The greatest democracy in history, a beacon of freedom, a selfless force of good in the world, these are all elements of American exceptionalism.  These are the ways Americans see their nation, its relationship to others, and its place in the world. But what happens when a sudden and unexpected catastrophe threatens this identity?  This was the case with the attacks of September 11th 2001.  In Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era, New York University’s Martia Sturken argues that Americans doubled down on the narrative of exceptionalism.  For the next twenty years it was the narrative of 9/11 exceptionalism, an extension of American exceptionalism, that shaped how we memorialized this past.  Only toward the end of the global war on terror, has the age of 9/11 memory started to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, giving way to a new era of more critical memory.  

The American faith in the selfless benevolence of their nation has much to do with an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the reality of American imperialism.  This in part has to do with the some 800 military bases in 70 countries hidden from view.  But, as historian Daniel Immerwahr has noted in, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, it also is based on the ability of the United States to project power and influence through culture, rather than a traditional land-based empire.  It was the presence of American military bases in places like Saudi Arabia, in close proximity to some of Islam’s most sacred sites, that sparked outrage and inspired the attacks on the symbols of American financial, political, and military power.  American exceptionalism, Marita Sturken argues, enables the narrative of American innocence in which the United States is not held accountable for its actions.  In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss, featured in an earlier episode, asserts that the 9/11 attacks were fundamentally understood as an assault on American innocence, a victimization of all Americans that called for a therapeutic war on terror.  Images of a tearful American eagle, superimposed over twin towers engulfed in smoke, were pervasive in the aftermath of 9/11. Marita Sturken adds that the gravity of the unprovoked 9/11 attacks was heightened by the narrative of 9/11 exceptionalism that cast the horrors as unprecedented in the annals of history.  This exceptionalism, she explains, served to mask the full scope, scale, and human consequences of the two decades of war that followed. 

In the many years since the destruction of 9/11, the struggle to mark the site of Ground Zero as national, significant, and as a symbol of resilience and renewal at the same time that it produces vast amounts of office space, shopping venues, and transportation infrastructure, has placed particular burdens on architecture. Yet as the rebuilding of Ground Zero has demonstrated, visions of renewal have been squandered in the pursuit of “business as usual.” There was a chance at getting this right but it became a case of business as usual.  Marita Sturken, Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era.

The plans for how to memorialize the 9/11 attacks were, in Marita Stuken’s opinion, overdetermined by the notion of 9/11 exceptionalism.  As an event that had no historical antecedent, no parallel of equal weight, all consideration of proposals for a more contemplative memorial were quickly dismissed.  From the get-go, the power brokers were determined that whatever shape and form the memorial took it would have to be focused on that particular day and the magnitude of what transpired.  Designer Michael Arad, chosen for the memorial, was equally constrained by the expectations for the site.  Two giant cascading pools of water, mirroring the footprints of the collapsed towers and ringed by the names of the victims, ended up absorbing almost all of the space of New York’s 9/11 memorial site.  

Beyond the lack of space to congregate and reflect on the attacks, the ground zero memorial site suffers from an array of security imperatives. Security bollards ring the site, cutting it off from the surrounding neighborhoods.  Prominently affixed signs present a long list of prohibited activities that are common features of New York City’s public spaces.  Some of these prohibitions are part of the debate found at many memorial sites about how to define and regulate appropriate behavior. In the case of the 9/11 memorial, however, they contribute to the ways in which the space is divorced from the larger life of the city and reduced to a tourist destination.  

The 9/11 Memorial Museum was tasked with the impossible mission of memorializing the victims while also telling the story of what happened on 9/11.  From images of shocked onlookers and the global media riveted on the site of the burning towers to recordings of the final words of passengers and flight attendants on the doomed aircraft, the museum aptly captures the emotions and horror of the day.  The difficulty, however, is how to mourn the victims while also providing a thoughtful and critical account of what happened.  By embracing the 9/11 exceptionalist narrative and the narrative of American innocence, by limiting the timeframe to 9/11, it is impossible to understand the course of events that lead to the attacks and the two decades of war on terror that followed.  

