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“Land of Unfinished Monuments”: The Ruins-in-Reverse of Nineteenth-Century America

2012; Routledge; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14664658.2012.708162

1743-7903

Nick Yablon,

Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

Abstract By focusing on the design and reception of successfully completed monuments, historians have overlooked the presence in nineteenth-century America of monuments that were left unfinished for decades, or even aborted altogether. This article recovers numerous such monuments, and shows how contemporaries seized on them not merely for their aesthetic value as homegrown ruins to be visited and sketched, but also for their rhetorical value as expressions of unfinished political and social struggles. In refashioning these incipient historical memorials as ironic anti-monuments to contemporary problems, diverse groups – radical workingmen and conservative Whigs, female activists and chauvinist newspapermen, patriotic Americans and critical Englishmen, proslavery southerners and abolitionist northerners – elaborated a broader discourse of unfinishedness. The fragments of these monuments could even figure the nation itself as a work-in-progress, contrary to current arguments about the construction of national identity through notions of organic wholeness. The article also questions scholars' assumption that monuments inevitably promote a culture of forgetting by projecting images of consensus and closure. In turning to the reception of monuments during their often-lengthy construction, we can perceive their more complex relationship to dominant ideologies and narratives of the nation-state. Keywords: monumentsmemoryruinssectionalismnational identity Acknowledgements I would like to thank Paula Amad, Carl Smith, Allison Wanger, and the anonymous readers for American Nineteenth Century History, for their readings of earlier drafts of this essay. I presented the essay at Karen Halttunen and Seth Cotlar's symposium on nineteenth-century American ruins at the Huntington Library, California, at Andreas Etges's colloquium at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Berlin, Germany, and as a lecture to the Iowa Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), and am grateful to the participants for their responses. Thank you also to Carl Zellner, who generously supplied me with several images and sources relating to the Bunker Hill monument. Notes 1. The inscription in fact reads, "Erected by a grateful people." 2. Smith, Baggage and Boots, 149–50, 351–2. Faith had been installed six years earlier, but the other figures were not yet completed. The Standish Monument was begun 1872 and completed 1898. 3. Savage, "The Self-Made Monument," 6. See also Savage, Monument Wars, 55–60, 75–7, 107–44; Kammen, Visual Shock, 12–17. 4. Baltimore's monument (begun 1815, completed 1842) was delayed by the Panic of 1819 and the excessive ornateness of Robert Mills's design; see Ryan, "Democracy Rising," 127–50. On Richmond's monument to Washington (begun 1850, completed 1869), see Bondurant, Poe's Richmond, 65–6; on Philadelphia's, see "Washington's Birth Day"; and on New York's, see "Towering Monument to Washington"; Landy, "The Washington Monument Project," 291–7. Washington and Philadelphia did construct Washington monuments later in the century. 5. Hetzel, Building of a Monument, 19, 137. 6. Warren, Bunker Hill Monument Association, 253–4; Vose, "First Monument on Bunker Hill," 236. Huber, Battle of New Orleans, 22; construction was suspended in 1859 and resumed in 1908 (ibid., 22, 31). 7. "Oysters and Hair-Oil," 58. 8. Chicago Tribune proposed a monument of burned safes, satirizing the failure of the city's institutions, in "Let Us Commemorate." On the presence of relics in Jenney's revised design, see "Safe Monument." 9. Sturken and Young, "Monuments," 277, 273. Although Sturken and Young distinguish monuments from memorials, here I treat them as a single category. 10. On the construction and sacralization of larger memorial landscapes such as the Capitol Mall and the nation's battlefields, see, respectively, Savage, Monument Wars, and Linenthal, Sacred Ground. 11. On monuments (and lack thereof) to African Americans, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 197–8; Piehler, Remembering War, 69; and Savage, Standing Soldiers, 174–5, 185–8. On the conservatism of monuments to the Revolution, see Young, Shoemaker, 115; Purcell, Sealed with Blood, 102–7. 12. On the striving for "consensus" and "closure," see Savage, Standing Soldiers, 4; on monuments as instruments of forgetting, see Nora, "Between Memory and History," 11–12; Sturken, Tangled Memories, 63; and Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 249–60. 