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Popular Memories
Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship
Ekaterina V. Haskins, Thomas W. Benson
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eBook - ePub
Popular Memories
Commemoration, Participatory Culture, and Democratic Citizenship
Ekaterina V. Haskins, Thomas W. Benson
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About This Book
A critical exploration of the ways public participation has transformed commemoration and civic engagement in the United States
In the last three decades ordinary Americans launched numerous grassroots commemorations and official historical institutions became more open to popular participation. In this first book-length study of participatory memory practices, Ekaterina V. Haskins critically examines this trend by asking how and with what consequences participatory forms of commemoration have reshaped the rhetoric of democratic citizenship.
Approaching commemorations as both representations of civic identity and politically consequential sites of stranger interaction, Popular Memories investigates four distinct examples of participatory commemoration: the United States Postal Service's "Celebrate the Century" stamp and education program, the September 11 Digital Archive, the first post-Katrina Carnival in New Orleans, and a traveling memorial to the human cost of the Iraq War.
Despite differences in sponsorship, genre, historical scope, and political purpose, all of these commemorations relied on voluntary participation of ordinary citizens in selecting, producing, or performing interpretations of distant or recent historical events. These collectively produced interpretations—or popular memories—in turn prompted interactions between people, inviting them to celebrate, to mourn, or to bear witness. The book's comparison of the four case studies suggests that popular memories make for stronger or weaker sites of civic engagement depending on whether or not they allow for public affirmation of the individual citizen's contribution and for experiencing alternative identities and perspectives. By systematically accounting for grassroots memory practices, consumerism, tourism, and rituals of popular identity, Haskins's study enriches our understanding of contemporary memory culture and citizenship.
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1
“Put Your Stamp on History”
Celebrating Consumer Democracy
In evaluating the impact of public participation on commemorations as a technology of citizenship, it is useful to begin with an example that seems to fit squarely into the category of “official” commemoration—a government-sponsored program intended to celebrate the nation’s progress in the twentieth century.1 Official commemorations, according to John Bodnar, tend to epitomize aspirations of political, cultural, and economic elites at the expense of ordinary citizens and take on forms that communicate “what social reality should be like” rather than what it “feels like.”2 As such they impose abstract ideals of citizenship onto the populace and in so doing disregard the lived experience of their audiences. This chapter’s reading of the “Celebrate the Century” stamp program organized by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) complicates the “official versus vernacular” polarity and provides a more nuanced account of an admittedly “top-down” commemoration. By exploring the sources of the program’s appeal to its audiences and the manner in which participants were invited to experience the narrative of history that they helped to create, I show how popularity functions as a strategy to attract public participation and how participation, in turn, lends an appearance of democratic inclusiveness and authenticity to a project that benefits corporate interests and promotes individual consumption as a model of citizen engagement.
Joining the retrospection fever at the end of the millennium, the USPS unveiled its own commemorative stamp program, “Celebrate the Century.” The program promised to become “one of the nation’s largest and most inclusive commemorations of the 20th century.”3 Its scope—150 stamps were issued over a two-year period to honor the most significant people, events, and trends of each decade of the century—was matched by unprecedented public involvement and an array of promotional activities. The stamps representing the first five decades were chosen by members of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee appointed by the postmaster general; the public selected the images representing the second half of the century. Ballots were available at post offices nationwide. In the balloting for “Celebrate the Century,” all those interested, including schoolchildren, could vote an unlimited number of times if proper postage was affixed to each ballot.
Much financial and organizational effort was exerted to excite and sustain public interest in this commemoration. Post offices across the nation were transformed into minimuseums featuring electronic panels that counted the days, hours, and seconds remaining until the year 2000. On their way to the clerk’s window, visitors were greeted by colorful panes of stamps issued under the aegis of “Celebrate the Century.” In February 1998, as the ballots for the 1950s arrived, the USPS issued commemorative sheets for the decades of 1900 and 1910 and sponsored a series of unveiling ceremonies across the country, dubbed “thirty stamps in thirty days.” Schoolchildren in some three hundred thousand classrooms were encouraged to “stamp history” as they learned about earlier decades from the “Celebrate the Century Kit.” Before the series of ten panels was completed, stamps issued to date were integrated into a train exhibit, Celebrate the Century Express, a four-car museum that traversed the country from coast to coast, inviting visitors to “experience a century’s worth of achievement and tragedy, entertainment and innovation, grit and greatness.”4
“Celebrate the Century” manifested a significant shift in the aesthetics and politics of commemoration in several ways. The program’s most conspicuous feature is a lack of discrimination between representations of historical events and persons and pop culture, between landmarks of social change and objects of mass consumption. One of the first mass-produced memorial artifacts, a commemorative stamp at the end of the millennium reproduces the imagery that has been rendered iconic by mass media. Thus the series is a mnemonic device in a cultural situation in which saturation by images or simulacra, to use Jean Baudrillard’s term, threatens a stable sense of history and identity.5
By the same token, the program relies on the mass-produced quality of pop culture images—and their potential for intimate appeal—to distinguish itself as a novel way to commemorate. That half of these icons were chosen by popular vote emphasizes popularity as a mark of their historical significance and political legitimacy. “Celebrate the Century” valorizes the increasing role of ordinary people as coproducers of significant texts of public culture. In this respect the openness of commemoration to various publics promises to strengthen civic engagement.