A 9/11 boondoggle is perhaps the best way to describe the construction around the sixteen-acre ground zero site.  Developers were able to ride the swell of patriotism that followed 9/11 to the tune of billions of dollars.  The most glaring examples are the One World Trade Center and the Oculus Transportation Hub.  Marita Sturken describes these projects as a multibillion-dollar office tower and shopping mall that draw more tourists than locals.  One World Trade Central contributes to the glut of office space in the city, only worsened by the pandemic, while doing nothing to address the very real housing shortage in the city.  The Oculus masquerades as a cathedral designed to lift the spirits while functioning as a high-end shopping mall.  Offering a dramatic backdrop for social media posts, the Oculus offers few resources, such as coffee shops, that might serve the needs of ordinary New Yorkers.  Like the too tall, too thin towers overlooking Central Park where the global elite park illicit funds in signature addresses designed by celebrity architects, One World Trade Central and the Oculus have much in common with the universe of high-end New York City real estate.  

If 9/11 exceptionalism funneled billions of dollars into questionable memorial and construction projects, the costs and the effects of the war on terror have been far greater.  According to Brown University’s Watson Institute, the economic cost of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2022 totaled over five trillion dollars.  The number of civilian and military dead topped 900,000.  What sustained these wars for Americans was their invisibility.  They were wars fought by an all-volunteer military, often serving several tours of duty.  Until 2009, photos of the coffins of fallen soldiers repatriated to Dover Air Force Base were banned by the military.  This was an invisibility, Marita Sturken stresses, in which the media were complicit in masking the true costs of the wars from the American public.  

Private memorial initiatives seeking to shatter the invisibility of the war were a key part of the shift away from the era of 9/11 memory.  Marita Sturken features a wide array of projects and cultural actors in her book.  Artist Michael G. Reagan offers free-of-charge, hand-drawn, photo-based portraits of the fallen as part of the Fallen Heroes Project. Photographer Ashley Gilbertson has assembled a collection of portraits of the bedrooms of soldiers killed in combat in his book, Bedrooms of the Fallen.  Counting and naming have long been central to how contemporary memorial projects render the dead visible.  Projects like Arlington West try to do this by placing symbols such as crosses or tombstones in prominent locations emblazoned with the names, and sometimes photos, of the fallen and reading their names in public ceremonies.  These projects marked a dramatic departure from the nationalist tone and tenor of the memorialization work in the immediate years after 9/11.

By the time we get to 2020 the spirit of 9/11 exceptionalism that drove American memory work for two decades began to sputter out.  What may be taking its place, is a very different approach to the past.  Marita Sturken believes that the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, founded by Bryan Stevenson, is an important example of this.  First taking up the cause of liberating often wrongly convicted death row inmates through legal action, Stevenson came to see memory activism as an important tool to sensitize the public about the criminal justice system and its treatment of African Americans.  Stevenson selected Montgomery, Alabama, one of the primary slave ports and central to the memory of the Civil Rights Movement, for a unique memorial and adjoining museum. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice uses the emotional power of modern memorial design to convey and emotionally implicate visitors in the history of lynching in America.  The adjoining, Legacy Museum, also designed as an interactive experience, ties the story of lynching to the larger history of racial violence stretching from slavery to mass incarceration.  

Inspired by the work of memory activists in Germany, projects like those of Bryan Stevenson are based on the conviction that healthy democracies need to reckon with their past.  The use of words like terror to describe the century-long epidemic of lynching that followed the civil war, also represents an important departure from the 9/11 memory era.  Rather than casting terror exclusively as an unprovoked assault on an innocent nation, Stevenson’s memorial and museum defines terror as integral to the experience of African Americans. Rather than a masking device used to justify wars with invisible costs, Stevenson uses terror to open a critical and long overdue conversation about the nation’s past and present.