 Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever you're listening. This is Davisville on KDRT LP 95.7 FM in Davis, California We live at KDRT.org online. I'm Bill Buchanan, and I thank you for tuning in Well, many public statues are being defaced torn down or removed this summer and names taken off of buildings as More of America comes to terms with the ingrained racism in the country that oppresses African Americans Statues of Confederate war heroes or slaveholders are particular targets But this fight over symbols is not new nor is it external to Davis This town has had conflicts over the years over symbols like the statue to Gandhi in Central Park and Overnaming a street for Edward Teller who helped invent a hydrogen bomb Melissa M. Bender is a senior lecturer in the University Writing Program and associate director of writing across the curriculum At UC Davis and she co-edited a book that came out in 2019 titled Contested Commemoration in US History Diverging Public Interpretations with her co-editor Clara Sluzak The book has 11 essays by different authors on how we remember contested events in America and the subject is timely to say the least Melissa, thank you for spending time with us today Thank you for having me Bill. I'm happy to be here So in your you you didn't write the essays, but you you wrote an introduction and in the introduction you write that Struggles to control national narratives through acts of commemoration Reveal as much about the anxieties of the present as they do about the historical events or figures to be memorialized You know You're saying in effect that these disputes are about us the people alive today and that really is the main reason they matter, isn't it? It is absolutely. I think that it's clear, especially with what's going on right now with many of the monuments being removed or defaced or Taking down during protests. Just how much we have emotionally invested In the present in these statues and memorials that represent the past You know your introduction has two other points that I want to mention because I think they add real clarity to this larger question One is a comment from Mitch Landrieu who was then the mayor of New Orleans and he was talking about a dispute they had there He said the disputes are also about who's in charge. Can you elaborate on that? Sure? So one of the things that Mitch Landrieu was referring to when he said that was the fact that the Confederate monuments that he was working to take down in New Orleans at the time which was 2017 had not been erected immediately after the civil war but at points when The white majority of New Orleans at that time wanted to reinforce racial supremacy So during the era just after reconstruction when there was a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and then later During the civil rights era. So he was saying that these monuments were constructed to Reinforce racial hierarchy and to remind people who was in charge. So efforts to reinforce white power at that time and so then in Discussing taking them down the point is to say basically a different view different people perhaps But a different view is what's in charge. That's why the statues would come down now Exactly. Yes, and I think I've got his name right. You also cite Seth Bruggeman Historian who says Commemoration dwells almost entirely in feeling And I took that to mean that when we're talking about this We need to address the feelings evoked and not treat these disputes as if they were sort of a dispassionate factual calculation Correct. Yes. I think you know the conversation that's going on about taking monuments down today seems to Ignore that fact and there's a lot of conversation in Certain groups in the populace about the fact that our history is going to be lost If we take down the monuments and that's certainly not the case and nobody's going to forget who Robert E. V Was if we take down every single statue of him throughout the United States he'll still be written about in history books, but the Sense that we're losing something by taking down some of those monuments has to do with people's Emotional relationship with that point in the past that they want to continue to commemorate and their sense that they're losing something Personally that their history or their heritage rather I use the word heritage in that history and that instance is going to be lost if we lose the statues You know you raise an interesting point there the difference between the words heritage and history could you explain on that a bit? Sure, I think that History is an effort and we're talking about the discipline of history is an effort to draw a narrative around the facts of the past that presents the truth of the past but Interpreted by a particular historian and we can never lose sight of the fact that It's always through a historian's perspective that we're getting that history, but heritage I think is a sense on the part of particular groups of a kind of personal ownership of Particular part of the past and Feeling that we have a connection to That moment or that era that is more than just the impersonal facts of what happened so the the book is written as and it reads as you know as an academic textbook and so This is for students right the point of the book is to analyze and present ideas and arguments and then to discuss them in the class Absolutely. Yes. Do you know that it's a fairly recent book? Has it been used much yet for that purpose if you had feedback about that from anybody? I've had feedback from a