Americans are living in an age of frenzied memorial making, argues University of Texas at Dallas art and cultural historian Erika Doss.  We saturate the public landscape with memorials to every conceivable cause, aggrieved group, or unsung hero.  What do memorials tell us about Americans and America today? In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Erika Doss contends that memorials embody public emotions such as grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger.  They help process tragic events like school shootings or terrorist attacks.  They allow us to express our gratitude for past sacrifices or shame for episodes that run counter to our shared values and ideals.  At their best, memorials allow for our participation in the process of memory making.  They can be powerfully therapeutic, encouraging conversations and engaged, critical thinking about the past.  At their worst, they can entrench us in our emotions, lock us into self-gratulatory modes of thought, or magnify our fears without helping us to understand the hows and whys of what we are memorializing.  

The uses and abuses of memorials are as old as civilization.  But in the modern industrial age we have the means, and often the economic incentives, to produce memorials on an unprecedented scale.  The late nineteenth century, Doss notes, was the first age of mass memorialization.  Doss refers to this period as the age of “statue mania” and posits that it was very different in terms of its content and character than then the present period of “memorial mania.”  The statues of the earlier era were devoted above all to great white men and their achievements in the battlefield or the realms of politics, art and learning.  During a period of rapid economic and demographic change, statue mania was an attempt to foster loyalty and unity around the nation by orchestrating memory from above.  

Memorial mania is a much more recent phenomenon ushered in by the civil rights era.  This was a period that laid the groundwork for what Doss describes as our current “rights conconsious” era where diverse and previously disenfranchised groups now lay claim to their rightful place on the American memorial landscape.  Memory in the present functions from the bottom up.  It is the participation of a vast array of publics eager to tell their story, to right a past wrong, or to commemorate a neglected achievement or past injustice that drives the current frenzy of memorial making.  

Emotions or what Doss labels as “public affect” are a key impetus for memorial making in America.  Beginning with a chapter on grief, Doss offers a panorama of examples, from school shootings to car accidents, of how spontaneous or grass roots memorial making allows us to work through the emotion of grief in the wake of sudden and expected tragedy.  Taking the 1999 Columbine school shooting as her most prominent example, Doss observes how morning went from a private to a public affair as the aggrieved came from well beyond the region to pay their respects to the dead.  As with countless other spontaneous memorials that would follow similar tragedies in the ensuing years, mourners who came to Columbine brought with them mountains of material objects to express their emotions.  From photos to flowers, letters to stuffed animals, perishable material objects with symbolic or inscribed meanings are how we grieve together in shared public spaces following tragic events like school schoolings.

Contemporary American commemoration is increasingly disposed to individual memories and personal grievances, to representations of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of a diffuse body of rights-bearing citizens. Erica Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.

While the outpouring of grief after Columbine had undeniable therapeutic value, Doss argues that it did little to promote a deep understanding of the reasons for or how to prevent future tragedies.  Spontaneous memorial making around the Columbine shooting failed to generate constructive or impactful conversations about why such tragedies occur and what could be done to prevent them in the future.  Moreover, other groups, such as Christian evangelicals, seized the opportunity to spin the tragedy for their own purposes by labeling the murdered as Christian martyrs thereby closing the door to conversations about mental health or gun control.  

Doss is careful to add that grief based memorials need not close off constructive conservations necessary for change. She offers the example of the NAMES project, better known as the AIDS Memorial Quilt, as a memorial that invites critical engagement with the past.  Through its tens of thousands of three by six foot, grave-sized panels, each of the squares of the quilt fought against homophobia, the AIDS epidemic, and the anonymity of the dead by incorporating elements of each victim’s particular life story.  Experienced by millions, and continuing to circulate in sections, Doss notes that the NAMES project has become a global foundation that funds AIDS research, AIDS prevention and education.  

Memorials to terrorism attempt to control the fears and uncertainty associated with terrorist attacks through security narratives.  These narratives try to establish a sense of calm and confidence by emphasizing order, national unity, innocence, survival and heroic sacrifice.  While Doss is quick to point out that there is no denying that those who died in the 9/11 attacks or the Oklahoma city bombing were innocent victims, she explains that their deaths are framed within a larger narrative of lost innocence that precludes circumspection and accountability.  Terrorist memorials celebrate our ability to survive and surmount overwhelming tragedy.  They recall the heroic sacrifices of rescue workers and first responders who died in the line.  However, terrorist memorials do little help us understand the hows and whys behind the unfathomable.  Instead of helping us to understand, Doss argues that terrorist memorials reinscribe the very fears they purport control and fuel vengeance inspired militarism.   

