monuments, memory and public space

This blog post has been way overdue. The reading (see Paula Levine's The Past in Present Tense) was really meaty so it required a lot of my brain power to process. Now that I've had time to digest the information, let me relay how I used Levine's text to examine a monument of personal significance in San Francisco's Union Square...

Levine wrote, "Monuments and public commemoratives can, when they work well, reeducate us to the events and people before us as a way to pay respect and reactivate daily life. They can be the vectors of memory, waypoints that mark the events, people, sites, and moments of significance that the culture, nation, town and city value."

In relation to the monument in San Francisco's Union Square, it was erected in 1903 to commemorate Dewey's victory in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. It was for the U.S. people, specifically the people of San Francisco--to remind them that U.S. involvement in war is justifiable, so long as the "good guys" win in the end.

Levine continued, "...However, those same commemoratives can also close down, delimit, and reduce complexities of history, cultural memory, events, ideas and lives, and appear as objects "for nostalgia or consumption."

U.S. citizens believed the military was doing "good" by being in the Philippines-- a completely narrow, one-sided affair. The fact that news of Spanish-American War was being filtered, skewed and downright withheld was unknown to them. What historians tend to leave out was that the U.S. became interested in acquiring the Philippines and actually purchased their "victory" from the Spanish. The Pilipinos were already in the midst of fighting for their own freedom, coming to a head in kicking out the Conquistadors themselves. With American involvement, the U.S. government tried to portray themselves as the liberators of their "small monkey-like brothers." The government and media made the U.S. people believe the war lasted until 1898 was a technicality-- the Philippine-American War went from the subsequent year, 1899 until 1913. The following war, the Philippine-American War which was actually just a continuation from the Spanish-American War, was minimally referred to in the media at the time and was said to have been won in 1902, though this is now contrary to what we know now.

Additional flags beneath U.S. flag are: peace, lands for the people, public improvements, education, and prosperity.

         
In Levine's The Past in Present Tense, monuments may embed a physical mnemonic-device to instill certain ideas and yet may dilute truth. (12) I see this monument attest to this unfortunately, which is still smack-dab in the middle of a bustling international city. Paradoxically, presently, not many people know the significance of the Dewey monument in Union Square. But the fact that it still stands prominently in such a liberal, radical place that its' citizens take pride in, shows the power that lie in monuments.