few instructors and actually in Europe Who are teaching in American Studies programs who have found that it's very useful for their students to? Get a grip on why I mean I think from those professors Perspectives, they're trying to give their students a sense of what's happening in the United States right now By helping them understand our connection to these controversial moments in the past and that the students have responded very well one of the strengths of the book I think is that you have 11 different topics in there and there's really a lot of Priority to it. I mean we've talked so far about statues and I've talked about street name, but it's far larger right One of the essays is about movies with an antebellum theme made during Barack Obama's presidency One is about to the homes destroyed to create Shenandoah National Park in the eastern United States Another's on the depiction of female US veterans of the Vietnam War both at the memorial Vietnam War Memorial in Washington But also in literature and the fate of a house in Chicago where the chairman and a member of the Black Panthers So we're killed during gunfire with police in 1969 You know this variety shows that the question of what to remember and forget It's really always with us. Isn't it? I mean sometimes maybe we notice it more, but it's always there It is I think that with regard to the variety of approaches in the book It was something that Clara and I really made an effort I think including these different approaches and If you read the book as a whole I think that one of the senses that you get is as you said Bill That this is all around us And that often as we're working our way through our everyday lives We move past these places or these sites or these other commemorative efforts without really seeing them as points of commemoration and so the book is bringing those moments out for the reader and those occasions out for the reader to see the very very different ways that we commemorate the past and I'm thinking in particular of one chapter in the book that analyzes the lyrics of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seager songs and how those songs commemorate the labor movement in ways That may have been otherwise lost Because they weren't getting a lot of attention at the moment or in buying historians And also the chapter in the book that deals with high school yearbooks during the Japanese internment during World War two and how those Japanese those high school yearbooks show us the absence of Japanese students who had you know one year been present in the yearbook and the next year they were gone and So you know these different ways of commemorating the past that are Representing a book and provide the readers with a really strong sense of all the different ways that these things come up And the yearbooks in particular as a reference to California's history These are California yearbooks you're talking about during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War two That they were seen as a security threat To the country We were at war with Japan. Yes Um Overall, what do you want people to take from your book? Do you want them to see the variety of all this? Do you want them to think about this in new ways? Do you want them to reach certain conclusions? I? would like readers to after reading the book think more consciously of Whose voices and Whose experiences are represented in our commemoration efforts throughout the United States Whose stories get told? What aspects of our history get glossed over or sanitized by some of our commemoration efforts and to Become just have greater awareness when they're in the presence of a commemoration Of any sort to think through those questions. I have a very personal connection to the idea that that brought this book forward and that has to do with my own personal history about Learning about Japanese internment myself I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and at that at the time that I was in high school I Don't think that we were anybody was teaching about the Japanese American internment Maybe it was the time period that I was in high school Maybe it was because I wasn't on the West Coast But we didn't learn about it in our high school classes and I didn't really know anything about it until I was late in my university years and I went to Washington, DC and saw a exhibit about it at the National History Museum and It was a huge shock to me that this had happened One and two That I was that age and I had never heard about it that I was an adult and I didn't know about this really important and traumatic experience in our nation's history and I think it was that it's early experience that drew me to the topic of this book Which is how we commemorate the more traumatic or egregious moments of our past or how we cover those things over So that's a good point here. I think is There's lots of things to commemorate I mean some would be totally uncontroversial or or even in our own times I mean, I was thinking about this we were not in really a statute building age all that much It's more names on buildings But one exception to that in my own lifetime has been to Martin Luther King There have been quite a few things named for him But but your point is if I understand correctly is it's the difficult commemorations Maybe that we really need to pay attention to because we don't hear about them otherwise perhaps or Maybe they have more to teach us as we try to grapple with our own identity as a country, right? Who are we and what do we