That rather bizarre structure is the monumental memorial to the Battle of Verdun. The 'graves' are almost all fakes. Although the number of deaths in the battle, which destroyed the nearby village of Fleury-devant-Douamont, is roughly known, it is only known by subtracting the number of survivors from the number who entered the battle. The bodies were mostly blown to bits by mortar shells or eaten by rats or torn apart by dogs. World War I was about as horrible an action as the human race had yet attempted, and the wise men of the age thought they would prevent a recurrence. Part of their attempt was to put all of the blame on the losing nation. That was not a sufficient reason for the rise of Nazism in Germany, and perhaps it was not even a necessary reason, but it certainly played a large part. World War II managed to kill more than four times as many people as the War to End all Wars. If only we could destroy that monument, perhaps the skirmishes and wars which have followed could have been avoided. Perhaps even the village of Fleury-devant-Douamont would return to its previous glory. Perhaps Universal Peace would break out upon the face of the earth.
The statue above is only part of a monumental memorial to one of the wars the War to End all Wars didn't manage to prevent: the War in Vietnam. (That's what it's called in the United States. The Vietnamese think of it in other terms.). The whole thing is a complicated memorial because the attitudes towards that war are very complicated. World War I, aka The Great War, enjoyed very good press. The governments of the participants controlled the newspapers very tightly, so people back home were shocked inded to find that things had not always been as described in The Times or in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Much to the inconvenience of Robert McNamara, Walter Kronkite showed film from Vietnam just as many Americans were sitting down to their would-be peaceful dinners. At first the Vietnam Memorial was going to be jus that: a memorial to those who had died. But those who survived and those of us who realized that we had sent all those kids over to that hostile jungle on our own nickel thought there should be a recognition of the veterans who came back as well. So, it got a sculptural addition. And then it got another addition to recognize the women who had served over there.
The Vietnam War was the first with which I had a personal connection. I was opposed to it from the beginning, when it seemed John Kennedy was being led by the Archbishop of Boston to put the United States more deeply into the conflict. At first I just wrote to editors and to my congressman and my senators. Then I carried signs and shouted slogans. Then I told my draft board that I wouldn't go. The chairman of the draft board was my brother's mother-in-law, who didn't want to grant me a conscientious objector's status but who came up with a bizarre deferment which involved my teaching in a previously all-black inner city high school. But many of my friends did go. I even have survivors' guilt a bit, because I was offered an appointment to the Air Force Academy. I turned it down, but the kid who accepted it was killed when the helicopter he was piloting was shot down.
Now I find the entirety of the Vietnam War to be pretty much a war crime. Should I go to Washington and tear down the monuments? Should I hate my friends who did go to Vietnam, even though for most of them it was against their wills because they didn't have an angel on the draft board as I did? Would such an act prevent future wars or bring back my friend and replacement who died in that helicopter?
That is the statue of John Caldwell Calhoun, which until very recently stood in Marion Square on Calhoun Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Poor Charleston: it seems often to have chosen names of people whose roles in civil wars ended badly.
I love the city of Charleston. I have lived there twice, and might still be there if my mother's health had not deteriorated and she had wanted me to go back home to help her. The first time, I lived on Folly Beach, but I had a mail box in Charleston, so nearly every day I would bike into town, going down Calhoun and turning onto King Street for lunch at a favorite restaurant. I became pretty good friends with one of the waitresses, a woman named Charlotte. (I never thought to ask her if she had been named for the town.). She was black.
The second tie I moved to Charleston, while my mother was enjoying a period of better health, I lived on the peninsula. I rented the second floor of a single house from a little old black lady who had somehow managed to become rich despite being part of an oppressed race. One of the first places I visited on my return was 'my' restaurant, where I was deeply distressed to find that Charlotte's son had been killed in a drive-by shooting. He had not been shot by Calhoun's statue.
