Preserve (Some of) the Wreckage
On the Sixth of January, 2021, hundreds stormed the U.S. Capitol building, disrupting the constitutionally mandated certification of the vote by the Electoral College. With democratically elected leaders at home, and around the world, watching in dismay, President Trump tweeted, “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” While I disagree with the former President on so many things, his concluding sentence is right. We must remember.
The insurrection of the Sixth of January has now become an important moment in the history of American democracy, an event that is worth memorializing in the spaces of the Capitol building itself. Not only does the building house the offices and chambers of the legislators who work every day to realize the mandates of the U.S. Constitution, it is also a museum with as many as five million annual visitors seeking a deeper understanding of American democracy (Figure 1). Do they visit because the building symbolizes American democracy? Yes. But to walk through those halls is also to understand that democracy is both an ideal and a practice, one that unfolds in space and time, in buildings and places. As the symbolic and functional epicenter of our democracy we have a duty to preserve the physical evidence of the Sixth of January. For legislators and visitors alike, broken windows and stolen objects must remain in place as unsettling evidence, jarring reminders of our democracy’s fragility.
Figure 1. U.S. Capitol, West Front, September 5, 2013. Photograph by Martin Falbisoner, , under Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
We must remember the armed hordes that scaled the walls and swarmed into the Capitol. We must remember that a white supremacist marched the Confederate battle flag through the halls of the American Congress that defeated that very same Confederacy. We must remember that another wore a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt making explicit his neo-Nazi allegiances. We must remember that conspiracy theorists and their followers invaded legislative offices, destroyed public property, and gloated about it on social media. We must remember that many of our democratically elected members of Congress, fearing for their safety, took cover and were defended by officers against armed insurgents, while others were evacuated from the building. And we must also remember that those same elected officials insisted on returning to those very halls of power to fulfill their constitutional duty (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Scaling the walls of the Capitol, January 6, 2021. Photograph by Blink O’fanaye, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0.
But our memory is short; in the era of instantaneous social media and a rapidly churning news cycle, in an environment where information echo-chambers dominate, we can be quick to forget. This day will certainly be the topic of study for decades to come. It will be the subject of popular and scholarly books and college lectures. It will be the source of legal action and court cases. The first arrests suggest that some justice will be done. But that is not enough.
If the past four years has taught us anything it is that public spaces and public symbols matter. As an architectural historian of the early American South, I have thought long and hard about how to interpret the tyranny of slavery in real spaces, even—or maybe especially—at the UNESCO World Heritage site where I teach: The University of Virginia (UVA). Although I helped to publish a book about slavery at the school, it is the newly opened Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on campus that will have the far greater legacy because it inscribes that history into the very earth that witnessed the horror. To erase slavery from UVA’s past is to cruelly ignore the submerged humanity of slaves, generations of Americans, and the humanity of more recent generations who have fought to acknowledge and recover the story of slavery on campus.
Figure 3. Robert E. Lee Memorial, Charlottesville, Virginia, November 28, 2017. Photograph by Sanjay Suchak used with permission.
Symbols are even more powerful than spaces. Statues of Confederate generals standing outside of American courthouses—like the one of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, which is just a few blocks from my house—are not just the legacy of a forgotten age nor are they impotent history (Figure 3). Erected in an age of white supremacy and in lockstep with Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, inhumane public health care, inadequate public education, and unconstrained lynchings, these statues worked to remind Black Americans of their diminished status and lack of full rights of citizenship. Left in place, they still do that work. They were and are objects that foster and constrain power, consciously and unconsciously shaping—often through distortion—our view of America and of American democracy.
Public spaces and public symbols have long communicated that some Americans are more valuable than others. Left unreconstructed, these objects and spaces, and their simple, celebratory histories effectively amplify those assumptions in our present moment and, even worse, serve to fuel the politics of exclusion on display on the Sixth of January.
