The 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, known to history now as “9/11”, sit unsteadily in American memory 25 years later. Historical memory, collectively structured, driven by competing narratives, rooted in power struggles, and roiling with turbulence within schools, universities, sites, all manner of media and creative arts, museums, scholarship, families and governments, is by definition unsteady. If a perfectly settled sense of the meaning of 9/11 ever emerges, however much many might wish, we may have reached a point of blunt amnesia, or what Toni Morrison once called “sanction[ed] ignorance.” 2,977 people died that day as airplanes, commandeered by al-Qaeda terrorists, smashed into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, into the Pentagon, and into the farm fields of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. “Shock” is an understatement of what this country experienced. It truly was felt, and in ways hard to fully grasp, in every corner of the United States.
Building the Historical Memory of 9/11
In the fall of 2013, I was engaged in a fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, just outside Los Angeles. I flew up to a small town, Eureka, in Humboldt County, part of the Emerald Triangle in Northern California, to spend a Saturday with about 50 teachers learning for the first time how to address 9/11 in their American history classrooms. In the continental United States, you could not get any further from Ground Zero in New York than that town. The teachers were as enthralled with the topic and the readings I had assigned as they might have been if 9/11 had happened squarely in their region of marijuana farms. Everything we addressed – from policy, to mass violence, to the nature of Islam, to what actually happened on that September day, to where it belongs in the long story of American history – seemed to them like their story. Twelve years after the fact, 9/11 was still very much a national event felt and assessed by everyone calling themselves American. It is worth asking whether today, we have forgotten just how to think nationally.
Whether 9/11 is considered today with similar intensity and meaning is a fascinating question at this 25th anniversary. All commemorations of major events are deeply informed by the present in which they are remembered or forgotten. 9/11 is still on virtually everyone’s lips as a major turning point in American history, but other huge pivots now struggle with it for preeminence in our modern, post-Cold War world. Were we forever changed by 9/11 as many predicted and as it seemed in its immediate wake? Did Americans finally lose their “innocence” about the place of our nation in world history because of 9/11, as many historians asked, including me? Did the nation take a solid set of lessons from 9/11 that now inform U.S. foreign policy, national self-consciousness, and attempts to forge or destroy national unity? Did we win the war on terror that 9/11 ushered in or is that war now the essence of a “forever war?” How did 9/11 change our national politics and is it still changing it?
I was very fortunate to have a front seat of a sort for the dramas of how 9/11 was commemorated, memorialized, and taught at least for the first decade and a half after the event. I served for several years on a “kitchen cabinet” of scholars, writers, and curators who occasionally advised the curatorial team planning the 9/11 Memorial Museum. That team, which included among others Alice Greenwald, Cliff Chanin, and Jan Ramirez, faced an almost impossible task: create a massive museum, six to seven stories down into the ground beneath where the Twin Towers had once stood, using bedrock and surviving foundations of the two structures as their base. The team encountered harrowing questions: Where do you begin the narrative of the story of 9/11 in history? Do you represent only that 24-hour day of 9/11, or tell a much longer story of the causes and consequences? Do you represent the stories of the perpetrators – the terrorists who hijacked the planes? How to use the tons of surviving wreckage assembled in a hangar at JFK Airport, including mangled fire trucks and pieces of metal that looked like asteroids after they had been forged deep in the fires of the fallen buildings? Are the heroic dead of 347 firemen and other first responders the essential narrative thread? How do you display such horrific elements as the “jumpers” from the buildings, the endless audio and video of the victims before their deaths? How do you plan for the countless foreign visitors, and was this to be an American national shrine or a world commemorative site for all time? What about creating a forensic center inside the museum to forever try to identify remains? The advisors were all people who had written about memory and history or indeed created museum exhibitions.
The curators labored under an impossible political burden of time; everyone wanted the memorial and museum up and finished as fast as possible. Indeed, U.S. culture in these years was so saturated in fights over memory and commemoration, virtually all of us had received a similar call within just days of the attacks in 2001, by a media person asking about “what kind of memorial” we thought would or should go up in lower Manhattan. I remember distinctly telling one reporter to call me back in 10 years and maybe we would have some answers.
The curatorial team did extraordinary work, and the museum would indeed open around the 10th anniversary. I am still astonished that they pulled it off. We had some fierce disagreements in some of the meetings; how could it have been otherwise on such a weighty and powerful subject? We were blessed to work with James Young, one of the greatest scholars of monuments and Holocaust memorials in the world as part of our group. Young also served on the commission that chose the winning design for the amazing surface memorial with the names and the two flowing pools in the footprints of the two towers. All we had to do was give opinions, not create the actual museum.