13. On the monument's erasure of its political origins, see Savage, Standing Soldiers, 6–7; on its "grandiose pretensions to permanence," see Sturken and Young, "Monuments," 277. 14. On the re-appropriation of completed monuments, see Thomas, Lincoln Memorial, 144–68, and Sandage, "A Marble House Divided," 135–67; on vandalism, see Doss, Memorial Mania, 315–16, 361–2, and Peffer, "Censorship and Iconoclasm," 45–60. 15. See, for example, Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Renan, "What is a Nation?," 8–22. On the (female) body as metaphor of national wholeness, see Tichi, Embodiment of a Nation; and Baker, Heartless Immensity, 25. 16. Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy, 23–4. 17. Bodnar, Remaking America, 14. 18. Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments," 68–74. See Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 19–61. 19. San Francisco's and Philadelphia's city halls both took 27 years to complete; the former was dubbed the "city hall ruins," the latter the "Temple of Philadelphia's Folly"; see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 231. On ruins-in-reverse of commercial buildings, see ibid., 80, 122–6; and on those of speculative town-sites, 60–1, 63–106. 20. Marrinan, Romantic Paris, 97–100. Even when dedicated in 1836, the arch was still unfinished: a statue was supposed to have topped it. 21. "Restoration of the Parthenon," 509–12. 22. See Mee, "Unfinished London," 395. 23. See, for example, Wordsworth's poem, "The Column Intended by Buonaparte," 344. 24. Savage, Monument Wars, 1, 41–2. On the slow emergence of historical consciousness, see Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory. On republican objections to obelisk monuments, see Harris, Artist in American Society, 191. 25. On Congress' reluctance to contribute to monuments, see Piehler, Remembering War, 23, 27, 29; and on its neglect of other forms of national memory, see Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 55. 26. Examples include the Chalmette Monument and New York's Washington Monument. 27. Act of Incorporation, 72–3. 28. Regarding the delay on Bunker Hill, see Willard, letter, May 1834. 29. Allegations of mismanagement and wastefulness drove the architect Willard to vow (temporarily) "not to have anything farther to do with the [Bunker Hill] Monument." Willard, Letter to G.W. 30. Huber, Battle of New Orleans, 12–13. 31. Warren, Bunker Hill Monument Association, 242–3, 247. 32. Miller, "Designs for the Washington Monument in Baltimore," 19. Even after the Baltimore monument was relocated to a suburban site, it continued to be viewed financially, as a spur to urban development; see Ryan, "Democracy Rising," 140–1. On the original location and designs of the Davis monument, see Collins, Death and Resurrection, 133–43. 33. Seelye, Memory's Nation, 423, 439. 34. "Bunker Hill Monument Association," 1834. 35. On the derision towards Mills' original design for the Washington Monument, which fused Greek, Roman, and Egyptian, see Kammen, Visual Shock, 13; on aesthetic debates surrounding the Bunker Hill monument, see Harris, Artist in American Society, 190–8. 36. "Bunker Hill Monument Association," 1829; O'Gorman, Accomplished in All Departments, 188. 37. News & Observer, June 7, 1896; Collins, Death and Resurrection, 136, 140. 38. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 469. 39. Landy, "Washington Monument Project," 296; Seelye, Memory's Nation, 553, 555. Commencement of the Provincetown monument was delayed until 1908. 40. Torres, To the Immortal, 36–73. 41. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 118. Diderot, Diderot on Art, 212. See also Harries, The Unfinished Manner. 42. See, for example, Poe's "Mellonta Tauta," discussed below. Bjelajac, Millennial Desire, 4. 43. von Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 21. 44. See also the reference to Plymouth sheep "roam[ing] undismayed" around the Forefathers Monument's forgotten cornerstone, in "Monument to the Pilgrims." 45. On the "curiosity-seekers" at the Washington Monument, see Richard McCormick's speech in Chipman et al., Washington National Monument, 27; on the unfinished Bunker Hill Monument as an "object of universal attraction" to both American visitors and "stranger[s] from Europe," see "[Report]." 46. Lossing described and depicted the Chalmette monument in The Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, 1042, 1042n1, 1048, 1048n2, 1058–9; and the Mary Washington monument in The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, vol. II, 221–2, 222n1. 