That same day at the restaurant, I met a young black man with whom I had a little affair. He was an aspiring writer. I was dabbling in graphic arts and painting and collage. (I wish I knew whether he has become a successful writer.) We both drifted off to different lovers, being somewhat confirmed bohemians, but he was a charmer. My landlady I met only accidentally. She rented through an agency, but she lived nearby, and when a tree fell on her garage, she asked me if I would cut it down. Apparently she had been watching me enough to know that I had a tree saw, which I had bought to take on kayak trips to the barrier Islands north of Charleston. She didn't tell me tht she owned the house in which I lived, and most of several blocks around it, but she recommended me for yard work to some of the other little old ladies in the neighborhood and one of them told me. I hadn't really been looking for work, but I was raised in the South and had been taught to respect little old ladies and their wishes. I always tried to do the work for free, but they always insisted on paying me.
While I was living in Charleston, an old friend from Santa Fe came to visit. When I say old, I mean that she was then about the age I am now. I left her sitting under the Calhoun statue when she first arrived while I rode to the mail box and bank. When I got back, she had been joined on the park bench by another old lady, this one black. They were sharing knitting secrets. A friend today suggested that the statue of Calhoun was a 'reminder of the slave owners/murderers of your ancestors looking down on you'. I found that particularly amusing because Calhoun was actually a distant cousin (on my mother's side, no the Caldwell side) and because some of my ancestors were slaves. I always liked the statue because Calhoun was such an amazingly complex thinker. He certainly didn't expect slavery to last, and he was looking for ways that South Carolina could transition to a just society when slavery ended. Besides, Francis Marion had been one of my heroes since maybe the third grade. Now I guess the square needs to be renamed and the street needs to be renamed, and probably the Hunley, another of my favorite things in Charleston, needs to be destroyed.
Finally, I want to look at one other monument, one in Memphis that memorializes the folks who died there in 1878 from the yellow fever. It marks a mass grave that had largely been forgotten for nearly 100 years. The nuns who had died helping the sick were buried under the altar at St. Mary's Cathedral, and the church in its generosity has, I think, extended the term 'Martyrs of Memphis' to include the whores who worked with the nuns. But the monument above is all inclusive, and it is not a celebration.
Monuments are often and usually more than celebrations. They are markers in our collective memories, markers that remind us of our greatness and also of our horrible stupidity and cruelty. If there is a socially redeeming value of the Battle of Verdun, I can't see it. But erasing it would just make it easier for us to forget how easily we get lulled into grand schemes, stirred up by the impassioned words of men who would be great. The Battle of Verdun lasted longer than the leaders of the Great Nations who created the Great War had said the whole war would last. I never quite understood what the War in Vietnam was expected to achieve. Preserve freedom? If so, perhaps we should have gone into Cambodia and opposed Pol Pot. Contain China? Ah, but Nixon declared victory and opened trade with China and now I am typing this blog post with a machine assembled in China. Was John Caldwell Calhoun a great but flawed man, a brilliant thinker and writer and also a slave owner? Yes. And do we know why the enlightened folks of the next century will tear down our monuments for faults we don't even perceive? (OK, we woke folks mostly just make graffiti, but the Instagram posts will be cancelled because of our great sins.)
We are now in the midst of a pandemic that is much more widespread than the yellow fever epidemic was in 1878. 5200 peopled died then in Memphis. So far the deaths from Covid 19 there have been less than 200. But, alas, it is early in the pandemic. I like to think that much of our frenzied activity to make things right by destroying our collective memories is a result of the stress of living with the virus. But I also recognize that there are dark corners of our hearts that harbor forces waiting to use and spread fears, to take advantage of any good crisis, whether it be the assassination of a Duke or the killing of a counterfeiting suspect, to turn a local tragedy into a great crusade. Crusades almost never end well.
So, I have a modest recommendation. Rather than looking upon monuments--I will resist the temptation to quote Shelley, I really will--and condemning them and the prerson they represent, let us consider using them and the people they represent as a emory of what we folks are capable of doing. Compare our strengths and weaknesses present to strengths and weakness past, hopefully to help us do better in the present. Destruction is mindless and easy. Building, not so much.
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