In 2001, three months before the ill-fated collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the United States executed terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Six years earlier, McVeigh detonated a rental truck full of fertilizer and racing fuel destroying the Edward R. Murrow Federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Five years before he killed 168 innocent people, McVeigh served his country during Operation Desert Storm. An uncomfortable question surrounded McVeigh’s execution in June 2001. How would Americans commemorate McVeigh’s lifeless body? Some war veterans felt obligated to honor his patriotism; for his service in Kuwait, McVeigh earned the right to be buried in a national cemetery, to receive military honors, and for the U.S. government to maintain his grave permanently. Others, including Commander-in-Chief, President William J. Clinton thought McVeigh deserved no such commemoration; he signed an executive order forbidding McVeigh’s body from being buried in a national cemetery.[i] After executing the terrorist, the U.S. federal government used a decoy hearse to smuggle McVeigh’s corpse in a van to a local funeral home in Terre Haute, Indiana where he was cremated. The government then gave the remains to McVeigh’s lawyers who scattered them in an undisclosed location that remained private for the family.[ii] McVeigh’s corpse shrouded in his identity as a patriot and a villain proved too controversial to be memorialized. By cremating his corpse and allowing his lawyers to dispose of his remains in a private location, the U.S. government attempted to control the way people remembered McVeigh.[iii] This was an example of agents of the nation-state attempting to produce Americanness by remembering McVeigh as a terrorist and forgetting his identity as a patriot; this dead body helped define what American identity was and was not. The actions that the federal government took in regards to McVeigh’s corpse was part of a larger cultural and political process; commemoration of dead bodies constructed a memory of American identity in which dead bodies of heroes and “Others” were used to define Americanness.
By treating McVeigh’s body as a site of forgetting and keeping that site secretive, the meaning of McVeigh’s actions could slide into obscurity and become meaningless. This response by the Federal Government’s was an attempt to make what Historian John Bodnar has described as official memory.[iv] It was official in that it was conceived and practiced by state-sponsored officials who sought to cultivate a specific meaning/ destruction of meaning in forgetting McVeigh. But the Federal Government relied on its authority at a time in American history when official memory was being challenged by what Bodnar has described as vernacular memory. The spirit of the renewed spontaneous vernacular memory was exhibited in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the practice of Descansos or roadside memorials marking the place where a loved one died in an automobile accident. It also described the commemoration of Princess Diana’s death (which significantly critiqued the Royal Family’s attempt at constructing official memory by attempting to deny Diana a state funeral), and the outpouring of sympathy for victims of the Oklahoma City Bombing, and later, the World Trade Center disaster. Recent resurgence of vernacular memory has even impacted spaces where official memory once dominated as evidenced in 2006 when Arlington National Cemetery relaxed the rules of burial and allowed people to place spontaneously non-sanctioned memorabilia next to the graves of their lost loved ones. Official memory that had dominated since the 1930s was being challenged by the reassertion of vernacular memory where people left flowers, cards, gifts, and other memorabilia in makeshift locations such as streets or in front of buildings. The people have reasserted their ability to remember and commemorate and often used it as a scathing critique of the politics of official memory.
Why have people begun to reassert their ability to remember after so many years of relying on official memory? The horrific act in Oklahoma City marked a traumatic moment in American history; it also marked the moment that Americans began to remember. Bodnar describes much of twentieth-century America as being dominated by official memory and suppressing vernacular memory.[v] With the exception of a few instances during the 1960s and 1970s when students were protesting Vietnam and the lack of civil rights, official memory dominated since the enlargement of the federal government in the 1930s and significantly influenced the way Americans, and much of the world, remembered the New Deal, the Second World War, and the Cold War. The opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signifying to the West the impending collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War brought a critique to official memory. In November 1989 Berliners began spontaneously commemorating the death of East Berlin by taking sledge hammers to the wall that had so thoroughly penetrated the official memory of a divided city, a divided Europe, and a divided World System; the end of the Cold War was the moment that Berliners began to remember and the moment vernacular memory came back to life.
Americans witnessed the unfathomable events in Berlin in 1989 but did not really begin to practice vernacular memory until the Oklahoma City Bombing; McVeigh became the catalyst for reasserting vernacular memory. For Timothy McVeigh the destruction of a federal building served to announce the underground’s seething contempt for American domestic policy toward its citizens. McVeigh delivered the bomb on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian disaster in Waco, Texas and, in a sense, attempted to commemorate the horror of that unfortunate event but also attempted to challenge the official recollection that justified the Federal Government’s response to David Koresh’s cult. McVeigh challenged official memory of Waco with the violent destruction of the Murrow building and the killing of innocent people just as, McVeigh claimed, the federal government had done to the Branch Davidians. This marked a violent rejection of official memory and the reassertion of vernacular memory; it was the moment that broke the hegemony that official memory had held in the United States since the implementation of the New Deal. McVeigh challenged official memory and so did the people of Oklahoma City who spontaneously commemorated the death of innocent people with makeshift memorials as no official space seemed appropriate. What does the resurgence of vernacular memory mean for the legacy of Timothy McVeigh? Does this mean that the Clinton administration’s attempt at turning the body of Timothy McVeigh into a site of forgetting will empower those who seek to commemorate his actions despite the absence of a memorial—thus making McVeigh a potential hero in the future and giving him the last word? Did this violent challenge of official memory weaken the nation-state’s ability to produce national identity? Or have the initial spontaneous makeshift memorials and the later construction of the Oklahoma City Memorial, commemorating the 168 victims of the attack with 168 chairs symbolizing the victims’ absent presence, succeeded in muting the memory of McVeigh by utilizing vernacular memory to echo historian Nikolai Voukav’s maxim that “one forgets not by cancellation but by superimposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying presences.”[vi]
[i] Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20.
[ii] “National Briefing: Midwest: Indiana: Decoy Hearse Used After Execution” New York Times, 13 June 2001.
[iii] Maria Todorova, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as lieu de mémoire” The Journal of Modern History 78 (June 2006): 377-411. Todorova used the term lieu d’oubli to describe a site of forgetting. She uses this term in the context of Pierre Nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire.
[iv] John Bodnar, Remaking America Public Memory, Commemoration, and patriotism in the Twentieth Century (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)..
[v] John Bodnar, Remaking America.
[vi] Nikolai Voukov, “The Destruction of Georgi Dimitrov’s Mausoleum in Sofia: The ‘Incoincidence’ between Memory and Its Referents,” in Places of Memory ed. Augustin Ioan, special issue of Octogon (Bucharest, 2003), quoted in Maria Todovora, “The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov,” 411.
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