Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond: Honoring Confederate War Dead without Flags and Racism

Pyramid honoring Confederate dead 

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Va.

On this Memorial Day Weekend, my 51st as a soldier and veteran, I went to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, with my daughter Lauren. 

The cemetery is in a beautiful location overlooking the James River just where the falls end and the river becomes Navigable.  

The graves in this sprawling 135-acre cemetery opened in 1847. Thousands of people are interred on the rolling hills north of the James River. At the north end of the cemetery on a hillside is Confederate Avenue.  This section of the cemetery includes the pyramid built just after the war to honor the confederate dead and the graves of thousands of confederate soldiers.  

As we approached the pyramid, I was delighted to see no statues of leaders of the rebellion, no confederate flags.  For me, April  12, 1861, and January 6, 2021, are the worst days in American history: worse than December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, because on those days the murderous enemy was an enemy outside the country.

This cemetery quietly honors the service of the thousands and thousands who died for their country without glorifying the cause they fought for.  

An entire section of the cemetery has tombstones with death dates at the beginning of July, 1863. Thousands of Virginians died at Gettysburg, most of all on July 3 when Richmond-born Major General George Pickett led the ill-fated Picketts Charge that sealed the defeat of Confederate Army at the most historic battle of the Civil War.  

Pickett is entombed at the top of the hill in the same area.

We live in a country where confederate flags wave from public buildings and pickup trucks and until recently American military bases were named after confederate leaders.  America failed to erase the confederate cause and symbols from public life after the Civil War.  The result was another hundred years of racist laws in the Jim Crow South.  

Germany did a much better job after World War II. They outlawed Nazi flags and symbols. Students and soldiers in Germany visit Nazi death camps to learn how bad the Nazis were.  

There is a German Military Cemetery in Normandy. More than 20,000 German soldiers are buried there. Each has a simple marker with name, rank and unit.  There is one statue of an ordinary soldier and no flags.  The cemetery honors the service and sacrifice of the soldiers, not the cause. I cried when I visited there in 2017 thinking how different America might have been if the confederate cause was suppressed after the Civil War. 

Soldiers under any flag can do their duty honorably.  My favorite memoir by an ordinary soldier is about a 17-year-old who enlisted in the German Army in 1941 and served the entire war on the Eastern Front.

Just down the hill from Pickett's grave and west of the graves of confederate soldiers is a memorial to the cadets of John Marshall High School. Each of the markers has the names of cadets and their graduation year.  The majority of those named were killed during World War II. Those who lost their lives in other wars have the war noted next to their names.  

Throughout my service in four different enlistments, when I was on active duty, the majority of the soldiers I served with were from southern and inland western states.  In the spring of 1980 when I had just returned from three years as a tank commander in West Germany, I read an article that said almost half of the men graduating from Baylor University that year were in ROTC programs and beginning active service.  Of the 1,400 graduates of Harvard University that year, two were joining the military.  

I was happy to see American flags waving in the cemetery honoring service of soldiers during the past century.  

 

Hannah Arendt Center Summer Social: Preview of Fall Conference on Friendship and Politics

This week I went to the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center on the campus of Bard College.  The campus is set in rolling wooded hills on the east bank of the Hudson River between Albany and New York City. I arrived just after a short downpour so the weather was cool and cloudy. Tables had been set up for dinner outside, but the wet tables meant the event was indoors.

Christine Gonzalez Stanton, 

Executive Director, Hannah Arendt Center

As soon as I entered the large old dwelling that houses the HAC I was greeted by Christine Gonzalez Stanton, Executive Director of the HAC and the kind of enthusiastic person every organization would love to have in charge of operations.  She signed me up for the book raffle and pointed me toward the appetizers and drinks in the kitchen. 

As soon as I entered the kitchen I met Ken Landauer in person.  We had been in one of the smaller Zoom groups discussing Hannah Arendt's lectures on Kant.  Ken makes zero-waste furniture in a nearby town.  The website of his company FN Furniture lists Ken as "Chairperson" of the business noted for making things to sit on. In person he is even more dryly funny as he is on Zoom.

Ken Landauer in one of his chairs

I have been a member of the HAC for several years and attended three annual conferences in person. Since 2018, I have joined weekly meetings of the Virtual Reading Group of the HAC.  As many as 200 people participate in these 90-minute calls on Friday afternoons year-round with seasonal breaks.  At the the Summer Social and the Annual Conference I have met many people who were only faces on Zoom.  

