This is KZSU, Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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There's a place on the Stanford campus called Memorial Auditorium,
the largest indoor performance space around,
seating 1,700 people.
It's where they schedule major speeches,
like the other America speech that Martin Luther King delivered here
in 1967, or the speech by Soviet President Gorbachev
in 1990.
It's also the site of large-scale performances,
academic conferences, and student activities.
If you look it up on the Stanford websites,
you'll be told that Memorial Auditorium also houses
the Department of Theater and Performance Studies,
with its main office, faculty offices,
administrative staff offices, as well as the costume shop,
scene shops, the light lab, and production staff offices.
It is also the home of PIGET theater,
a so-called little theater with 200 seats.
Also, Prost studio, which seats 60.
What none of the websites tell you, though,
is the most important thing of all,
namely that in an obscure corner of Memorial Auditorium,
sits KZSU, home of entitled opinions.
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There's a word for those of you who love this show.
[Music]
It looks so good, it looks so cool,
[Music]
Another piece of information that the websites tend to ignore
is that Memorial Auditorium was dedicated in 1937,
in order to commemorate those students and faculty from Stanford,
who died in World War I.
It's not the only Memorial on campus, far from it.
We also have the Memorial Quad, just off the Central Quad,
There you'll find various discrete plaques with the names of students and faculty who died in that same war.
People think Stanford is all about success, money,
high tech, and California dreaming.
Very few people remember, or want to remember,
that Stanford University is Memorial in Nature.
Its full name is the Leeland Stanford Junior Memorial University,
founded in memory of Leeland and Jane Stanford's only son,
who died at 15 from typhoid fever.
Stanford's obsession with success and achievement
is inextricably bound up with a grief that haunts its institutional psyche,
as if success and achievement could somehow redeem the early death of the boy this place is named after.
Stanford's websites may not mention that KZSU is nestled in a corner of the Memorial Auditorium.
They may not tell you why it's called the Memorial Auditorium,
and Stanford may have dropped Memorial from its full university name years ago.
But on entitled opinions, we make a habit of remembering the essential,
of interrogating the essential, of thinking the essential.
In title opinions, it's like the countercurrent of this university's raging,
future-oriented river.
On this radio program, we don't drink the Silicon Valley Coolade,
or buy into the triumphalism of innovation and technicality.
We quietly go about the most important business of all,
remembering the essential, interrogating the essential,
thinking the essential.
Today, we're going to turn our attention to, you guessed it, memory.
And in particular to the Memorial dimensions of the public sphere.
I'm joined in the studio by Valerie Kinsey, a friend and colleague who teaches in the program
in writing and rhetoric here at Stanford.
She is a collaborator of mine in a humanities freshman course I teach called The Wind of Freedom.
Valerie earned her PhD in rhetoric from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 2015.
And she's currently working on a book about public memory and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Valerie, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much for having me.
I mentioned that you're writing a book about public memory among other things,
and many of our listeners might not know that there is a thriving discipline
in academia these days called memory studies, and that public memory is one of its most important components.
Could you begin by telling us something about memory studies in general and public memory in particular?
Absolutely. And fair warning that if your listeners go to Stanford,
they will also not find a department of memory studies or a department of public memory.
Yet there is an international and interdisciplinary field of memory studies, which addresses basically the interplay of the past and the present in different cultural contexts.
Scholars of memory studies are particularly interested in the way that social experiences inform individual memory,
and also the way that groups of people work together to basically constitute and re-imagine and re-animate the past.
Public memory is basically looking at the public dimension of memory,
so far as we have a public sphere, and two very important scholars inform our understanding of the public sphere,
who I would like to mention.
One is you're going to hover moss, and hover moss's idea is that publics are brought together through print media, through discussion,
through lively debate television, television, television to radio, like entitled opinions.
And the other scholar I wanted to mention is Hannah Arendt, who I know you featured on this show previously.