47. "Monuments for Battle-Fields of the Revolution," n.p. 48. See Programme of Ceremonies. On the immediate doubts, see Landy, "Washington Monument Project," 295–6. 49. Hone quoted in Barck, "Proposed Memorials to Washington in New York City," 87. 50. Poe, "Mellonta Tauta," 882–4. 51. Shelley, Selected Poetry and Prose, 194. 52. Winthrop, "Oration on the Completion," 530. Reference to flagstaff in Griffith, ed., History of the Washington Monument, 70–1. 53. Referring to the "hideous and beggarly appearance" of the unfinished Washington Monument, Chester proclaimed that "few things in architecture are meaner than an obelisk made of small stones." Transatlantic Sketches, 267. 54. Simmel, "The Ruin," 265. 55. "Beef Depot Monument," 167, 173; Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age, 177. 56. Simmel, "The Ruin," 260–1. Harland lamented that "the relic-hunter's hammer has been busy" with the Mary Washington Monument, in "A Disgrace a Century Old," 364. On the "vandal hands of relic hunters" that marred the Chalmette monument, see "Society United States Daughters," 187. 57. Simmel, "The Ruin," 261. 58. Torres, To the Immortal Name, 37–8. There were also proposals to complete the monument but in some other style; see Savage, Monument Wars, 117–23. 59. Such calls included: "Correspondence," 60; and "Editor's Easy Chair," 437. For exceptions to the rule about immediate rebuilding, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 237–42. 60. Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, 26–7 (emphasis in original). On the Boston shipyards strike, see Curl, For All the People, 41. On Luther's activism, see Hartz, "Seth Luther," 401–18. 61. Luther, Working-Men of the City of Brooklyn, 14–15. 62. "Working Men's Declaration of Independence," 47–50; Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory, 84–5. 63. See Young, Shoemaker, 108, 110, 113, 121–6, 132, 154. 64. Purcell, Sealed with Blood, 65, 198; Young, Shoemaker, 134–5; veteran Caleb Stark quoted in Warren, Bunker Hill Monument Association, 65. 65. See Purcell, Sealed With Blood, 195, 197, 201; and, on the workingmen's cooptation of the cornerstone ceremony through sheer force of numbers, Young, Shoemaker, 138. 66. By the 1830s, some of the "artisans" of the MCMA had effectively become businessmen, prompting a special committee to renew its allegiance to those with "real mechanic skill." Although the editors of its organ, the Mechanic Apprentice, rejected class politics in favor of moral individualism, it still published occasional essays that voiced a "populist radicalism that denounced the idle rich and the 'antagonistical principles' of capitalist social relations." Wach, "'Expansive Intellect,'" 42, 44, 45. Reference to "liberality" from Hudson, "Doubts Concerning," 260. On Willard's insistence on "hir[ing] good men" and "pay[ing] them fair wages," see Evans and Snell, Construction of the Bunker Hill Monument, vol. I, 64. 67. Hale, "The Worth of Money," 54, 55; on the Israelite analogy and male objections, see Hale, "The Bunker Hill Monument" (1830), 135; on the failure of that effort, see Hale, "Bunker Hill Monument" (1833), 280–2; on the Ladies' Fair, see Warren, Bunker Hill Monument Association, 295–314; response to men's complaints in "Building the Monument," 1. 68. Constitution, 10, 3, 5. For legal reasons, the treasurer had to be male. 69. Constitution, 10, 3, 5. For legal reasons, the treasurer had to be male. 10, 12. 70. Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument, 79. Conn discusses a similar rhetoric in "Rescuing the Homestead," 72, 75. 71. See Clemens, The People's Lobby, 184–234; Mills and Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause. 72. Huber, Battle of New Orleans, 26, 28–9. 73. Collins, Death and Resurrection, 141. 74. Collins, Death and Resurrection, 140; "The Memorial to Mr. Davis." 75. Harland, "A Disgrace," 364; reference to melancholy in Harland, Story of Mary Washington, 154; on the failed bills, see Hetzel, The Building of a Monument, 24. 76. "The Mary Washington Monument"; editorial, American Architect and Building News, 61–2. 77. Johnston, "Mary, the Mother of Washington," 196. 78. "Speech of the Hon. Edward Everett." 79. See Conn, "Rescuing the Homestead," 78, 80–1; and Urofsky, The Levy Family, 40. 80. [Bausman], "Ingratitude of Republics," 137. 81. Chipman et al., Washington National Monument, 12, 9. The bill failed; not until 1876 did Congress approve the appropriation. 82. "Instructions to the Collectors." 83. "Ingratitude of Republics," 138. 