Remember the Maine!
July 10, 2005
Arlington Cemetery is a fine place to spend a Sunday morning; it cries out for a religious response. The rows and rows of uniform white grave stones initiate the visitor into the sheer magnitude of the historic sacrifice of blood. A little further one comes across the larger more ornate grave markers allowed for admirals and generals. Supreme honor is granted to the white marble tomb of the unknown soldier.. which now encompasses the very spirit of patriotism. It is the place where the president lays a wreath every Memorial Day, and every day a fully-uniformed soldier, with the highest level of seriousness and formality, marches back and forth in front of the simple marble tomb. Signs warned visitors that this was a place for reverent silence.
I am not sure what site could as forcefully remind one that the United States is no fly-by-night enterprise, but an entity which has called generation after generation to sacrifice. Set so close to the capital (the Lincoln Memorial is just across the Arlington Memorial Bridge) Arlington Cemetery inevitably calls to mind the sacrifice that is necessary to establish and keep safe that great political world on the other side of the Potomac.
The words of John F. Kennedy are inscribed on a curving granite embankment facing out toward the Lincoln Memorial, located right behind his grave. There in stone is his familiar call to “ask not what your country can do for you”.. and similar rousing passages urging idealistic action. The vocabulary was familiar.. too familiar. These are the words that now routinely frame every American action: “Now the trumpet summons us again.. a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle against the common enemies of man...” It could be said by anybody, and it could frame any action. Such Cold War formulations have become generalized and abstracted.. one might even say stale.
One anomalous memorial was the careful and costly one dedicated to the USS Maine.. Remember the USS Maine? At first I could not, and had to look at the short explanatory notes. The USS Maine was the battleship that exploded off Cuba in 1898, leaving 260 Americans dead. The boat became a popular rallying cry: “Remember the Maine!/ To hell with Spain!” Since Spain was the immediate suspect in the blast, and since newspaper barons such as William Randolph Hearst started banging the drums of war, the United States declared war on Spain.. a war that would eventually net us overseas territories such as Guam and the Philippines. The actual cause of the blast, however, remained mysterious. In 1976 an Admiral Hyman Rickover published an account blaming a coal bunker fire.. in 1998 National Geographic similarly favored an internal coal fire as the cause of the blast. But by this time the war was long over, and only history buffs actually remembered the Maine.
Arlington Cemetery did not provide details about the controversy over the cause of the explosion.. on their website they acknowledge only that the cause has “never been definitively determined.” To be fair, their job is not to arbitrate history, but to commemorate the 260 definite deaths. But if the cause had been known all along as a coal fire, would those deaths have received the same treatment? The mainmast has been recouped and placed atop the memorial. The memorial is engraved with the names of the deceased, and then small white gravestones lie adjacent to the memorial. These men should be honored.. but it is also clear that something else was at work. These lives were transformed into a symbol.. “Remember the Maine!”.. and that symbol, with all its Alamo resonance, pushed us into war. It seems to provide another symbol.. becoming a gangly and odd looking memorial to the confusing trouble that words and valor can get us into.