And Hannah Arendt was very interested in bringing the Greek understanding of publics and public memory to the fore in her work,
and she really emphasizes the spatial relationship between people in public.
In what sense exactly in the city as such?
Right, so Hannah Arendt was interested in the ways in which publics are formed through the physical construction of the city,
and creating spaces where men, at least in men, and only in the Greek tradition, could be seen by one another,
and act and speak together in public.
And for her, this ability to interact in public, to speak before others, to act before others, to be in physical proximity to one's equals
and to distinguish themselves in this way is actually the highest human calling.
Yeah, she calls it freedom, and the acknowledgement of my freedom by my fellow citizens in that public sphere is the ultimate fulfillment of human potential and kind of our understanding of it.
Yes, that's right. And Arendt was also very interested in the ways in which these actions and deeds became remembered,
and she is therefore very important to scholars in public memory, public memory studies.
Because she highlights the fact that men's actions and deeds could be and would be remembered and possibly immortalized in reunifications,
such as history and public monuments.
Right. Let me ask you about that, however, because I know that Hannah Arendt is almost foundational for public memory studies with some of the theorists.
And while I understand that memory is important to her concept of the police, the city, as an institutional public space,
and how important it was for Hannah Arendt, she believed for us human beings to have a world that preceded our entry into it and that will outlive our exit from it.
This is the kind of continuity and permanence of the world that provides the proper backdrop to our own mortality and our own finite souljourn through the world.
Memory obviously has a lot to do with that permanence, insofar as there are monuments and so forth.
But I'm not convinced that the singular sort of sense of fulfillment or gratification that the citizen gets when he and we're using the masculine because Greek citizens were exclusively male,
know that he would get when he got up and had his voice heard in a public assembly, contributed his opinion to the deliberation about a particular policy or war venture or otherwise.
My feeling is that that was satisfaction enough in that moment, that it was a gratification and that immortality or the fame that would immortalize you,
it has more to do with what the poets would, above all the poets, like Homer or the epics that would celebrate the deeds of great heroes in those epic cycles.
Do you think it was that every time a citizen stood up in the public sphere and made his voice heard and was acknowledged as an equal citizen in those public assemblies that
he felt that he was immortalizing himself?
No, I mean not all basketball players can be Steph Curry, right? I mean no, the important thing I think for a Hana Arrent and her discussion of politics is that this ability to speak and to be seen and to act before others is what is the political
it constitutes the political it constitutes freedom and it was certainly man's highest calling to devote himself to excellence in the Serena.
But I think in keeping with a Greek understanding,
Arate or the concept of excellence cannot be far from our minds because this was definitely a preoccupation.
It's the highest calling to participate in this freedom but the to leave one's mark is through one's excellence.
I think remains at least for the elites a goal.
But I think in fairness, in terms of public memory studies, I think what how people understand Arrent and use her thinking now is maybe a little bit different.
So I think that she was sort of motivated so much for this immortality.
Today although certainly those of us who are creative and writing and engaged in this scholarly endeavor hope to leave some kind of legacy.
But I think she was more interested in the way in which these reifications of the past are used and useful for politicians in the present.
So I guess it's sort of a slightly different emphasis.
Arrent was very careful I think to indicate that when men act in public or when individuals act in public, the result of that action cannot be known.
The telos of that action cannot be known.
So I think she would think it was folly to attempt to engender an action that would guarantee immortality.
This is going to be a parenthesis.
We're going to talk more about memorials very shortly.
But nowadays we're not so motivated driven for this kind of immortalization.
And here we are, my opening remarks were about Stanford, the Memorial Auditorium, Memorial Quad.
These are memorials in the true genuine sense of the term.
But as you know there are any number of rich donors to this university.
And these donors, many of them most of them very much still alive, pay a lot of money to have their names put on the buildings.
And there are some who have tried to colonize as much of the public space of this private university as possible.