84. Howard, The Monumental City, 68. A lottery was requested in "Bunker Hill Monument," 1829. Hale rejected it as "appeal[ing] … to the avarice and gambling propensities of the people," in "The Worth of Money," 54. 85. Edward Everett warned against such a sale, preferring that the Bunker Hill monument be left incomplete for the time being; Warren, Bunker Hill Monument Association, 252. The monument association voted to sell the mortgaged land in 1829, but did not sell it until 1839. 86. The Washington National Monument, 9, 16. 87. J.D.C., "The Washington Monument," 60. For fears that the "unfinished yet decaying monument" would cast a "shado[w]" on "the American Jubilee," see "Great Council Improved Order." 88. Untitled newspaper clipping, "Forefathers Monument." 89. Dickens's, American Notes, 129–30. On Dickens' critique of the capital as a "monument raised to a deceased project" and the reasons for its unfinished appearance, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 80–1. 90. Trollope, North America, vol. II, 6, 19, 20. Construction on the dome was suspended in May 1861 due to the Civil War and resumed in the spring of 1862, shortly after Trollope's visit to Washington. 91. Griffin, The Great Republic, 16–17. 92. On the seizure of the Pope's stone, see "A Brief History of the Block of Marble." On the 1855 election, see Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument, 60–1. Call to "nationalize before we naturalize" from Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 121. 93. Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument, 69. The Know-Nothings claimed their efforts were sabotaged by their predecessors; see "Secretary's Report." 94. New York Tribune, quoted in "The Washington Monument." Semi-Weekly Western Sun, June 26, 1857. 95. Gilman, The Poetry of Travelling, 186–7. 96. The Washington National Monument, 7. 97. Winthrop, "Oration on the Completion," 539–40 (delivered by another speaker as Winthrop was too ill to attend). 98. On the liberty tree and the unfinished pyramid, see Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, 19–36, 148, respectively; on the Federal Edifice, see Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, 81–2. 99. Breckinridge, "Oration," 103–4. 100. See, for example, Webster's comparison of the Union with "a vast and splendid monument" (at the 1825 Bunker Hill cornerstone ceremony) in "An Address," 254; and Winthrop's plea to "let each stone [of the Washington Monument] be raised and riveted, in a spirit of national brotherhood!," "National Monument to Washington," 88. This rhetoric dates back at least to Washington's paean to the Union as "a main Pillar in the Edifice of your real independence," in his "Farewell Address," 286. Slauter shows how Federalists shifted from bodily to architectural metaphors in the 1780s, in State as a Work of Art, 39–86. 101. Winthrop, "Oration on the Completion," 530. 102. On the call for commemorative stones, see Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument, 48. Many states sent stones without any financial offering. See Jacob, The Washington Monument, 8. On the belief that the preservation of Mount Vernon would "heal sectional wounds," see Conn, "Rescuing the Homestead," 85. 103. The Washington Monument, 11, 19, 8. Garrison, editorial (1850). Some of the southern states' stones were more ambivalent; Georgia's read "The Constitution as it is, The Union as it was," and South Carolina's included just its coat of arms. 104. "Vandalism," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 6, 1850. On the lapidarium, see Jacob, Washington Monument, 16–17. 105. Reference to Foote speech in Winthrop, "Oration on the Completion," 529; Taylor quoted in Harvey, History of the Washington National Monument, 50. 106. On the broken column in cemetery iconography, see Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 37–8. 107. Fuller, Our Duty to the African Race, 7, 10, 11, 17, 16. 108. Garrison, editorial (1831) (emphasis in original). 109. Lowell, "A Washington Monument," 222, 223. On the slave auctions conducted on the Mall until 1850, see Green, The Secret City, 33–54. 110. Emerson, "Lecture on Slavery," 106. 111. Hale, "Speech," 33; see also Seelye, Memory's Nation, 449–50. 112. Phillips, "Speech at Tremont Temple," 107. 113. On Billings' abolitionist illustrations, see O'Gorman, Accomplished in All Departments, 47–62. 114. Seelye, Memory's Nation, 447–48; see also 443. On efforts of abolitionists to reaffirm the centrality of New England, see ibid., 226–49. 115. Clingman, "Speech on the State of the Union," 549–50. Before joining the secessionists, Clingman remained hopeful of compromise; see Jeffrey, Thomas Lanier Clingman, 148–64. 116. Clingman, "Speech on the State of the Union," 548. 