Despite the success of “Celebrate the Century” as a popular program, however, its professed inclusiveness veiled the process through which the public’s political agency as cocreators of history was manipulated to benefit private, corporate interests. Although it was promoted as the result of a popular and open selection process, “Celebrate the Century” used this process to authenticate a hegemonic narrative of consumer democracy, to convert the stamps and historical lessons they might teach into politically inert mementos, and to foreclose public dialogue across lines of difference.
To show how “Celebrate the Century” exemplifies a shift in the political aesthetics of commemoration, I first trace thematic and stylistic transformations in commemorative postal iconography and its relation to mass culture. Because contemporary icons serve an important emotional and political function in an ever-accelerating culture of obsolescence, they constitute a visual lexicon out of which both dominant and oppositional interpretations of history may emerge. Next I depict the politics of stamp selection as a struggle among competing interests to suggest that the public’s participation in the process ultimately was appropriated by corporate interests. Finally I focus on several display mechanisms that helped to frame the collection as a commodity, the public as atomized consumers, and history as a progress toward consumer democracy.
From Civil Religion to Consumer Society
The evolution of commemorative aesthetics in general and postal iconography in particular forms the backdrop against which “Celebrate the Century” stands as an example of collective memory in the making. Some observers have frowned on the “pop” character of the series in which somber photographs of child laborers and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother share iconic status with neon-bright images of consumer products from crayons to Barbie dolls.6 That a collective memory project should be so closely entwined with popular culture is not simply a matter of taste. Working from the assumption that icons “reflect social knowledge and dominant ideologies” and “shape and mediate understanding of specific events and periods,”7 I begin my analysis of “Celebrate the Century” by surveying the changes postal iconography has undergone over some 150 years.
The current postal iconography can be seen as one of many manifestations of a transformation in individual and collective experiences of history in the West. Whether described as postmodernism, postnationalism, or post-Fordism, this change has affected the way citizens in liberal-democratic societies relate to past, present, and future.8 In the United States, this shift was felt in part as a disenchantment with the legitimizing myth of “civil religion,” itself a blend of religious faith in the nation as a chosen people and a civic republican ideal of the state as social covenant. Robert Bellah coined the term in 1967 in the midst of the social upheavals of the Vietnam War era, when the symbolic fabric signified by the term already had begun to unravel.9 Bellah defined civil religion as “the myths that have developed to help us interpret who and what we are in America.”10
Central to civil religion is the nation’s myth of origin, which encompasses historical periods from the Declaration of Independence to the inauguration of Washington under the Constitution, and a host of religious and philosophical discourses that imagined America as a promised land.11 The myth of the nation’s beginning, as embodied by the founders, represents “the act of conscious meaning-creation, or conscious taking responsibility for oneself and one’s society.”12 The theme of self-determination from the outset was complemented and complicated by the mythical teleology of the nation as a New Jerusalem, whose “natural” state connoted opposing visions of paradise and wilderness. These different strands of U.S. civil religion in all their dialectical complexity coalesced around the idea of common heritage.
For more than a century, U.S. postal iconography dramatized the dialectic of self-determination and destiny, stewardship and conquest.13 Stamps promulgated the heroic imperative of leadership: presidents, statesmen, military leaders, and explorers remained the dominant themes of celebration well into the 1950s.14 The style of depiction contributed to the sublime aura of the images. Statesmen were often shown in profile in the manner of Roman emperors. Heroes of the American Revolution were leading their troops to victory. Explorers were landing triumphantly on the shores of new territories or ascending mountain peaks. Thus, whether the subject is the landing of Christopher Columbus, Jacques Marquette’s crossing of the Mississippi, or John C. Fremont’s scaling of the Rocky Mountains, the composition of the images and the postures of those featured convey the momentousness of the event and the superhuman status of the central character, thereby establishing a kinship between the legendary conqueror of the New World and nineteenth-century pioneers.