In 2012 and again in 2013 I created and led an annual summer teacher institute about “9/11 in American Memory,” co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History and the 9/11 Museum. It was one of the most difficult but profoundly rewarding experiences I have ever had as a teacher and a historian. The teachers came from all corners of the country. The first year we met in a large seminar room on the 20th floor of 1 Liberty Plaza, where the museum team had its offices and overlooking the massive construction site where the memorial and museum were quickly emerging. Needless to say, we were treated to extraordinary hard-hat tours deep into the museum structure underground.
The second year we met in the classroom inside the museum itself for a full week, since it had opened to the public with great fanfare. Thirty American secondary social studies teachers learned from scholars, survivors, and curators all about the story of 9/11 as a world-historical event, as well as about the process of conceiving such a museum on the actual site where the event took place. I assigned many readings, including several works by some of the finest scholars on historical memory, the 9/11 Commission Report, and even one work among the many books of fiction that had emerged over the years since 2001. A few guest speakers included Brian Dodwell, the director of the U.S. Military Academy’s Combatting Terrorism Center, and Jay Jonas, an FDNY chief and a survivor of the collapse of the North Tower. Curators also gave presentations about the museum’s phenomenal collection of artifacts. By the third year, 2014, I happily passed on the institute to Edward Linenthal, a genuine historian-expert on 9/11, and a leading scholar on Shanksville and the National Park Service site that has emerged there in recent years.
The Meaning of 9/11 Today – and Tomorrow
What does 9/11 mean now 25 years on? Many things to many people, depending upon where you live, whether you work in national security, historic commemoration, teach American history, or just ride subways or buses and go to work in lower Manhattan or near the Pentagon in Washington. It also depends on just how seriously one takes the idea of citizenship and the duty to possess a sense of history. As everyone who lived through it knows, for a short period of time, 9/11 unified Americans as perhaps no moment since World War II. Because of the terrible misadventure of the Iraq War, many culture wars carrying over from the 1990s, and the ever more vicious polarization of U.S. national politics, we are now a highly disunited society. 9/11 has been used and misused in high politics, in popular culture, in our very national self-conceptions in a world fraught by terrorism, rogue states, and now horrible new wars that have put our country on foreign paths most Americans do not comprehend.
Above all, 9/11 memory must confront at least four challenges.
One, it must not ever lose its element of grief, unspeakable loss, and a sense of authentic tragedy that many Americans refuse to confront. We need to continue to read the Greeks on tragedy to fully grasp the place of this event in historical time.
Two, 9/11 must continue to be studied as one major marker in a long history of America’s changing roles in world history. It has ushered in profound changes in American foreign and military policy.
Three, 9/11 is and ought to be a lesson about authentic heroism, as well as national and community patriotism. No one could look at this most filmed and visualized event in history and not weep. That weeping may have eased with time but it ought never to end. The event is still, perhaps, awaiting its modern Euripides.
And four, no matter how much a presidential administration (as is the case of Trump’s White House) seeks to dictate the nature and function of American historical narratives, schooling, museums, and historical sites in the name of their own particular version of “patriotism,” triumphalism, racism, and social control, 9/11 and all other elements of U.S. history must remain in the hands of professional scholars, curators, and public institutions. 9/11, like all important history, is richly complex, full of the pluralism that is America’s broadest identity, and teeming with endless lessons about human nature, violence, ideology, and survival of the human spirit.
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Memorials are always about the past; but they are almost always also about the present in which they are erected and endure. In the case of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, both the past they represent and the present in which they live will be of very long duration. So will their politicization by those inclined to do so; some among us will use others’ loss and a story that belongs to all of us for narrow aims of power.
In the great Old Testament story of the “Valley of the Dry Bones,” the prophet Ezekiel finds himself in a terrible, bleak landscape; the masses of horrifying bones were “very dry.” God confronts him with a question: “Son of man, can these bones live?” An awed Ezekiel cannot know. God puts his hand on the prophet, breathes into the bones on the parched earth, and they begin to grow flesh and skin; they begin “shaking” and moving about as God pronounces: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” Humbled, Ezekiel, “prophesized” as he “was commanded”; and behold, the bones become flesh “stood up upon their feet.” The story of 9/11 is very old, as it also seems so very new. But anyone with a design to control this story awaits the hand of God and the awesome words of Ezekiel.