117. Seward, The Union, 5. 118. Clingman, "Speech on the State of the Union," 547–8. 119. "Beef Depot Monument," 167. 120. Taylor, "A Flying Trip to Washington"; "The Twenty-Second." 121. On Lincoln's resumption of the dome, see Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, 89. On the slave Philip Reid's contributions, see Holland, Black Men Built the Capitol, 5. On Davis's inauguration, see Furgurson, Ashes of Glory, 110–11. 122. Perrin, Speech, 1, 8; "The South and the Flag"; Bates, Sergeant Bates' March, 28. 123. On the aborted monuments to African American soldiers in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Baltimore in the 1870s and 1880s, see Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 156. 124. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 115; see also Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 177; Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal, 15–70. 125. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 162–208, especially 182. 126. On the federal government's involvement with war cemeteries, see Piehler, Remembering War, 49, 66; Linenthal, Sacred Ground, 104; on the CFA, see Brown, "The Mall and the Commission of Fine Arts," 249–61. On the Park Service's 1933 assumption of control over the Mall, see Glazer and Field, eds., The National Mall, 183. 127. Savage, Monument Wars, 297–313; Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal, 271–92. 128. Savage, Monument Wars, 140–1. 129. Winthrop identified the obelisk with "a united and glorious Nation" in "Oration on the Completion," 552–3. Breckinridge, "Oration," 65. 130. Mead, "The Mother of Washington," 455. Baptism of fire quotation from Fredericksburg newspaper, cited in "The Mary Washington Monument," 11. 131. Hetzel, Building of a Monument, 21, 146. Within earshot of that spot, "over fifty thousand" fell over four years – from the Union troops who lost the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville to the Confederates, who were routed at Spotsylvania Court House, ibid., 21. 132. Collins, Death and Resurrection, 148–9; on the decline of the Lost Cause movement in the early twentieth century, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 381–97. 133. Tyler, A Souvenir Book, n.p.; see also the call to reuse the Mary Washington Monument's "scattered, moss-covered stones" in the new monument, quoted in Harland, "A Disgrace," 365; and the legend that the Washington Monument cornerstone in New York had been transferred to the one in Washington, cited in "Unwritten History," 93. 134. See, among others, Baltimore's Washington Monument, the Forefathers Monument, and Chalmette Monument. Similarly, Mount Rushmore was to have depicted the presidents down to their waists, and Stone Mountain was to have included General Lee's army. On Washington Monument as blank, see Savage, Monument Wars, 123–8, 140–4. 135. James, The American Scene, 378; see also Wilson, "Monument Avenue, Richmond," 100–15. On the belated landscaping of the Mall, see Savage, Monument Wars, 147–92. 136. "All the Varying Phases," 26–7. 137. "Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee." 138. Paul, letter to Adelaide Johnson; Johnson scribbled in the margins, "Ye gods!!! And ignorant fools." Equal rights quotation from Workman, "The Woman Movement," 61. The unfinished portion did attract controversy in the 1990s, when the National Congress of Black Women demanded it be chiseled to depict Sojourner Truth (ibid., 55–6). Docents have misinformed visitors that it was intended to eventually depict the first female president; see Cho, "A Woman at the Helm." 139. From the Vietnam era onwards, advances in identifying bodily remains have hindered efforts to continue this tradition; see Sturken, Tangled Memories, 63, 72. See also the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, constructed after the Korean War but updated to include the names of subsequent wars. 140. Sturken examines the leaving of artifacts at the Vietnam memorial in Tangled Memories, 74–81; the supplementing of that memorial by the Three Soldiers Statue and Vietnam Women's Memorial (56–8, 66–8); and the demands of other groups for their own additions (274 n55). Savage discusses the addition of the wheelchair statue to the FDR memorial after its dedication in Monument Wars, 307–8. On virtual monuments, see Ulmer, Electronic Monuments. On spontaneous, temporary memorials at sites of death, see Doss, Memorial Mania, 61–116. On light projections, see Purcell, "Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument," 55–71; see also the "Tribute in Light," two columns projected from Ground Zero every September 11 since 2003.