And so there's this center, that center, you know, I don't want to mention names now and get in trouble.
But that, you know, I was asking myself before coming on there, is that the same sort of drive to distinguish oneself immortalize oneself, leave a legacy?
Or is it another form of kind of capitalist narcissism or some kind of less noble motivation?
Boy, that's an interesting question.
My sense is that if I were going to interpret this in an arentian sense that the telos of these donors is very evident.
That is they're seeking to have their names be associated with a specific building or placed in a way that's...
They're obliging us to take notice of them obvious. Yes, yes. But is it really memorializing?
And the reason I asked that, Valerie, is because I think it cheapens the genuine...
No, I don't think so. I think that the publicness has to do with an event or series of events or a personage or series of personage who bring people together.
And that event can be devastating like September 11th. It can be uplifting, like Martin Luther King Jr.
But that for when we talk about public memory, we're not really talking about placing a name on the building and then having sort of people go,
"Gosh, wasn't that a great person who donated that building?"
We're talking about events that I think really are so much larger than that.
No, I agree. I agree. So we can at least establish that when we're talking about public memory and public monuments,
we're talking about something that is memorializing an event that had a public dimension that brought a community together.
So we could call it... It's related to collective memory, although maybe it's not the same thing as collective memory.
And it's not just about private individual drawing attention to her name in a public space like a campus like this.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that's a little bit tricky about this is that we can spend a lot of time debating what constitutes a true public event.
I like the idea that Casey, Edward Casey, brings up where it has to be something that an event, a photograph, an image that is instantly recognizable.
Right.
And I think that's a good litmus test.
So why is there so much interest in public memory and memory studies these days? Is it because we're afraid of that there's too much...
...for getting going on or on the contrary, is it because we are living a world which is so saturated with public memory through the relentless accumulation of images and words and monuments that we're wondering what is going on is our entire public space going to be filled up entirely by memorializing
gestures and buildings. I think you bring up a really good point and certainly a lot of people who watch culture very closely have noticed that our propensity to archive things to save things to keep things to back up things is getting greater and that we're sort of obsessed with generating archives and museums and monuments and
there's a real sort of paranoia about forgetting. And I think that impulse may come out of some anxiety over what it is that we should remember and what it is that we need to remember.
And this is really the question that's at the heart of any kind of memory driven inquiry in public memory, which is what should we remember? Who should we remember?
How should we remember it? Why should we remember it? And these are the kinds of questions that really drive theorists in this area.
Well, and that plunges us right into the midst of a certain kind of social warfare because we're going to have competing versions of what should be remembered and what should not be remembered.
Was it the $20 bill? I think not that they were going to take Andrew Jackson. Hamilton is a $10 bill and he was saved from being removed from the $10 bill because there's a musical on Broadway now which has brought a lot of attention to him.
And so there was a sufficient lobby with enough power to keep him on the $10 bill, but the $20 Andrew Jackson of the $20 bill has now been, I'm not Suame Moria that Romans called it.
His memory has been damned and removed consigned to oblivion taken off and replaced by by someone else.
So we and not everyone of course agreed with the gesture and so forth, but in that these public memory studies are the scholars trying to establish anything like objective criteria for determining what legitimately counts as belonging to this fear of public memory or not.
That is a really great question and there's a lot of controversy over this. That is, is it enough to simply criticize the monuments and public displays that are erected, selected and erected by institutions or do we have to go a step further and come up with some kind of criteria for what constitutes an ethical memorial what constitutes a good use of public space and so forth.
And I don't think there's an answer to that question, although there is a lot of interest in coming up with some criteria, although I think that you I'm guessing that you would agree that it's aesthetic success is certainly one important measure.
And, you know, other things that scholars look at have to do with financing, you know, who financed certain monuments, what did they replace, what was there before them, what kind of political ideologies are being forwarded.
And I think the really essential thing for memory studies always is what is the motivation in the present to memorialize this person or this event right now.
