Memorials, Power, and the Proper Business of the State

That a field in Pennsylvania, a scarred riverfront in New York, and the grounds of a war office in Virginia should become places of national pilgrimage, will surprise no one who has attended to human nature. We erect monuments not to instruct the dead but to steady the living. The recent decision to mark the Pentagon memorial as an affiliated area of the national park system is therefore a serious act. It does not add one bench, one name, or one drop of water; it adds, instead, a public acknowledgment that this place belongs to the whole people, and not merely to the department whose walls were struck.

In the work on the Wealth of Nations, I described certain duties of the sovereign which no private undertaker could discharge with profit, though the whole society might be greatly enriched by their performance. Among these I counted public works and institutions that facilitate commerce, improve instruction, and sustain the common defence. To these, I would now add another species, little noticed in my time but plain enough in yours: those public monuments which preserve the memory of great calamities and great crimes, and by preserving them, prevent the moral imagination from decaying into indifference.

The Pentagon memorial, with its individual benches and pools, is a public work of this kind. No merchant could calculate a return sufficient to justify its expense; yet the return, properly understood, is great. It resides in that habit of fellow-feeling which The Theory of Moral Sentiments takes as the foundation of morals: the capacity to place ourselves, if but faintly, in the situation of those who suffered in those few minutes of terror. To walk among the names is to practise sympathy; to let the mind run from one life to another is to resist the coarse arithmetic that counts only totals.

If the monument itself answers to one duty of the state, the ceremonies held upon it touch another. Public remembrance is a kind of education, and like all education it may instruct or mislead. Political leaders, who now speak at the Pentagon while the New York memorial bars speeches to preserve nonpartisanship, stand at a dangerous intersection. They must speak, for silence from those entrusted with defence would seem cold; yet they must not speak for themselves, lest praise be sought rather than praise-worthiness. The impartial spectator, whose judgment I once proposed as our inner tribunal, would listen less to the applause and more to the proportion between grief, resolve, and self-display.

The guardians of the New York memorial, by refusing all speeches in order to keep the event from becoming a party show, display a certain wisdom of distrust. They appear to reason that once the door is opened, no one will confess to bringing faction through it, yet faction will come. In controversies of trade, I advised the most suspicious attention to every petition of the merchant; in controversies of memory, one must view with equal jealousy the approaches of the statesman. For men are nowhere so tempted to arrange the great chess-board of public sentiment as when standing before cameras and graves at the same moment.

Yet the temptation to politicize remembrance does not cancel the legitimate functions of defence and justice that spring from the same events. The killing of the chief instigator of the attacks, and the long, still-unfinished trial of another accused as mastermind, belong plainly to what I called the first and second duties of the sovereign: the protection of society from violence, and the exact administration of justice. That such a trial should linger for more than two decades suggests not over-zeal but a certain impotence; and prolonged impotence in matters of justice wears away confidence more surely than any single act of severity.

There is, then, a kind of triangle which a wise nation must hold in balance: the memorial that fixes the fact, the courts and arms that answer the crime, and the rhetoric that surrounds both. If the first is neglected, the event dissolves into legend; if the second falters, vengeance and suspicion breed in the dark; if the third is corrupted, a noble sorrow is bent to ignoble projects. The stone benches at the Pentagon cannot guarantee virtue, but they provide a stage on which virtue, or its counterfeit, will inevitably appear; the task of citizens is to know the difference, and to remember it longer than the speeches last.