The Capitol building is similarly burdened. It is the visualization of American democracy, the materialization of the Constitution, and thus embodies the imperfections and contradictions of both. The Capitol was built by enslaved labor in a city that profited from the domestic slave trade. The selection of a neoclassical architectural style—columns and domes—tied the political heart and symbolic center of the new nation, as historian Mabel Wilson has demonstrated, to an Enlightenment tradition that justified a hierarchy among the races. (The outgoing administration’s Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again executive order promised to revive that tradition.) The recent removal of Robert E. Lee from National Statuary Hall is simply the most recent step in the process of diminishing the stranglehold of white supremacy on the U.S. Capitol; in 1958, Discovery of America and The Rescue—monumental sculptures that heroized Columbus and Daniel Boone while dehumanizing Native Americans—were quietly removed from the Capitol steps, an insufficient but symbolic acknowledgement that Native Americans were and are citizens of the United States.
The Capitol is not just symbolic of American democracy, it is also the physical legacy of America’s halting efforts to realize the ideals of the Constitution it represents. It embodies the paradox of American democracy: the grandeur of the ideals and the fragility of its construction. The violence of the Sixth of January helped us to see that fragility, and in some way that is a gift. The shattered doors and the broken glass remind us that Constitutional stability is not promised. To preserve the physical legacy of this most recent chapter of the building’s—and America’s—history gives both legislators and millions of visitors a potent reminder of the dangers of forgetting.
Figure 4. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum – Boxcar, March 31, 2009. Photograph by Zenobia Joy, under Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Figure 5. Photograph of the Wall of Soil, the Legacy Museum, Equal Justice Initiative, August 15, 2018. Photograph by Eze Amos, Used with permission.
But how? Most importantly, we must privilege the physical, the material, the real, over mere interpretive panels. The boxcar or the piles of shoes in the Holocaust Museum, the wreckage preserved in the 9/11 Memorial, the jars of soil in the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, these real, physical objects invite a physiological response in viewers that words and images cannot (Figures 4, 5). Especially in our increasingly digital age, physical proximity to the real thing matters. For those prone to forget, real objects—actual artifacts—are reminders; for those prone to deny, they are evidence. But one expects to be confronted in a museum.
As Berlin’s Stolpersteine have made very clear, being confronted by a jarring history is even more effective when the viewer is not necessarily expecting it. In that project, small, engraved blocks set into the pavement before the houses occupied by those persecuted by the Nazis interrupt the everyday with sober reminders of the Holocaust. Unrestored damage also has great potential to inspire. Visible pockmarks from the bullets in the walls of l’Hotel de Ville in Paris—left unrepaired—remind passersby of Resistance fighters who couragously held out against the Nazis. Some remnant of Sixth-of-January-damage would remind visitors and legislators of the violence and of how close they actually came to legislators. As interruptions of the everyday buzz of legislators and visitors, damaged artifacts and damaged walls in the Capitol would be sober reminders of the very real potential for failure and the very real choices we must make every day to preserve democracy.
Marking historical events in real spaces matters. Visible from the passing freeway, the eerily open landscape of District Six in Cape Town is inescapable evidence of the Apartheid-era destruction of an entire community. Reading “I Have a Dream” while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial means something more than reading it on my computer screen. To be reminded that the Capitol was invaded and to be in the very spot where walls were scaled or windows broken through is a far more potent reminder than watching the inevitable stream of documentaries to come.
Figure 6. U.S. Capitol evening of 2021 storming. Photograph by Tina Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Any installation, however, must also take a page from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s playbook and refuse to commemorate the perpetrators. Their names are not worthy of these spaces. Neither are their own symbols—especially the Confederate battle flag—which have harmed for generations. There is a very simple solution to this conundrum: preserve not the icons of hate but some of the wreckage. Broken doors, stolen signs, a ripped Chinese scroll, a shattered window, each preserved in its own glass case, scattered throughout the building (Figure 6). As visual interruptions of the grandeur, these displays of broken things would serve as important reminders that democracy is not just an idea but also a practice, one that must unfold each and every day in legislative chambers, courthouse squares, and town halls across our country. This we must remember.