As a counterpoint to terrorist memorials that magnify our fears and encourage retribution, Doss points to Christo and Jean-Claude’s 2005 exhibition in New York’s Central Park entitled The Gates.  On the same expansive scale as the artists’ other projects, The Gates featured over 7500, sixteen foot tall, six to eighteen foot long floating saffron rectangles of fabric stretched along a 23 mile span of pedestrian pathways in Central Park.  Not intended as a 9/11 memorial, this was nevertheless how New Yorkers perceived it.  Still reeling from the trauma of 9/11, The Gates invited a playful and creative way of reimagining a familiar space.  With no designated start or finish, The Gates encouraged visitors to see uncertainty as empowering rather than destabilizing.  For the over four million who experienced The Gates in its brief, two-week run, they expressed a feeling of hopefulness and optimism about the future.  

Gratitude is the emotion Doss associates with the proliferation of war memorials.  Movie celebrities like Tom Hanks took the lead by arguing that the “Greatest Generation” had received insufficient gratitude and was deserving of a National World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall.  While it is true that traditional military style memorials featuring men on horseback fell out of fashion after the eras of Nazi and Stalinist stutuary, Doss points out that World War II was commemorated in the form of “living memorials.” From parks to auditoriums, highways to museums, these living memorials were intended as useful additions to the national landscape for the millions of returning veterans.  The drive to build a National World War II Memorial, completed in 2004, was less the result of forgetting than the fear of forgetting.  Moreover, celebrating the “Good War” and the “Greatest Generation” was a way of forgetting or attempting to overshadow the more problematic and divisive war in Vietnam.

The danger of war memorials as expressions of gratitude is that they can easily fuel a celebration of American imperialism.  Rather than educating us on the reasons we go to war and the consequences of military conflicts, military memorials can become a blind ode to patriotism, hyper masculinity or what Doss describe as war porn.  The best war memorials, in Doss’s opinion, pay respect to the fallen without promoting militarism. These are often anti-war memorials that allow us to consider the human toll of war, making visible what is often rendered invisible by most war memorials.  The Boots on the Ground for Heroes Memorial, for example, uses over 7,000 boots adorned with photos of the fallen as well as flags, dog tags, teddy bears and an array of other material objects left by friends and family.  As with the AIDS Quilt, it invites conversations and questions about why we fight and what price we pay for war.  

Shame is not an emotion that has had a prominent place on the American memorial landscape.  Shame fits poorly with traditional heroic American narratives of progress, achievement and exceptionalism.  Yet as more American publics gain political clout, demands have grown to recognize their contributions as well as their histories of suffering and victimization.  Some shame based memorials, however, struggle to put past experiences of suffering on public display.  For example, Doss notes that many memorials to slavery tend to highlight the theme of overcoming rather than the experience of victimization.  The African American Monument in Savannah only makes an indirect reference to slavery through the broken chains on the base of the pedestal.  Featured on the pedestal is an African American family in modern dress and the theme of overcoming a past which is never explored or explained.  

Doss points to the Duluth, Minnesota Lynching Memorial, completed in 2003, as an example of the transformative potential of shame based memorials. What Doss describes as the “first large-scale memorial in America dedicated to lynching,” the Duluth memorial recalls the murder of Elias Clayton (age 19), Elmer Jackson (age 22), and Isaac McGhie on June 15, 1920.  What made the Duluth memorial particularly effective, Doss argues, was community buy-in.  Those who advocated for the memorial went to great lengths to lobby the mayor, local officials, and the people of Duluth.  Once the memorial was completed it became an educational resource for teachers and local students.  It was the identification of the people of Duluth with the memorial, their willingness to acknowledge and take responsibility for this past, that allowed the memorial to achieve its transformative potential.  

Sentiments of anger toward the American memorial landscape are omnipresent today.  Monuments to the Confederacy, especially following the 2020 murder of George Floyd have become focals points of public anger and outrage—feelings that have led to the toppling and removal of many of these monuments.  Going back to the toppling of the George III memorial in New York at the start of the American Revolution, Doss reminds us that there is a long American history of iconoclasm.  Monuments and memorials are above all built for present needs and present interests.  When the values, ideas or political imperatives they embody no longer resonate with the public(s) they can be toppled, removed or even recycled and repurposed.  

What should be the future for America’s disgraced and troubling monuments?  One possibility is to create parks filled with ruined statues from discredited pasts.  Pioneers in this domain are Eastern European states, Taiwan and India where statues to the Soviet, Chiang Kai-shek and British imperial eras have been assembled in uncurrated memorial parks. By reframing what were once glorifications of political regimes as ruins, the hope is to provoke critical reflection on the uses and abuses of monuments and memorials.  Another possibility is London’s Fourth Plinth.  Located in the prestigious Trafalgar Square, the Fourth Plinth began as a traditional monument which ran short on funds leaving only an empty plinth for posterity.  The vacant pedestal ended up becoming the subject of a prestigious art award known as the Fourth Plinth.  It is the ever changing, always impermanent nature of the Fourth Plinth that allows us to reimagine monuments as temporary and subject to our changing needs and interests.