The VRG format is a 20-30 minute introduction of the reading followed by a discussion. The discussion leader is the Founder and Academic Director of the HAC Roger Berkowitz.  I sometimes stay on line for the discussions, but I always listen to Roger's introductions of the reading.  Here is a short clip of Roger welcoming us to the social:

After the introduction, we walked through the woods up a small hill to the Bard College Cemetery. Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blucher are buried there and have small markers next to each other.  

Hannah Arendt's grave in the Bard College Cemetery. 

We all placed stones on Arendt's grave. As with so many things in Arendt's life and work, her death was controversial. She wanted to be cremated, not a usual practice in 1975 for Jews. Her wishes were carried despite resistance from a relative. Her ashes are interred in the Bard Cemetery.  

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After the walk to the cemetery, we went to the library. Arendt's personal library is in a special collection in the Bard Library.  Four scholars connected to the Bard and the HAC made short presentations about their work.  

Jana Mader, with some of the books 

from Arendt's library.

First was Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. She will present at the HAC fall conference on the friendship between Arendt and the poet W.H. Auden.  Arendt credits Auden with teaching her English and helping to edit the works she wrote in English. The poet Robert Lowell was also a friend of Arendt. Mader put books with inscriptions to greetings to her by the poets on display. 

Born in Germany, Mader teaches literature at Bard and is a writer and artist.  She just had a book published that made me wish (again) that I could read German fluently. Her book Natur und Nation cooperatively analyzes 19th century literature inspired by the Hudson River with texts inspired by the Rhine River. In October her curated walks to women's history in New York City will be published, this one in English.

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Next Nicholas Dunn spoke about Hannah Arendt's lectures and writing about Emmauel Kant.  He talked about a conference he is hosting on June 20 with the author of the book Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner.  

Nicholas Dunn, postdoctoral fellow at HAC

Dunn talked about the way unique Arendt looked at Kant's thought and some of the response to her views.  Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He will also teach courses in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Studies and for the Bard Prison Initiative. 

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Jana Bacevic is a visiting scholar at the HAC. She led a conference at the HAC earlier this month on the Social Life of the Mind.  She explained Arendt's reading of and view of the The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Dilas, a Yugoslav intellectual. As with the Kant volume, Arendt had a unique perspective on Dilas and his work.  Dilas was jailed when the book was published in 1958 because he sent it to western countries for review.  Foreign Affairs magazine published a one-paragraph review of the book in 1958 that said: 

The manuscript of this book was sent abroad for publication and the author is now in prison as a consequence. It is important both for the quality of its thought and for the fact that it is a root-and-branch criticism of Communism, including Titoism, from within the Party itself. Since he was formerly one of the ranking Party leaders in Jugoslavia, his picture of the Communist monopoly of power is particularly telling, and the indictment is made with a typically Montenegrin lack of restraint. 

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Thomas Bartscherer, the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in Humanities, was the final speaker.  He announced that his volume in the series Hannah Arendt--Complete Works. Critical Edition will be published this year. He was so happy about the firm publication date that he had the audience chant a call and response of 

"When?"  
"This year!"

He told us each volume of the critical edition includes images of works in Arendt's library that she used for reference in her works.  Underlines, notes, starred items, are all included in the published book along with the text itself. His volume is on Arendt's The Life of the Mind, her last and uncompleted work. She died on the week she was to begin the third volume on judgement.   

Bartscherer talked about some of the complexities of finding and compiling annotations.  Arendt had five copies of Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics: two in Greek, two in English, one in German. She made notes and underlined passages in all of them, on different passages in each book.

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After the library we went back to the HAC building and ate dinner together, a buffet meal set up in the kitchen.  During the dinner I met more people who read and admire Hannah Arendt.  I am very much looking forward to returning for the conference on Friendship and Politics in the fall and possibly the event on Kants lectures next month.  

Street Numbers Freeze History

 

In Lancaster County, the roads from Lancaster City to the outer boroughs radiate in every direction, a hub and spoke system like the German countryside many residents came from two centuries ago.  To the north is the Lititz Pike, the road to Lititz. To the west is Harrisburg Pike, the road through Mount Joy and Elizabethtown. Between them is the road to Manheim, the Manheim Pike. 

 

To the east is the road to New Holland that passes through CDP (Census-Designated Place) of Leola.  I ride the New Holland Pike because it is very flat and has a wide shoulder.  On one of my recent rides, I noticed that the numbers on houses and businesses in Leola switch from West to East at a place almost a mile east of what I would have thought was the center of Leola.