So that raises the question of how does memory really work is memory recollection of something that has taken place and that through the memory of it, it's more preserve for how it took place and so forth or does memory have some power to transfigure what actually took place through the very active memorializing.
So there's kind of I think two really important concepts that you're bringing up one is sort of our understanding our growing and evolving understanding of memory from a neuropsychology perspective, which is that a lot of times we think about memory as a file cabinet or a computer something where we have data that we can access and retrieve.
And that data is in the same kind of condition in which it was deposited, at least in an ideal context.
What scientists have discovered is that memory is actually constructive.
That is, it is something that we make. So every time we remember something, we are actually putting something that wasn't there before, namely a protein or a series of proteins into place.
So what scientists are now saying is that actually the more we remember something the less faithful it is to what actually happened.
Because we are overlaying these constructions and reconstructions.
I don't like the word construct it. Now everything becomes a construction, now memory becomes a construction, I take a German, good German word like on dengken, which is dengken means to think and on dengken means to think back and that there's active recollection or
rememorization that doesn't recall the past in that kind of data driven way. But in the recalling it infuses and animates it with some spirit of the present that has little to do with construction and has more to do with I would call some sort.
Yeah, I think the French verb fair is kind of nice also because you get to make and to do at the same time. So memories and active process is something that you're doing and it's also something that is being made or formed in the process.
So when it comes to a public monument, obviously when there is a decision made at an institutional level and also through the finances and maybe government agencies that that gesture of memorializing altars or I would imagine every public monument builder would want it to alter or trans figure and
in some way exalt or put into relief the virtue of what is being remembered. Right and this kind of comes to the second point that of the previous question which is the idea that sometimes public monuments memorialize people or events that living people have witnessed or
known or experienced. But eventually those people for example who knew Martin Luther King or those of us who remember and live through 9/11 will no longer be living anymore.
And we do not have that kind of dialectic between our impressions and our memories and the iconography that we see or the histories that we read. So we become dependent culturally on these reifications which is why they have so much power.
There's one monument that interests both of us and it actually exemplifies many of the issues in play here above all who is going to choose the criteria for the selection of a monument and the aesthetics of it and how it's going to be represented.
Very very thorny issues and I have in mind now to begin with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC and when I say the Vietnam Memorial everyone thinks of the wall which is the most visited monument along with the Lincoln Memorial in the United States by far.
But of course the Vietnam Memorial also has another call it it's part of the same memorial but it's a different edifice it's a statue of three anonymous soldiers in heroic postures made of bronze I think or something because there was so much protest on the part of a certain group of Vietnam veterans against the project.
My Alin and the wall which they were calling the black gash of shame because they felt that from the designs that this is not a monument that was in any way exulting or rendering heroic the sacrifice of the 59,000 soldiers who never made it back from Vietnam alive.
And they insisted on having a much more traditional style of monument and you have a what my personal point of view is that it's quite pathetic compared to the wall in so far as it glorifies enough a war which was at bottom I think this nation lived as a civil war first and foremost more than a war against you know an enemy and that the power of the war is not a war.
Power of my alins wall was it's silent discrete refusal to erm he row his eyes and it's very solemn tribute to to the dead.
Yeah I think that one of the things from a memory studies perspective that's very interesting to about the wall particularly vice the sort of more representational statue of the three figures is the way that it really invites participation which is.
Been kind of a huge part of the ethos of the Vietnam wall where survivors and friends come and do rubbings of the names they leave. Flowers I was reading one article where someone left a six pack of beer and a pizza.
And I think that kind of share a share a meal with his fallen comrades and.
This has been kind of one of the huge points of praise of the Vietnam memorial in that it's democratic it invites.
This personal individual expression of grief to become rendered public and becomes actually sort of part of the monument and it'll be interesting to see kind of as.
As time goes on at what kind of participation it invites if.
