Kirk Savage

It’s no accident that President Obama began and ended his State of the Union address with strong words of praise for the U.S. military.  In the middle of that “compliment sandwich” he lathered on a special sauce of American exceptionalism, full of tributes to American values of hard work and fair play and to American qualities of innovation, ingenuity, and productivity. “Our workers are the most productive on earth,” he declared at one point, “and if the playing field is level, I promise you – America will always win.”

American military superiority and American exceptionalism – a potent combination made to order for a nation still reeling from a near economic collapse and from a decade of counter-insurgency warfare fraught with shifting objectives and inconclusive results.

Why does America need to proclaim itself better than the rest of the world?  Does America have to win always? If America were a person with this attitude, we would probably think he was a megalomaniac or a bully or both – at the very least, not a person secure in his own skin.

The rhetoric of American exceptionalism has a long history but, in this day and age, it does seem to mask an underlying, deep-seated anxiety. While politicians trumpet our superiority over the rest of the world, middle-class Americans have been seeing their incomes, benefits, and job security decline even as wealth and living standards in developing countries like China appear to be be skyrocketing.

Once again, it’s no accident that exceptionalist rhetoric goes hand in hand with military might. As I wrote in an earlier post, there’s an age-old school of thought that national greatness feeds on blood. To be exceptional the nation has to shed blood – lots of it. The folks who have made this argument weren’t fanatics.  Some of them were ministers who preached the gospel of love. Obama is no fanatic either, but he plays the cards he’s dealt.

In one respect the U.S. is without question exceptional.  Its military budget is five times larger than China’s, the next largest.  Even more astonishingly, if you add up China’s military budget and the next 19 largest national military budgets, the U.S. military budget is still larger than all of these nations’ military expenditures combined.

Maybe one day we can rethink what it means to be exceptional, and decouple it from militarism. But that is going to take all the hard work, ingenuity, and innovation that America can muster – and then some.

I heard today from Susan Eisenhower, who let me know that her father John S.D. Eisenhower also supports the position of his children, who have all made public their opposition to Frank Gehry’s current design proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial.  John Eisenhower, President Eisenhower’s only child to survive into adulthood, has written to his daughters Anne and Susan that the monument should be “as simple as possible” and should “encapsulate, as much as can be done in stone, the accomplishments and principles of your grandfather.”

My previous post compared the Eisenhower case to the history of the FDR memorial. The FDR design controversy began in the early 1960s, when Eleanor and their five surviving children were all still alive. As the memorial finally came to completion in 1997, a new controversy erupted over whether to include a more open representation of Roosevelt’s disability.  By this time Eleanor and her children had all died, but 25 grandchildren survived, 16 of whom issued a statement supporting disability advocates.  Still they emphasized that there was no single “family position” on the issue.

The Eisenhower family is much smaller and evidently tightly knit.  They are a smart, thoughtful group and will no doubt prove to be a formidable challenge for Gehry’s design team and the regulatory agencies in charge of reviewing it.

It always seemed like an odd match.  Now it has become a controversial one too, as several of Eisenhower’s grandchildren have thrown down the gauntlet and gone public with their opposition to the latest design for a national monument to the former President in Washington, D.C.

In some ways the current fracas is a replay of the original controversy surrounding the FDR memorial, which erupted in the early 1960s, long before the memorial we know today was even on the drawing board. In both cases the design process was shepherded by a memorial commission, which included one representative of the Presidents’ families (a son in the case of FDR, a grandson in the case of Eisenhower).  Both commissions ended up choosing “avant-garde” architects.  In both cases the family representative went along with the process for awhile before turning against it and siding with other members of the family, who demanded a simpler, more “traditional” memorial. The opposition to the FDR design put the process on hold for over a decade, before a new designer, Larry Halprin, took over in the 1970s and the project got back on track.  The outcome of the Eisenhower memorial controversy still remains to be seen.

Of course there are some key differences in the two cases which may bode different outcomes.  Most notably, the FDR commission held its original design competition only fifteen years after Roosevelt’s death, while his wife and children were still alive.  The Eisenhower commission chose Frank Gehry forty years after Ike’s death, with his family now represented only by his grandchildren. Is it fair to ask whether more remote generations have as much standing as those in his immediate family? Probably, but this issue simply raises the larger question of what standing any member of the family ought to have in a public debate over a national monument. On the one hand, we feel impelled at least to listen to family opinions, because these are people who knew him well and it would seem disrespectful to pay no attention to them.  On the other hand, we all know that families are profoundly biased and even the best of them are to some extent dysfunctional.  Moreover, the monument is not for them; it is for us. Washington’s memorial landscape serves a national, indeed international audience, given how many come from abroad to visit its monuments.

The deal-breaker for Eisenhower’s grandchildren is the proposed statue of Ike. Gehry’s team wants to depict him as an adolescent boy in rural Kansas.  The designers also plan to include more standard bas-relief images of him as general and president, but the statue in the round would create a different sort of narrative anchored in the agrarian yeoman past of America. To emphasize this narrative, the designers propose to create huge metal mesh “tapestries” on three sides of the enormous site that will display a continuous farm landscape from his hometown.  For the family members the design puts far too much stress on Eisenhower’s farm roots, making the memorial’s theme essentially “a barefoot boy from Kansas.”

The idea of representing the hero’s boyhood roots in an agrarian America links this project to a distinct phase in Lincoln’s commemoration.  During the 1930s especially there was a mini-craze for boyhood sculptures of Lincoln, as railsplitter, farmboy, horse driver.  These were local projects typically (though not always) located in the midwest. But no one would ever have considered putting a barefoot image of the young Lincoln in the temple on the Mall or in any national monument to him, where a statue of more gravitas would be expected.