Coming from Lancaster, the street numbers count down from Rutter's Store at 370 W. Main Street to a house at 2 W. Main. Then the numbers go from the Post Office at 10 E Main St. to a home at 509 E. Main St. where the numbers switch to West Main Street in New Holland. The name NewHolland Pike is used on the road from the Lancaster City line to the edge of Leola.

What surprised me was that the numbers in Leola switch from East to West Main Street at Maple Avenue. That location is well past what looks like the center of Leola: the two traffic lights where PA Route 772 intersects with PA 23. 

It turns out that the numbers switch from East to West near the location of the former Glenola Train Station that connected Leola with Lancaster more than a century ago. The Leacock Township Building is also near the place where the numbers switch. So even though the busiest part of Leola is east of the intersection of Main and Maple, the building numbers preserve the history of the time when the train station was the center of Leola.

Five miles east in New Holland, the numbers count down to the center of the borough, but differently. The numbers count down on West Main Street until 101 at the intersection with Roberts Avenue. Then on the east side of the intersection the numbers count up from 104. There are no numbers below 100 on either East or West Main Street in New Holland. But the numbers on the North-South roads, like Roberts Avenue, drop to double or single digits as they approach Main Street. 

Another oddity is that the center of New Holland is all on East Main Street. It's mostly residential on West Main Street with scattered businesses along the road. The central business area starts immediately on East Main Street.  

Road numbering in cities can be logical, but not necessarily.  I grew up in the Boston area, a city with no grid at its center. In Manhattan, the east-west street numbers are at zero at Fifth Avenue and increase to the edges of the long, thin island. But the avenues have numbers that simply increase from south to north. There is no way to to know where 101, 365 or 565 Fifth Avenue is except by memory.   They are the Zara store, the CUNY Graduate Center and the Adidas Flagship Store. 

     

Benetton and the End of Communism and Cigarette Ads

 

At the beginning of the 1980s, the winning cars in Formula 1 racing were billboards for cigarettes and oil companies.  The Marlboro McLaren, John Players Special Lotus, the Gitanes Ligier, dominated the winners circle in Formula 1. 

Then in 1986, Luciano Benetton, a maker of Italian knitwear, bought a team and went to win a driver's title and two manufacturer's championships. 

Benetton also brought his clothing business to communist countries beginning with Hungary in the mid-1980s.  I read about Benetton and the decentralized clothing empire he created. His knitwear was made by women working as independent suppliers. Benetton would decide on the colors at the last minute and be sure his knitwear was in the color of the season.  

I was a fan of the Benetton team for the decade and a half they raced--1986 to 2001.  Benetton surprised the racing world. They were the first clothing maker to sponsor a Formula 1 team and they were a success from the first year: Gerhard Berger won the Mexican Grand Prix in a Benetton the first year the team was in operation. 

Benetton was the first team for Michael Schumacher, one of the greatest driver's of all time.  With success the team sought more sponsorship becoming billboards first for Camel and then for Japanese cigarette maker, Mild Seven.  The team won the driver's title and two manufacturer's titles in 1994 and 1995, but by 1996 Schumacher was at Ferrari and the team was in decline. Renault became the title sponsor for the last two years of Benetton ownership: 2000 and 2001. 

Cigarettes no longer sponsor the cars. The leading sponsors in 2023 are car makers Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin and Ferrari along with Red Bull and Alpha Tauri sports drinks. 

The posters above are in the upstairs hallway of my home along with a print of 1992 World Champion Nigel Mansell in a Williams Renault.  Nigel is the name of my youngest son. But Benetton is still my favorite team.

Pissing Contest: Real and Metaphorical

Between birth and enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, I had two addresses. Both in the town of Stoneham nine miles north of Boston. The first was 48 Hancock Street. The second was 41 Oak Street. My parents lived in the house at 41 Oak Street from 1957 until my mother sold the house in the 1990s more than a decade after my Dad passed away.

My first friend in the "new" neighborhood on Oak Street was a boy named Bobby. He lived two houses away at the corner of Oak Street and Victoria Lane. We were friends, and like most boys fighting is part of friendship.  

Many times in my life I have had metaphorical pissing contests with other kids, co-workers, and soldiers. But only once did I have an actual pissing contest.  Soon after we moved to Oak Street, Bobby and I were playing and something went wrong. Whatever the cause, Bobby and I did not have the side-by-side competition of who can piss farthest, longest, highest. 