value? Yes You know, I think it's interesting for me because my co-editor is German and I think about how Germany has Handled commemorating the Holocaust in many very public and visible ways including marking houses where Jewish citizens were taken from their home and taken into concentration camps It's really hard to go anywhere in Germany without being reminded of the Holocaust in some very public ways We haven't as a nation done that To as great of an extent with issues of slavery or with Native American genocide Among a number of other things it's possible to Move through large spaces without seeing any way of marking those Traumas of our past. So in that way, I think the US is quite different than some of our nations and how they have handled it We are talking with Melissa Bender She is a senior lecturer in the university writing program at UC Davis and co-edited a book that came out in 2019 Contested commemoration in US history. I'm Bill Buchanan, and this is Davisville on KDRT So one of the questions of course is what do you what do you do with the statue? What do you do particularly if it's in a gray area? And I got this from your book as well that the choice for a community deciding what to do doesn't have to be either or For the example in New York City a panel established by Mayor Bill de Blasio Supported keeping a statue of Christopher Columbus, who is a controversial figure because of for a variety of reasons but while adding also a monument to indigenous people and So that was New York City working out at least at that time how they wanted to to balance all that and I wondered is you know is this tactically basically saying that sometimes And of course we're all pluralistic communities Is this the way the community's pluralistic will to present balance and context rather than simply remove? This is one tactic to approach it. I suppose right Right and I think the issue of the Columbus statue in New York City Maybe something that needs to be updated since the time that the book was written I'm not sure what they've decided to do about that now in light of what has been happening throughout the US with the removal of Columbus statues and other places But yes, there are a number of different ways that Communities can handle these issues. There's the counterbalancing efforts as you see in that example that you were Just citing from the book I think in your leans when Mitch Landry was taking down statues of Confederate heroes That his goal at that point was not to destroy the statues But to house them in a museum at some point where they could be explained or contextualized in some way Although at the time that he took them down. They were just being warehoused. So I'm not sure how far along they've gotten with that so it really seems that the local communities need to Decide on their own how to handle it, you know, I read there was a statue in Tennessee to a Confederate general who The statue is on private land But it's so tall that it can be seen from highways all around and The community voted to put in hedges high enough That it would block the view of the statue from the highway I mean, that's another you know a different kind of way of dealing with these issues. Yeah, lots of ways in I Looted at the start of the hour. I mentioned that Davis has had some questions like this the Edward Teller dispute Davis resolved by deciding not to name a street for him The city deliberated about the Gandhi statue, but has kept it. It's still there in Central Park So there are ways to work through this and the hedges one I hadn't heard of but The way that's kind of classic American ingenuity But you know memorials rely on a consensus and a simplicity that might not currently exist And so I wonder if ours really is an age for memorials or if ours is more of an age where You put a lot of things out there and maybe you encourage people to read widely or or research widely But you don't so much create these points in places unless there's just real clarity that eludes us right now in lots of areas I agree. I think that I mean, I think the idea of a monument itself is Ostensibly to be a unifying symbol for a community or a way of saying this is what represents us this is a part of our past that we can all Agree upon as representative of our community, but unfortunately in many instances That decision about what gets memorialized in that way Hasn't included a diversity of voices or a diversity of opinions and in some instances as We discussed when we were talking about Mitch Landry earlier those choices of creating a unifying For the community were deliberately exclusive right deliberate deliberately exclusionary Yeah, and ultimately I guess that's really what we're engaged with these days is we're saying look There are more voices in this country, you know, our ideal is pluralism our ideal is everybody And if we really mean that then that has to be reflected in our public places as well Absolutely, I mean that's sort of a it's a dispassionate way of describing it, but but I think that's the heart of it Of course, it's not just the United States. It's doing this as I was researching for this show I came across an essay by Julian Bagini who was an author and this was in the Times literary Supplement dealing with a statue that was torn down in England of someone who had profited I think also from the slave trade and His essay suggests that statues be evaluated partly on why the person is celebrated And so in other words in this country, though, there was a statue of you Ulysses S. Grant that was