Soldiers from are more recent wars and Iraq and Afghanistan connect in some way with this continue to connect in some way with this memorial.
That's probably unlikely I would imagine because the when the memorial opened in 1982 I think was November 13th 1982 hundred fifty thousand people didn't know what to expect then they unveiled there were a lot of vets there lot in fatigue the wheelchair the families.
And it was you know the most amazing scene that was covered on television where.
Slowly you know they they approach the wall as you said it has also this tactile thing there's.
Every name of every.
Soldiers and make it back alive is inscribed and there was this irresistible impulse to touch the names as if there was some primitive presence of the dead in.
And then the realization that each one of these individuals.
Had died.
Brought about you know the breakdown into tears of one person after another person after another and even the media ended up.
You know weeping at that moment and it was a catharsis for a nation that had not by 1982 still.
Known how to grieve and mourn the losses of that war and the loss of the war by the way.
Precisely because it was like a civil war and the genius of the wall was that it as you said it found a way to.
Enable sort of public participation in in that in front of that wall on the part of people for whom the war was still very much a living memory and not.
I agree with you and at the same time I also think that that it's enduring.
I hesitate to use the word popularity, but the way in which it continues I feel to resonate.
With people who are often called searchers the people who go to the wall who have no direct personal connection with Vietnam.
I think speaks to its aesthetic success, but also its symbolic power transformative symbolic power which I think is not present and at least in some of the figurative memorials.
So you use the word symbolic and you know I have written on the Vietnam Memorial wall so this might be a place to bring up coal ridges famous definition of the symbol which I.
The way I see it the wall actually reverses or it's kind of like a contrarian symbol.
Let me remind our listeners what Coleridge said about symbols he's speaking mostly about literary symbols, but in his statesman manual.
He says that a symbol is characterized I'm quoting by a translucent of the special in the individual or of the general in the special or the universal.
In each case the translutions is a greater category larger genre class of things.
That's a very compelling definition and it certainly works for traditional war memorials.
If you think about the two of the unknown soldier you have one unknown soldier and he or the two symbolizes all the known and unknown soldiers who fought in that particular war and beyond that.
The soldiers who fought in all the kind of war so in that in that sense you have the translucence of the general in the particular.
But the symbolism of the Vietnam Memorial wall is works the other way around really because we see all this list of all these names over 59,000 names.
Each one is individually and while they are there as a collective it's actually the power of the wall in my view comes from the fact that it's the individual that is the translucence, that is the individual that shines through the general and through the collective.
In that sense it reverses the power of symbolism in the cold region sense.
I think that first of all that was a lovely description and having just revisited your chapter on the Vietnam Memorial and Dominion of the Dead I am convinced.
I also do think that there is something almost river like about the memorial which in which the kind of particles the individual do become part of this sort of larger obsidian stream if you will.
I think it offers a more general solve but we'll see how future people who don't necessarily have that immediate need to mourn.
I didn't know anyone who fought in the Vietnam War while it was being waged and I don't know anyone who died in it but that wall nevertheless the fact that every name is inscribed there gives a tangibility to each individual death.
That's why I would speak about this absolution of the singularity of each one.
I understand what you're saying that it's a river obsidian river and that's the whole general but it's as if each individual has shared the same fate but the fate is the death of the individual and that is irreducible.
And therefore the power of the monument when people first saw it would go there and it's the name and look at each name evoked something very specific that was unsapsurable under a higher categories and how do you redeem that individual?
I think that's my aline genius is that she managed somehow to provide a measure of redemption to those deaths.
Now in future generations will it people for whom the Vietnam War as many of our undergraduates is kind of a distant memory.
I think the part of prehistory will they relate to it in the same way? Certainly not.
But I think the aesthetic resolution of the monument will assure that it's going to have a lasting power of residence now.
I think where I certainly 100% agree with everything that you've said is this idea that those who have a direct experience in Vietnam are not going to be around forever and the monument is in many ways
How people are going to think about this conflict.