We turned and faced each other for a battle of who could make the other smell worse. We both won, or lost, depending on how it was judged.   

Although my memory of my childhood is very limited, I have some memory of Bobby and I standing next to the tall hedges that separated his yard from the Bishop's house (Mr. and Mrs. Bishop, not a church official) and emptying our bladders toward each other.  

Our mothers were displeased at our need for a change of clothes. We were friends for years after, so the actual pissing contest was not fatal to our friendship. In later life, I found having a metaphorical pissing contest could end a relationship.  Best to avoid both.  

Nothing Ever Dies: Re-Reading a Haunting Book About War and it's Aftermath

I am re-reading the book Nothing Ever Dies because I first enlisted during the war in Vietnam 51 years ago and this book holds a mirror to my service during that war and all the wars I served in and during over the fifty years that followed. 

The notes below are thoughts from reading the first chapters.

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen 

The opening chapter, “Just Memory” begins: “This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” 

Nguyen then tells us the war known as the Vietnam War in America is American War in Vietnam. This identity crisis is central to the war as perceived by those who lived through and after it in Vietnam and neighboring countries. 

It is one of the truisms of history that the winners write the history. But in the modern world history gets written by everyone with the means to tell their story. America was the clear loser of the wars in Southeast Asia from the mid 1960s to 1975. But America names the war and controls much of the narrative because America is the biggest producer of movies, books and other forms of bringing story to the world: all published in English. 

The stories from Vietnam can never have the distribution of American narrative, especially stories in the Vietnamese language. Language itself is a tool in the hands of those who want to shape war as it happens. Russia is “liberating” Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine. 

The sovereign country of Ukraine is a territory when defined by Russia. Those who are with Russia, like the Christian Nationalist propagandist Tucker Carlson, sided so openly with Russia that his shows were a regular part of Russian state news programming. 

The people of Ukraine describe what happened as an invasion. They describe war crimes committed by Russia. They want freedom. They want peace. They have a compelling message, but Russia is bigger. Someday, the war will end and the two narratives will compete in the world of ideas. 

Before the opening chapter is a short prologue. The first sentence of the Prologue: “I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America’s deeds but tempted to believe in its words.” Like so many Americans who lived during the war, I “mistake Vietnam with the war named in its honor.” 

When I enlisted in 1972 near the end of the Vietnam War, I signed up for the education that I did not care about when I graduated just the previous spring. But education, career, learning beckoned after several months of loading trucks and looking at the men beside me doing the same thing I was as at triple my age. 

For me the war meant a chance to get away from home, from the small world of Stoneham to a world I could not imagine. I had not been south of Erie, Pennsylvania, west of Cleveland, Ohio, or ever flown on an airplane. I cannot remember any dread in connection with the Vietnam War. It was a route to freedom. 

The war I saw on TV news was no different than the war movies and serial dramas, showing endless American heroism and victory. The world looks so different now. I served in the military four times, each time getting out I was sure I was done. Then three times, I re-enlisted. During those four enlistments, I served in or during four different wars. 

Until 24 February 2022, I thought I served during three losses, one win. Now the one win, the Cold War, needs an asterisk. The peace we thought would follow the end of the Soviet empire cracked immediately in the Balkans and broke in Ukraine. We watched as oligarchy followed empire in Russia. 

Beginning in 2014 and with open fury in 2022, The Empire Struck Back. 

Reading Nothing Ever Dies it was clear from the first pages that more than four wars shaped the psyche of the kid who so happily signed up in 1972. My Dad was a veteran of World War II. For good and ill, those were the best years of his life—it was clear every time he told and retold his stories from the war. 

My uncle Jack served in the Air Force from 1958 to 1978. He had three full tours flying over southeast Asia in a tanker plane then and F4 Phantom II fighter plane. To say I worshipped them shows how shallow my actual religious practice has been in my life. My regard for them in uniform had none of the skepticism I always felt toward God Himself. Which means in addition to the wars I was in or around, I was haunted by wars before I was alive, wars that happened between my last two enlistments (The Gulf War, Grenada, Somalia, The Balkans) and the wars that formed the backbone of the history of America, Europe, and Israel. 

Nguyen says, “…the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War, the fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it. The war’s identity—and, indeed, any war’s identity—cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself. … because war is not just about the shooting but about the people who make the bullets and deliver the bullets and, perhaps most importantly, pay for the bullets, the distracted citizenry complicit in what [Martin Luther] King calls the “brutal solidarity” of white brother and black.”