torn down in San Francisco Mm-hmm, and Ulysses S. Grant was a president and he also led the Union army that defeated the Confederacy He did own a slave for a year or so on the eve of the Civil War if I understand the history correctly that was given I hate using that word Whatever word you want to use By his in-laws, I think and then he set the man free eventually But the point is that Grant then if the statue is up there It's probably not because of that it's because he led the army. He led the Union army in the war and he was president It's a way of looking at something that's not just either or it's not just all of this person. We're celebrating you question none of it Versus no this one thing Particularly that maybe it wasn't all that unusual in his time disqualifies any commemoration I don't have an answer for that But I thought that was an interesting way to kind of evaluate it to sort of look at it and say we'll keep this one This one will put in a museum. I would imagine though, of course, there's something to be on the pale I can't imagine anyone wanting a picture of a statue of Hitler Anywhere, right? Yeah, right? What do you think of that approach? the idea of sort of evaluate why you're commemorating and Not just all the details of the person's life. I agree with you on that. I think that that seems like a very logical and measured approach to this question of which memorials we Keep in place and which we move or which we try to contextualize in some other way and I think in addition to Thinking about Why Somebody has been being memorialized in this way. We also want to think about What Keeping that memorial in place now says about us today and Thinking about the legacy that we're going to leave for people in the future when they look back I mean, this is a moment that historians are going to write it out because of So much is changing once and I think over 180 monuments have come down just since the George Floyd murder throughout the United States some by protesters taking them down and some by local group saying we want to take this down ourselves with the sanction of government and I think that People are going to look back at this moment and Make judgments about us about which choices we made about things that came down And so we need to think about that too. What is it? What does it say about us in this moment? And that's part of the complexity of interpretation, isn't it? I mean, how much do you want to interpret a historical figure in their era? versus now Because something that could have been very let's say progressive a hundred years ago now someone could look at and go Don't don't like that and yet we all live in our eras and Right who knows what's coming ahead, but it will almost certainly make this era look strange Whether it's by technology or attitudes or whatever it may be Right and historians live in their error as well are limited by The world view that we have at the present when they're interpreting the past You know as we discussed I've worked in the press over the years one of the things that you get as a journalist is people will say the media this the media that and My answer often was to say read widely. Don't if you feel it's monolithic go beyond the monolith Of course, there's this problems when things scatter too because in to some degree then Where do you find an accepted basis for truth? If if you or at least the truth is you can get to it But the point is I think it's something similar here. It says read widely look widely you'll get a better sense of the issues that way and Memorials in a way are like mainstream media used to be here's this one thing this one place this one square and It's meaning to represent something Larger perhaps then we will out help and that's just part of the change But it gets down to the individuals. How do you deal with it? And so read widely look widely put it in context So have you decided how you'd respawn resolve these displays of memorials? I think that The best approach is at a local level for communities to come together and make decisions about how to handle I don't think that I can say there's one correct way to do this But certainly that community effort needs to include all the voices in that community about how they want to represent that represent themselves through their public commemorations and That should happen and it's very democratic fashion through conversation You know, I I recently read about a family who They are descendants of a confederate general and there is a statue to him in Virginia and They had in previous decades, you know paid to have the statue kept up and They've recently come to the conclusion that they actually want to ask their local government to take it down and One of the things that happened that that led to this change in their attitude toward the statue was that they met and became acquainted with the black descendants the African-American descendants of this confederate general and you know They and they got together and started having conversations and So, you know, the African-American and the white side of the family came together over the monument made a decision together And I think that that may happen in other places as well Well, we're we're running we've hit the end of the show, so I'll need to end it there But that's a good story to end it on so thank you, Melissa for having me go We've been talking with Melissa Bender lecture at the UC Davis and Co-editor of a new book on public commemorations. I'm Bill Buchanan. This is Davisville. Thank you for listening