Isn't that what a public monument is supposed to do?
Yes, absolutely.
And I think it's sort of irreducibility I think and it's refusal to kind of tell a simple story about Vietnam is definitely a testament to its power.
Yeah, to say nothing about the ingenious way in which it's actually underground. She built it not above ground but it's underground.
And the height of the wall varies and it comes to a kind of peak at the middle of the war.
And all those names are inscribed chronologically and the higher the wall is, the further down you go.
And at the highest point where there's, you know, the forms of corner it seems like all these names or soldiers are falling down from a height.
So while the wall is extremely horizontal from a distance because it extends, you know, in these kind of triangles horizontally when you're there up close then it's the anxiety of the vertical which takes over.
And you have a sense of a cascading of the dead on down into the ground, you know, the burial ground.
To keep in mind of course that the Vietnam Memorial is not a tomb. It's a cenotaph because the bodies of all those individuals are buried elsewhere.
Valerie, can we talk about a few other memorials that maybe would be in, I think you and I agree, maybe less.
In the work of rendering a memory public in a way that does justice to what is being commemorated now.
Absolutely.
Well, there's two recent additions to the national mall and memorial park which are very controversial.
The first is the World War II memorial which has not been extremely well received and the second is the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial.
And this is, I believe the most recent addition, it's 2011 and was created with a great deal of controversy.
Can you just describe it for artists and theirs before we talk about the contours?
Sure.
So the statue is, I believe, 29 feet tall and it was made out of white marble that was imported from China and it was done by a Chinese sculptor.
Is it actually marble?
I thought, yeah.
Oh, granite. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Sorry.
And also the Vietnam Memorial wall is granite.
Yeah.
But it looks like marble because it's as white as they could make granite artificially, obviously.
And it is a, it is a representational statue.
It features Dr. King kind of sort of almost coming out of this block of rock.
And initially there were sort of several main controversies surrounding this.
The first which I'm not, I'm not totally sure is important, but the first has to do with the decision to use a Chinese artist who is famous for basically doing statues of Mao.
And Chinese workers who many felt were not potentially not compensated fairly and also to use an imported material from China.
And another feature that is controversial is the fact that this stone is white.
And some critics have said maybe potentially knowing that it was done by a Chinese artist that the combination of the white kind of stone and the way that Dr. King's face is depicted make him look, you know, Chinese and/or white and not an African American.
I think it's the most shockingly mangled and abortive monument that I can think of when I think of Martin Luther King.
It is so hideous and so ill calculated to have everything blanched and whitewashed to that degree.
And you look at, and I'm speaking now mostly of the statue at the center of it because maybe the design with the semi circle can be okay.
But, you know, if I feel profoundly mystified by the fact that such a project could have been chosen for that memorial and the end result is even worse than the conception.
It's even more, I don't know, I take offense to it.
I think to me, my overall concern is that while I think that the way that he's coming out of the statue is supposed to represent, first of all, his fortitude, his kind of mountain-like strength.
And also the unfinished business of civil rights in this country, I think the icon itself, the statue itself, suggests something else.
First of all, I think it suggests the kind of white appropriation of his image and legacy, I mean, a literal sort of whitewashing of this figure who, you know,
was not widely loved and accepted but who had a very, very difficult road to ho and was courageous and stalwart.
And immobility, his feet are bound in this rock and he was somebody who was, you know, tireless.
You know what? I'm glad you mentioned that Valerie because it reminds me of the unfinished statues of Michelangelo, I don't know if you know.
And those statues are mostly of the slaves and Michelangelo had a very deliberate purpose for making these figures coming out of a block that he left.
In complete because that's how he conceived of slavery, that you're trapped within the world of matter and you haven't achieved the independence of form.
And I think you're right about that. It's like Martin Luther King enslaved to the block of granite.
Yeah, and I mean, I think we can sit here and say that the idea was that the process of civil rights is evolving and it's yet to be completely human.
