in Pearl Harbor would wane as the war generation ages, 2001 witnessed an upsurge of renewed interest as Disney Studios released it’s summer “blockbuster” film Pearl Harbor. Aimed at younger movie-going audiences, that film showed in more than 3,200 cinemas across America when in opened. And it stimulated no less than 22 television and documentary films focusing on various aspects of the “real story,” suddenly of interest because of the Hollywood publicity machine (White 2002).
Having described some of the ways that Pearl Harbor has been invoked to interpret and define September 11, it is important to also note that September 11 has had an important effect on the meanings of Pearl Harbor and other previous wars, especially Vietnam. Senator John McCain, on day of the memorial service marking the end of the recovery effort at the WTC observed that many who had opposed the Vietnam war have found a new “compact with their country.” He hoped that the “ghosts of Vietnam” might at last be “put to rest.” 2001, with the release of the Disney film Pearl Harbor and its spin-off documentaries, was already a year in which Pearl Harbor memory was again re-inscribed in American popular culture. Shortly after September 11, the Honolulu media carried stories about visitors to the Arizona Memorial finding new meaning in that site, seeing the call to “be prepared” as once again taking on renewed significance.
The heavy inscription of Pearl Harbor and other WWII images in American representations of September 11, as well as the absence of reference to the atomic bombings, make sense if we consider that acts of representation and remembrance are concerned to do something—in this case to validate a sense of national purpose in the face of devastating attack. [A possible place where you might wish to develop this slightly: the specific mobilization of the nation for a series of wars, even pre-emptive wars, militarization on a global scale, the expansion of US military and other power etc.] Yet, in this age of global media flows, we may wonder how it is that intensely national images produced by American media and consumed by American audiences can have the effect they do. In this paper I’ve suggested that the ability to recontextualize conflict in the frameworks of memory growing out of previous wars continue to shape the meaning of events according to the familiar scripts of global conflict among nations.
Given that the Pearl Harbor attack, as a focus for American propaganda and resolve, proved to be such a liability for the Japanese during the war—providing a symbolic focus for American rage and resolve, one wonders if those planning the terrorist attacks of September 11 were aware of Pacific War history. On the other hand, if the aim of the attacks was to create the symbolic conditions of war (rather than to win a war)—to provoke reactions that manifest a vision of global conflict between Islam and the West, then attacks that create an environment reminiscent of World War II could be said to have succeeded, possibly beyond the dreams of those who perpetrated them.
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