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Death at the Edges of Empire Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and
the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921
Shannon Bontrager
Studies in
War, Society, and the Military Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2020 Hardcover.
384 pages. ISBN 978-1496201843. $60
Reviewed by Robert T. Jones US Army Cyber School (Fort
Gordon, Georgia)
Abraham
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American
history, establishes a foundation for reference throughout Shannon Bontrager’s Death at the Edges of Empire : Fallen Soldiers,
Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921. This work
examines the evolving cultural practices of burial and remembrance of American
military dead during the six-decade period spanning the American Civil War
through the end of World War I. The author’s over-arching purpose was to trace
the ways in which the American nation chose to commemorate its war dead during
a period of substantial change in warfare: the advent of the industrial
revolution. The onset of mass casualties during this period challenged the
nation’s leaders and its populace to rethink how to best mourn and commemorate
its fallen in a more modern age. Throughout this work the author points out the
conflicts created between the young nation’s imperialistic leanings and the
citizenry’s need for remembrance of the fallen. Bontrager examines the many
tensions that existed within this social contract [21]. The book’s nine
chapters are organized more or less equally into three sections: storage,
retrieval, and communication. These sections correspond to three techniques of
remembering espoused by memory historian Jan Assmann, a German historian best
known for his work in the field of Egyptology as well as his theory of cultural
and communicative memory. The first book
section (“storage”) consists of three chapters dealing with the post-Civil War
memory boom, westward expansion (including Alaska), and the Spanish-American
War. Bontrager opens the book with a lengthy discussion of the post-war memory
boom centered on the establishment of national cemeteries and the commemoration
of soldiers as national icons [37]. Private citizens led the new efforts of
memorializing fallen soldiers through the establishment of grief rituals and
mourning traditions. Chapter 1 examines the establishment of national
military cemeteries at Arlington (Virginia) and Marietta (Georgia). The author explores
the way grief and mourning were practiced and politicized during the early
reconstruction period [41]. He is careful to note that these early efforts
excluded former Confederates as well as former slaves. Chapter 2 deals
with westward expansion, conflicts with native Americans, and the beginnings of
reconciliation between northerners and southerners. Former Confederates desired
northern investment for industry in the south while northerners wished to harness
southern resources for an expanding American empire [81]. In this section
Bontrager offers an insightful discussion of how a softening of relations
between former combatants led to a revision of the national cultural memory of
the war. Improved sectional relations thus enabled a unified American attempt
at an overseas empire that came about as a result of the Spanish American War.
In Chapter 3 the author explores the intricacies of the reunion movement
that enabled the recognition of Confederate war dead. This period stressed
reunion and reconciliation at the expense of emancipation memories. Symbols of
the old Confederacy gained storage space while symbols of freedmen and
emancipation lost ground in the cultural memory of post-Reconstruction
Americans [105]. Part 2 of the book
consists of two chapters and deals with the “retrieval” aspect of cultural
memory. Chapter 4 is a detailed look at how the American government
retrieved the fallen bodies of American sailors killed in the explosion of the
battleship USS Maine in Havana
harbor. In addition to discussing the logistics of retrieving the sunken
battleship, the chapter is most focused on how the operation threatened to
transform cultural memory [125] and the tensions between “official” and “cultural”
memory [137]. Chapter 5 looks at imperialist and anti-imperialist
perceptions of the annexation of the Philippines as a new Pacific territory.
The focus of the chapter is on how US contractors traveled to the Philippines
to recover the bodies of fallen US servicemen, a task of extraordinary
difficulty. For the first time the United States faced the challenge of how to
recover large numbers of military dead from an overseas war. Prior to this
effort, the military’s system for retrieving, burying, and accounting for the
dead was haphazard at best. No formal system had ever been instituted. Yet the
demands of ordinary citizens required the national government to properly honor
and memorialize those fallen in the cause of American imperialistic ambitions.
In the words of one Philippine expedition leader: “common respect and decency,
for both the dead and their relatives and friends, demands better treatment” [166].
While American involvement in the Philippines was not universally supported at
home, the treatment of the fallen made good on Lincoln’s promise made at
Gettysburg [179]. The final part of the
book concerns the “communication” of cultural memory. This section contains
Chapters 6 through 9, dealing with World War I (exiles), the
Information Age, the creation of a modern graves registration system, and the
establishment of the Tomb of the Unknowns respectively. In Chapter 6 Bontrager
draws heavily on the North Carolina state archives to tell the story of a
fallen World War I aviator, Arthur Blumenthal. This transitions into
Chapter 7, which deals with cultural memory in the information age. The
author asserts that control of cultural memory is much harder in an age of
information [216]. The growth of state archives in some ways “institutionalized”
the making of cultural memory – in effect they became “gatekeepers” of
information by determining which memories were to be authenticated and which
were to be concealed [219]. The book concludes with President Warren G.
Harding’s eulogy dedicating the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National
Cemetery. This event marked a significant moment in the communication of
cultural memories. For the first time, literally thousands could hear the
President’s words through the power of an amplified public address system, and
thousands more over telephone lines across the country. While this was a great
advance technologically, it was at the same time problematic as it enabled
tensions between official and citizen remembrances. According to Bontrager,
these tensions were often contentious and real. [278]. Shannon Bontrager’s Death
at the Edges of Empire is
an important addition to the scholarship of cultural memory. By limiting the
scope to the period between the Civil War and the end of World War I, he
allows us to trace the evolution of remembrance across four very different
conflicts during a period that transformed America as a nation. Given the depth
and complexity of the topics discussed, this book would work well in a
graduate-level seminar on American history, especially one concerned with
cultural memory.
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