His project is not yet done. But I mean, Martin Luther King, who died at 39, who was killed at 39.
I mean, was relentless tireless, accomplished such a great deal that to sort of choose to portray his figure as stock in this.
You know, is I think ill-conceived.
Well, I don't know what agency, it must have been a government agency.
Obama was the one who opened it and inaugurated it and I didn't see that there was any controversy, you know, at that particular moment.
I think it was all more on the sidelines, but astonishingly blind to what it was intended to be memorialized.
And those, and the quotes are all the most, I mean, some of them are inspired. Everything that King said had a certain power in its context, but the decontextualized single-line quotes that are up there on the walls, given another kind of saccharine, as you say, white-washing effect to the legacy of Martin Luther King.
I would, you know, if I had the time and resources, I would start a campaign to demolish. And I'm not so immemorial to that memorial and start again.
You know, and it's interesting that you say that because many public memory scholars, especially feminists and occupational minorities, are very critical of the way in which public space is used over and over again to
memorialize male presidents, often military leaders, military exploits, that it is quite remarkable in a way that we created this monument on our national sort of memorial park to an African-American man who is not a military leader and who is not president.
So in that sense, I have to just say that it was remarkable that the project ever got completed, but on an aesthetic level, I think it leaves a lot to be desired.
Are there any major monuments of women? You raise that question. I'm asking myself to do, I mean, apart from more private ones and semitaries of Emily Dickinson or things like that.
You actually are working on, you've done a lot of work on the Mormons and their strange relationship to the past and to memory. And you were telling me about one of their memorials that has to do with women. Could you tell us that story?
Sure. So to my knowledge, the largest monument to women was erected by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church in 1978.
And it's a statuary park in Navu, Illinois, which is where the Mormon Church was essentially operating as kind of its own colony, basically under the leadership and direction of Joseph Smith before he was martyred.
And the monument features, I think it's 11 statues, and it is the largest monument to women that I know of that I have heard of.
And who are these women and what's being...
Well, I mean, that's sort of one of the things that's very interesting about this monument is that there's one historical representation which is of Joseph Smith with his wife, Emma Smith.
And the remaining statues are not of specific women and they're not of public figures, they're not of women who are making a public statement.
And the origins of this monument are essentially the Mormon Church's response to the women's rights movement.
And one of the things that we talk about in rhetoric is the ways in which public monuments are epidemic.
That is the way in which they are instructive to the viewers and proclaim a set of values.
So in this monument to women, we have women sort of depicted as homemakers, as...
There's a violin teacher, there's a young woman who's sort of looking after some children, there's a young mother.
What's the name of the Smumorro?
It's called the Monument to Women, actually.
And 1978.
What's important about that date?
Well, you know, what I'm exploring in my work is this monument's relationship to the women's liberation movement.
And particularly the big push to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment at this time.
And the Mormon Church was adamantly opposed to ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, which is a constitutional amendment that was proposed,
that would grant equality based on gender.
It says you cannot discriminate based on gender, basically.
And so this was basically a monument that was erected in this very, very essential geographic space for Mormons as a kind of reminder that women did not have and should not have a public role.
So would we call such a monument that, as you just said, it was erected for Mormons?
We couldn't really call it a public monument then, no?
Well, to be clear, Nauvoo is in a fairly inaccessible place.
It's not the easiest place to visit, but it is absolutely a space that is meant to attract visitors.
Now, the visitors who are attracted to it are largely Mormons who are revisiting kind of their historical.
No, I understand that.
So it's what Edward Casey would maybe put under the rubric of collective memory, or let's say communal memory, community memory, rather than public memory, because we're talking about the community of Mormon believers for whom such a monument would have special resonance.
But for the rest of us in the public world as such, it wouldn't apply.
