A Final Resting Place - or Two
by Julia M. Klein
APRIL 29, 2010 TAGS:
We’re constantly, reflexively, wishing for the dead to “rest in peace.” It’s almost a throwaway line, but also a benediction, meant literally and figuratively. Burial signals the end of life’s journey, life’s struggle – a final repose for the secular, and a way station for those who believe that body and spirit will re-unite in an afterlife.
But the finality of burial itself is far from guaranteed. For the famous, the notorious, and sometimes even the obscure, interment may be just the first move in a protracted struggle over ownership, identification, reputation and history. Such contests are the subject of Michael Kammen’s Digging up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (University of Chicago Press), which catalogues the surprisingly peripatetic fate of many of this country’s most illustrious corpses.
Kammen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture emeritus at Cornell University, has unearthed an array of reburial tales, ranging from the sentimental to the bizarre. His characters include generals and spies, presidents and Indian chiefs, and such literary luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kammen purposely skips over one prominent category of exhumations – those involving crime victims. But, his subtitle notwithstanding, he does detour to Europe, where fierce ideological divides provide a contrast with America’s more gently shifting political tides.
What Kammen calls the “cultural politics of exhumation” is a subset of larger debates over cultural memory, as expressed through monuments, historic sites, museum displays and other representations. As reputations rise and fall, and power changes hands, neglected figures may be singled out to receive their new historical due, and a more appropriate gravesite and memorial may begin to seem necessary.
Kammen opens with the example of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. After the South’s defeat, neither side in what the victors called the Civil War had much use for Davis. But his death in 1889, at 81, coincided with nostalgia over the so-called Lost Cause, burnishing his long-tarnished image. He was initially buried in New Orleans, where he died. But six Southern cities fought over his remains, and in 1893, with great pomp and the blessing of his survivors, he was transferred to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy.
“Relocation and reburial … are invariably all about the resurgence of the reputation of and hence respect for someone whose lamp and visage had dimmed in some way,” Kammen suggests, in prose that hasn’t quite transcended the leaden rhythms of academe.
The emotion that generally underlies reburials, Kammen suggests, is pride – local, sectional or national. Families get involved, too, and race matters, as it nearly always does in America. Sometimes, in cases involving such magnetic figures as Poe and Sitting Bull, commerce -- specifically the desire to spur tourism -- plays a role. Cemeteries associated with celebrity burials develop constituencies and host tours.
Kammen’s book often threatens to devolve into a mere compendium, a list of bodies wrenched from the earth. His aim is to develop a conceptual framework, but it remains tentative and blurred. He seeks, for example, to differentiate between patriotic reburials involving Revolutionary-era figures and nationalistic ones a century or so later – a distinction that isn’t always convincing.
In any case, history is just one lens. Reburials also raise scientific and spiritual issues, which Kammen covers sketchily. Before being moved, the remains must be identified. And decaying corpses and coffins, jumbled graves, and a lack of grave markers all contribute to the challenge. To this day, no one is quite sure where Sitting Bull’s bones really lie. Meanwhile, changing attitudes towards the dead can create ghoulish sideshows, as curiosity-seekers purloin skulls and other body parts as talismans.
Reburials can be divisive, but they can also build consensus. As Kammen tells us, French President Charles de Gaulle appropriated the memory of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin, whose ashes were re-interred in the Pantheon, to gloss his own Resistance bona fides and spur unity in the wake of the controversial Algerian war.
Then there is the story of two early 20th-century North Pole explorers, Robert E. Peary and his friend and navigator, Matthew A. Henson, who was African American. Henson was buried separately, in obscurity. But in 1988, he was reunited with his friend in Arlington National Cemetery, with his U.S. and Inuit descendants looking on – a poignant development symbolic of larger trends.
