Twenty-one years ago, the late architectural historian Spiro Kostof published America by Design, preceded by a PBS series of the same name. The goal of both the series and the book was to “see America as one design…, and to review some of the enduring themes of its history….”¹ In his chapter on public life, Kostof sounded a cautionary note about memorials and monuments, since they “derive their authority from some unified vision—or its presumption.”² He thought the relative paucity of significant national monuments built since World War II indicated a cynicism “about great national agendas, about the methods of forging a national consensus or promoting national ideals.”³ To support this view, he cited the controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was solved by uniting two disparate ideas about memorials. Kostof also noted that the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission, created in 1955, had failed to develop an acceptable design in the intervening thirty-some years up to the publication of Kostof’s book.
 
More recently, the sociologist Nathan Glazer examined monuments and public art in From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City. He relates how, after “fifty years and many designs,” the Roosevelt Memorial had finally been completed—but only when interest groups had edited out Roosevelt’s “ever present cigarette” and insisted that he be shown in his wheelchair. Thus, “what was part of Roosevelt’s image in his time was suppressed, and what he was careful never to have photographed was made visible.”⁴ As I write this, it is reported that the United States Commission of Fine Arts has asked sculptor Lei Yixin to change the proposed sculpture of Martin Luther King, Jr., for the National Mall, because King appeared confrontational and not sympathetic enough.⁵ Perhaps it will take another fifty years to get an acceptable likeness of King. Like Kostof, Glazer believes that the civic speech of public monuments has been muted. Even as Glazer describes how the National Mall is crowded with recent and proposed memorials (like King’s), he believes our capacity to create monuments with symbolic import—and with awe and reverence—has been vitiated. He says travel agents report that fewer tourists are going to Washington, D.C., and that in Boston the preferred family photo is not on the historic “Freedom Trail,” but with Bugs Bunny in front of F.A.O. Schwarz.⁶ For Glazer, our uncertainty about heroes and civic virtue, along with the power of the media and special interest groups, and an arts community more interested in subverting or challenging the public than uplifting it, all figure in the dilution of commemorative art.
 
Judith Dupré’s new book Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory gives a different picture, which is framed by her belief that “the monument building campaign in the United States today rivals the one that followed the Civil War….” Dupré, currently the Dominique de Menil Scholar at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale Divinity School, is the author of previous books on skyscrapers, bridges and churches. Monuments has neither the scope of Kostof’s ambitious search for the character of American design, nor the critical thrust of Glazer’s engagement with modern architecture. Dupré’s book is an exposition of the American monument in all of its iterations. She explains that the book is not meant to be read linearly, but was designed to create individualized reading experiences, where readers themselves choose how to engage the array of photographs, essays and marginal commentaries.
 
Monuments is a sheer delight to read in this dip-in, dip-out, skip-around fashion. Dupré has marshaled an abundance of information, which is generously enlivened with anecdotes and quirky information. For instance, the chapter on Mount Rushmore tells us that, when Calvin Coolidge dedicated it in 1927, he was wearing new cowboy boots. In one sense, it is trivial information, but the omnipresence of such attention to detail gives a distinctive texture to the book. How would you know that, within the pyramidal tomb of Brigadier General Egbert Viele at West Point, there is a light switch and a buzzer, unless you read Monuments? Viele had them installed before his death in 1902 so “he could call for help in the event of a resurrection.” Dupré notes electricity to the tomb was cut off during World War II.
 
Dupré’s approach to monuments and memorials differs from Glazer’s and Kostof’s, who are largely concerned with official governmental monuments. Dupré includes memorials, such as the AIDS quilt, which develop outside of government purview. The quilt was a conscious rejection of the triumphal mentality of official memorials. In her account, it marks the blossoming of “therapeutic” anti-monuments (which include the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) that replace heroes and victors with victims. The book cites several other examples—the Manzanar National Historic site, the 2000 replica of the Amistad schooner—of memorials for victims of injustice. Even so, the majority of the memorials discussed here belong to a more classic understanding of commemoration. The battlefield at Gettysburg has a chapter, as does the Statue of Liberty, the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., the Shaw Memorial in Boston and the memorial to the sled dog Balto in New York’s Central Park.
 
Dupré is acutely aware of the contested nature of history, and how once-excluded views of past events can recast our perception. The discussion of Mt. Rushmore leads to another monument just seventeen miles away, the as yet incomplete monument for Crazy Horse, the Oglala Sioux chief who defeated Custer at Little Bighorn (also the subject of a chapter). Mt. Rushmore is carved out of land held sacred by the Sioux. The expropriation of the land was belatedly recognized as an “illegal taking” in a 1980 Supreme Court decision, which ordered the government to reimburse the Sioux. The problem is the Sioux would prefer the land, and presumably without Gutzon Borglum’s great monument.
 
Another significant aspect of Dupré’s approach is her attention to the physicality of monuments. This begins with the cover of the book, which is meant to simulate the texture of stone. In one chapter, she interviews Nick Benson about letter carving. The owner of the John Stevens Shop, a famous and historic carving studio in Newport, Rhode Island, Benson designed and carved the inscriptions for the World War II Memorial, dedicated in 2004. Dupré recognizes the gap between a monument’s physical being, and its abstraction in thought and memory. She writes that monuments actually allow us to forget, because—after all the debate and controversy are settled—the completed structure creates a kind of closure, “an outward sign that finally all has been said and done,” allowing us to move forward. It is the ironic fate of some monuments to fade into the landscape and disappear. They are still physically present, but gone from public consciousness.
 
Monuments is vivid and entertaining, informative and thought provoking. It is generous in its commitment to the multiple communities that collectively make up the United States. In comparison, Kostof’s and Glazer’s concerns about the loss of a unified civic discourse may sound somewhat antiquated or narrow. Their paradigms are modernist, linear, insistent upon one grand narrative. Still the concerns they raise can’t quite be set to rest by the recognition of multiple perspectives.
 
The last artifacts discussed in Monuments are the informational plaques that were bolted on the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, sent into deep space in 1972, and the records created for the Voyagers I and II spacecraft, launched in 1977. Both were designed by the well-known astronomer Carl Sagan. By including these, Dupré makes a valid imaginative leap; they are representations, and function like monuments. Their purpose is to inform whoever may inhabit the vast, apparently lifeless reaches of far space about the Earth and the human race.
 
But who are we? In the Voyager records, Dupré explains: “…notably lacking were any images of poverty or war, something Sagan’s group debated at length before omitting them on the grounds that they might be construed as a threat. Overriding all was the feeling that humanity should be depicted positively. First impressions do count….” Dupré’s book helps us understand how all monuments are edited historical representations; some have ignored painful truths. Yet even with the shift from the triumphal to the therapeutic monument, conflict, suffering and injustice remain constituents in a grand, monumental narrative. Ironically, the editing of truth for the sake of a good impression may have reached its apogee with Sagan’s records. While this may be bad news for any trusting intergalactic travelers, they might build new monuments to set the record straight.
 

Originally printed in American Arts Quarterly, Volume 25, number 3.

Notes
1 Spiro Kostof, America by Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. vii.
2 Ibid., p. 265.
3 Ibid., p. 267.
4 Nathan Glazer, From a Cause to a Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 103–104.
5 Ben Sisario, “Arts Briefly,” New York Times (May 10, 2008), p. A18.
6 Glazer, op. cit., pp. 104–105.