My own feelings about the project are mixed. The statue proposal has at least provoked some interesting debate, and if it were erected it would probably get a lot more attention from its audience than a more predictable commander image. In the hands of a good sculptor it could even be interesting. (Note: There is already a seated bronze figure of “little Ike” in a small park in his hometown of Abilene, sponsored by the Abilene Kid’s Council.)

I am much more bothered by the scale of the whole project.  The enormous size of the metal tapestries, which effectively enclose the site on three sides, only exaggerates the overall scale of the four-acre site. The design team points out that the tapestries are supposed to be translucent, so that the buildings behind them are visible through the mesh.  But if we are to see the tapestries as Kansas farm landscapes, we will not see the cityscape behind them.  (This is a variant of the old duck-rabbit puzzle, where a line drawing can be seen either as a rabbit or as a duck but not as both at the same time.) The tapestries will become enormous billboards that surround the site and dwarf the observer on the ground.

And finally, these images of a mythologized agrarian past will displace a genuine agrarian experience already on the site: a community garden.  It seems ironic, to say the least, that a real working urban garden must be destroyed to make room for a simulacrum of midwestern agrarian America, a simulacrum, moreover, that reeks of chemical fertilizers, federal farm subsidies, and everything else that is unsustainable about large-scale commercial agriculture in this country.

A more truly innovative solution would be to go small and keep the community garden as an integral design element.  Then we might really stretch our notion of what a monument could become in the twenty-first century.

Due to a long stint in the hospital in September-October, I haven’t been able to post much lately.  But not surprisingly I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about mortality – more specifically, how our thinking about mortality is embedded in our thinking about history.

Like the nightly news, history books are dominated by violence and war.  “If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the old saying. As a boy I was seduced just as much as anyone: I read avidly about Napoleon’s military exploits and the battles of the Civil War.  My parents took me to Gettysburg, Petersburg, even Waterloo. When I grew up and became a scholar I dragged along my obsession with war and found a way to do art history about it.

As I get older and death grows less remote, I become more ambivalent about my own fascination with war and its bloodshed. When your own body sheds blood in buckets it’s harder to accept the familiar euphemisms and dodges we use to make war palatable. I have a chronic, incurable blood disorder that somehow makes my veins both bleed and clot. It’s crazy but treatable, with a lot of vigilance.

These are my own blood drops still left on the hospital floor, after multiple transfusions that barely kept me alive. Blood is messy, frightening, and beautiful all at once – and it is indispensable to our received ideas of history.

After the Civil War, a cult of blood spread across the land. For the Union, the rivers of blood spilled on battlefields and in military hospitals had “baptized” the nation and redeemed it from the sin of slavery. For the Confederacy blood had guaranteed the honor and lasting fame of their cause. “Red, rich, and pure, like a rain for us,” wrote the Lost Cause poet Father Ryan in his poem “C.S.A.”

“History cannot live on peace,” minister Horace Bushnell declared, “but must feed itself on blood.” Bushnell’s point was that “without shedding of blood, there is almost nothing great in the world, or to be expected for it.”  Blood had the uncanny ability to “quicken and consecrate whatever it touches.”

To the patient who has seen his blood drain out of him, all this is infuriating nonsense. My blood didn’t consecrate the hospital floor. Nor did the Civil War’s rivers of blood consecrate the nation.  On the contrary, that blood cut young lives short, deprived parents of their sons and children of their fathers, and impoverished families and communities. The cult of blood at once celebrates death and destruction and refuses to acknowledge the real suffering that death always brings.

For the past several months Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic has written a superb series of articles on slavery and the Civil War, arguing that the war was not a tragedy but a triumph. Blacks had been under a constant state of war, he observes, since slavery began in the seventeenth century.  The Civil War was a war of liberation, a second revolution that ultimately failed to live up to its promise but at least laid the legal and moral framework for the Civil Rights movement a century later. Coates is right to debunk the old myth that the war was “unnecessary” and that slavery would have ended soon on its own, or through some combination of colonization and compensated emancipation; without the war the ongoing tragedy of slavery would certainly have been prolonged for decades, if not longer.

Yet, even if war has a compelling moral justification, there is no excuse for glorifying the shedding of blood or for arguing that “history” demands it. The cult of war distorts the suffering of those soldiers and civilians who lost their own lives and minimizes the plight of all those survivors who were profoundly damaged by the deaths of their loved ones.  These are the countless thousands of tragedies that any war exacts, and they are just as much the stuff of history as the “causes” that sometimes burnish a war’s reputation. Whether the cause justifies the tragedies is a calculation that is ultimately impossible to make, since every individual tragedy, in its own way, is infinite.

When Christ died on the cross to redeem mankind, thereby giving the cult of blood a theological foundation, he did so as God, choosing absolutely freely.  He was not conscripted into his sacrifice by a nation or weapons industry or even “history,” which all feed themselves on blood.

On this Christmas day, when the saviour is still newborn and the blood of the cross a tragedy on the far horizon, let us hope for less blood and more compassion, less death and more life.

I don’t ordinarily plug books here, but I would like to put in a word for Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial, edited by historian Thomas Brown.  This is the first book I know of that deals primarily with how the U.S. Civil War is remembered and reshaped in our own contemporary day and age.  Essays look at visual art, film, photography, literature, social moverments – everything from flag controversies to installation art.

I wrote an afterword for the collection.  My short contribution asks how we can “decenter” the Civil War and situate it instead within the long struggle for justice in U.S. history, and how we might connect it to the terrible ongoing history of civil war in the world today.  Whether my suggestions are provocative or not is for others to say.