Not all Kammen’s tales involve celebrities. One of the most moving stories in Digging up the Dead is borrowed from the Washington Post. The Post chronicled a granddaughter’s fulfillment of her ailing grandmother’s request: to re-bury her son, dead at 34 of a brain aneurysm. The granddaughter undertakes the complicated task of moving her father’s remains from New York to his native West Virginia, in the process cementing generational ties. “Soon we will bring him here forever, home at last,” she says. “I will say goodbye then, and remember it as long as I can.” Here a move that shatters the rest of the dead brings peace to the living.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
But the finality of burial itself is far from guaranteed. For the famous, the notorious, and sometimes even the obscure, interment may be just the first move in a protracted struggle over ownership, identification, reputation and history. Such contests are the subject of Michael Kammen’s Digging up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (University of Chicago Press), which catalogues the surprisingly peripatetic fate of many of this country’s most illustrious corpses. Kammen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture emeritus at Cornell University, has unearthed an array of reburial tales, ranging from the sentimental to the bizarre. His characters include generals and spies, presidents and Indian chiefs, and such literary luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kammen purposely skips over one prominent category of exhumations – those involving crime victims. But, his subtitle notwithstanding, he does detour to Europe, where fierce ideological divides provide a contrast with America’s more gently shifting political tides.
What Kammen calls the “cultural politics of exhumation” is a subset of larger debates over cultural memory, as expressed through monuments, historic sites, museum displays and other representations. As reputations rise and fall, and power changes hands, neglected figures may be singled out to receive their new historical due, and a more appropriate gravesite and memorial may begin to seem necessary.
Kammen opens with the example of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. After the South’s defeat, neither side in what the victors called the Civil War had much use for Davis. But his death in 1889, at 81, coincided with nostalgia over the so-called Lost Cause, burnishing his long-tarnished image. He was initially buried in New Orleans, where he died. But six Southern cities fought over his remains, and in 1893, with great pomp and the blessing of his survivors, he was transferred to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy.
“Relocation and reburial … are invariably all about the resurgence of the reputation of and hence respect for someone whose lamp and visage had dimmed in some way,” Kammen suggests, in prose that hasn’t quite transcended the leaden rhythms of academe.
The emotion that generally underlies reburials, Kammen suggests, is pride – local, sectional or national. Families get involved, too, and race matters, as it nearly always does in America. Sometimes, in cases involving such magnetic figures as Poe and Sitting Bull, commerce -- specifically the desire to spur tourism -- plays a role. Cemeteries associated with celebrity burials develop constituencies and host tours.
Kammen’s book often threatens to devolve into a mere compendium, a list of bodies wrenched from the earth. His aim is to develop a conceptual framework, but it remains tentative and blurred. He seeks, for example, to differentiate between patriotic reburials involving Revolutionary-era figures and nationalistic ones a century or so later – a distinction that isn’t always convincing. In any case, history is just one lens. Reburials also raise scientific and spiritual issues, which Kammen covers sketchily. Before being moved, the remains must be identified. And decaying corpses and coffins, jumbled graves, and a lack of grave markers all contribute to the challenge. To this day, no one is quite sure where Sitting Bull’s bones really lie. Meanwhile, changing attitudes towards the dead can create ghoulish sideshows, as curiosity-seekers purloin skulls and other body parts as talismans.
Reburials can be divisive, but they can also build consensus. As Kammen tells us, French President Charles de Gaulle appropriated the memory of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin, whose ashes were re-interred in the Pantheon, to gloss his own Resistance bona fides and spur unity in the wake of the controversial Algerian war.
Then there is the story of two early 20th-century North Pole explorers, Robert E. Peary and his friend and navigator, Matthew A. Henson, who was African American. Henson was buried separately, in obscurity. But in 1988, he was reunited with his friend in Arlington National Cemetery, with his U.S. and Inuit descendants looking on – a poignant development symbolic of larger trends.
Not all Kammen’s tales involve celebrities. One of the most moving stories in Digging up the Dead is borrowed from the Washington Post. The Post chronicled a granddaughter’s fulfillment of her ailing grandmother’s request: to re-bury her son, dead at 34 of a brain aneurysm. The granddaughter undertakes the complicated task of moving her father’s remains from New York to his native West Virginia, in the process cementing generational ties. “Soon we will bring him here forever, home at last,” she says. “I will say goodbye then, and remember it as long as I can.” Here a move that shatters the rest of the dead brings peace to the living.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
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