Behind America's rush to memorialize death

For most of America's history, tragic death was something the nation hastened to forget. No memorials to victims went up on the sites of some of America's worst disasters - the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire, the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the 1980s' serial killings of Jeffrey Dahmer in his Milwaukee home. The reason for erasure, say cultural observers, was always the same: shame.

For the past decade, however, Americans have been demonstrating a new sensibility: to set apart forever the sites where innocent people met a violent end. First at Oklahoma City, then at Columbine High School, and now at ground zero, memorials naming each fallen victim are going up on sites where the deaths occurred. And any day now, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is expected to unveil the winning Sept. 11 memorial design with a promise to families who lost loved ones to "never, ever build commercial or retail space where those towers once soared." (But families are still fighting transportation plans that they say will desecrate the site.)

The ground zero plan is confirming on a grand scale what scholars have identified as an important cultural shift toward a new type of public remembering. Tragic death sites, it seems, are becoming permanent shrines to the lost individuals in order to prove that violence has not prevailed. It's a trend Americans are appropriating to some degree from European traditions. And it's controversial, memorial scholars say, because such sites also risk glamorizing mass killing and making death the defining moment of life.

"This is one of the major, major cultural trends of our time," says Edward Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture and a memorial expert at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. "It's a way of protesting the anonymity of mass death in our time. With these memorials, we're saying, 'We don't know how to prevent this, but we're going to make sure these dead are not forgotten.' "

To make such a statement, Americans are parting with a certain measure of practicality that has long been a hallmark of their mobile, rapidly changing culture. Valuable land, as much as four acres in downtown Manhattan, is being deemed "sacred" in the classical sense of "set apart" from the routine activities of work. What makes it sacred? ask the memorial planners. The loss of life? The possible presence of human remains? A horrific act of war? Or the future establishment of a memorial with more than 2,700 names on it?

But cultural scholars caution Americans not to endow every site of mass death with the status of "sacred." The danger lies in accidentally encouraging a culture that glamorizes death and violence through music, film, and other media, says James Young, author of "At Memory's Edge: After Images of the Holocaust" and a juror in the ground zero design contest.

"If [a memorial] is done without a very explicit rationale, then we risk blurring the culture of death with the need to remember," says Mr. Young, department chair of Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts. "We have to be careful not to venerate or fetishize the site, to let it speak for itself, suggesting death as the defining event of a life. I worry that venerating the site of death reduces the richness of a person's life."

Since its Colonial beginnings, America has purposefully buried its dead individually in cemeteries understood to be hallowed ground. The sacred spot, therefore, has not traditionally been the site of death but the site of burial, where individuals receive their own space and headstone. Death sites could be returned to former use or new use without fear of forgetting the deceased because a memorial site had been established at the cemetery.

More and more, however, Americans seem determined to commemorate both the individual life and the tragic death. Roadside memorials for people killed in car accidents, for instance, have become far more common over the past 20 years, says Elizabeth Pritchard, a religion professor at Bowdoin College. Photos and memorabilia keep the memory of the deceased alive, while the decision to place objects at the death site keep the tragedy from being forgotten.

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