In the meantime stamps bearing icons of the industrial age carried the story of progress. The locomotive, the steamship, the automobile, and the bridge—the images marking the Pan-American Exposition issue of 1901—assume a sublimity unrivaled by human beings. Representation of these technological wonders in the commemorative contexts acquires the aura of a national myth. A particularly vivid example is the stamp “Landing of Cadillac in Detroit 1701–1951,” in which the image is formed by the juxtaposition of a familiar iconic scene of a hero’s “landing” with Detroit’s skyscrapers in the background. The center of the U.S. automobile industry and the birthplace of the assembly line is mythologized by its retroactive inclusion into the pantheon of the nation’s civil religion.
From the mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, the subjects and iconography of postal stamps replicate other commemorative practices of the era of nationalism. As John Gillis observes, “on both sides of the Atlantic, national commemorations were largely the preserve of elite males, the designated carriers of progress”; by contrast “the role of women was largely allegorical,” and workers, minorities, and younger people “gained admission to national memories at an even slower pace than they were admitted to national representative and educational institutions.”15 The rhetorical legacy of the heroic imperative, the choice of individuals as subjects, and the grandiloquent manner of their depiction on postal stamps is evident even when ordinary Americans are the honorees. The Iwo Jima stamp of 1945 is a remarkable example. The stamp, reproducing Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of marines raising Old Glory on the crest of Mount Suribachi, became an archetype of patriotic courage precisely because the group’s posture so perfectly embodied the iconographic conventions that had been employed in national commemorations for more than a century.16
By most accounts the sixties were a watershed decade that transformed memory practices throughout the world. Although the heroic ideal had left its imprint in the form of imposing monuments, museums, cemeteries, and national holidays, there was a multiplication of subjects worthy of remembering and of contexts of commemoration. After the establishment of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee in 1957, postal commemoration entered a new era, as cultural institutions became more open to influences from ordinary people. Although the final word still belonged to the postmaster general, all citizens could now propose postal themes and designs.17 Official anniversaries continued to provide commemorative themes, but their representation no longer uniformly followed the heroic aesthetic of the nationalist era. For instance a laconic image of a broken chain—black links against a navy blue background—hailed the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. The abstract character of the image connotes a nonhierarchical value system without leaders or followers, wherein all are equally liberated by the freeing of an oppressed group. In the commemoration of the American Revolution’s bicentennial, populist motifs mingle with the icons of the Founding Fathers. Issued over a six-year period, four stamp series—“Colonial Craftsmen,” “Colonial Communications,” “Contributors to the Cause,” and “The Spirit of ’76”—exemplify a turn toward reconsidering crucial events of U.S. history from the perspective of a common citizen.18
The popular turn also is signaled by the inclusion of mundane subjects expressing the seemingly apolitical interests of regular Americans. Alongside space exploration, achievements in electronics, the Civil War centennial, and the U.S. bicentennial, stamps of the sixties and seventies saluted amateur radio, professional baseball, and college football. In the post-bicentennial period, stamp subjects drew on popular culture more than on the traditional patriotic lore. In the eighties and nineties especially, commemoration ran the gamut from Will Rogers and Elvis to comic strip classics to classic movie monsters. Not only were women and minorities admitted to the national tableau, but a whole range of places, objects, holidays, and pastimes also acquired iconic status. This proliferation of icons is a symptom of the increasing speed of obsolescence and the increasingly sophisticated capacity to preserve the past. As Gillis remarks, “On the one hand, the past has become so distant and the future so uncertain that we can no longer be sure what to save, so we save everything. … On the other hand, never has the past been so accessible on film, on tape, and in mass-produced images.”19 Reproduction of mass-produced images on commemorative stamps captures the paradox of preservation and obsolescence that is the mark of contemporary historical sensibility.
According to Aaron Betsky, “part of our twentieth-century loss of faith has been a loss of the kinds of icons that are unapproachable, semidivine apparitions.”20 Nowadays, Betsky notes, “icons are all around us”: “some of the most normal, run-of-the-mill objects we use in the United States have become iconic.”21 Ubiquity and ordinariness entail a corresponding aesthetic. In place of polychromatic and multilayered compositions reminiscent of nineteenth-century painting and neoclassical sculpture, today’s postal iconography favors the bright, glossy look of a color photograph. Images are supposed to convey the feeling of three-dimensional similitude. This insistence on “hyperreality,” as Umberto Eco argues, “suggests that there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy.”22 If technology saves fragments of material culture from oblivion, their commemoration as fetishistic objects saves them from trivialization.
In “Celebrate the Century,” for example, pop icons have the same ontological status as representations of significant past events. Showcasing the preceding decades from the perspective of the present, the ...