Yeah, I don't think it's easily recognizable, but I would say that for feminist scholars, which you might call a counter public rather than a public potentially, it does have resonance in so far as it's a very
practiced, very deliberate attempt to intervene into the conversation about women's rights.
In the public sphere.
Yeah.
So I would say maybe a counter public.
I was trying to think of an analogy, and I was thinking about the election and assassination of Harvey Milk, and I was thinking that.
For San Francisco, and this was definitely a very public event.
But for people who are interested in gay and lesbian histories, for example, or queer histories, it has a different resonance.
That is in their histories, and certainly they're in that counter public.
It's a very important moment that maybe doesn't have a national public.
Right.
So, what do you think about the public presence?
Do you have anything to say about the AIDS quilt?
The AIDS quilt is, I think, part of this counter trend in public monuments.
That is very much grassroots inspired.
It did have kind of a humble beginning, and the idea was that people who wanted to create a square in honor of a loved one with AIDS could do so.
So there were some constraints imposed on participants in terms of the size of the square that they could contribute to the quilt.
But essentially, it was a kind of experiment, and it fostered this incredible response where people who in communities really entire communities that have been stricken by AIDS were
offered this opportunity to commemorate their loved one and to share their very private grief in this public way designed specifically to raise awareness for AIDS.
No.
And this is kind of a new thing in monuments, this sort of idea of a bottom up memorial.
Yes, and getting more and more traction, I think.
Of course, having been raised Roman Catholic, I think that the church has a very extensive council of people that deliberate according to very strict criteria about who qualifies as a saint and who doesn't.
And you have to have miracles, you have to have verification, you have to investigate and think it would seem to make sense.
It would just be logical if the nation had such a council of people to use their objective criteria to decide what has the right to become part of the public space in terms of a memorial and what doesn't.
And yeah, who is going to be the saint and who is not?
Well, I think this is what's interesting is that we do do this.
It's not maybe as organized as you would have it be.
I agree.
But we do do this and interestingly, one of the studies that I find extremely interesting has to do with the erection of monuments to the memorials to the women who organized
the women's Christian temperance unions in their towns.
And in- When was this?
This was in basically the 19th century, late 19th century.
The women's Christian temperance movement was incredibly powerful.
They were committed obviously to the welfare of women and children on the grounds that excessive alcohol abuse only had negative impacts.
One of the things that they were committed to was providing clean drinking water for not only towns people, but also animals.
They were very interested in the welfare of animals.
And so they raised money and built these fountains that often occupied very prime public real estate and towns really across the country, but especially in the mid-Atlantic states and in some the Midwest and the South.
And these statues and fountains which served a very expressed public use and often did memorialize women activists.
By putting their names on.
They sometimes had their names. Many of them honored Francis Willard, who was national leader of this movement and one of the most famous Americans in her time.
And they were really what in kind of our discipline we'd call sifted.
That is they were allowed to fall into disrepair.
They were moved. They were dismantled.
And they were oftentimes replaced with sort of obelisks or other monuments that commemorated fallen soldiers in World War I.
Do you write about this in your book?
I don't. This is not this is not my research, but I think it bears on other groups whose monuments have also been sifted.
For example, there have been many attempts to honor the sacrifices of black former slaves in the Civil War.
There have been efforts to honor, you know, say Sarchovas, many many people other than sort of patriotic militaristic individuals.
And these have a very hard time. They have a hard time getting built and then they have a hard time getting maintained and protected.
That's great.
Well, Valerie, been a very interesting discussion for the last hour.
I want to thank Valerie Kinsey, my guest who teaches here at Stanford in the program of writing and rhetoric and who collaborates with me in the freshman course, the wind of freedom.
And we're going to be doing that course again next year in the fall.
So all of those students who are listening to KZSU take note of that.
So, Valerie, thanks again for talking to us about memory studies and public memory.
Remind our listeners, I'm Robert Harrison for the show is called entitled opinions.
Stay tuned and we'll be with you next week. Take care.
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