JP Monument

Conversations About Memorials and Meaning in the Public Sphere

In 2011, City of Boston officials and Jamaica Plain dignitaries convened to rededicate the recently restored Soldiers Monument which was originally erected in 1871 in what was then the Town of West Roxbury. Then Councilor Matt O’Malley quoted Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” in his remarks:

[She] writes about the dramatic effect the loss and suffering during the Civil War had on our society, and how it ultimately helped our nation heal. She says, “without agendas without politics, the dead became what their survivors chose to make them. For a time, they served as the repository of the continuing hostility between north and south. But by the end of the century the dead had become the vehicle for a unifying national project of memorialization. Civil War death and the Civil War dead belonged to the whole nation.”

Councilor O’Malley neglected the following quote one page earlier in Gilpin Faust’s book:

“Slavery had divided the nation, but assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.”

We set out to understand these meme-like Union soldier memorials, mass-produced and erected across the North. Originally they served as a common reminder of the massive loss of life incurred in every community. They no longer perform in the same way. Presently, they act as characters in the mythological narratives of some passersby, while for others they are merely extras on the set, placeholders that serve no purpose in the plot. The Monument is a popular place to meet and is a geographical anchor. What it originally served to memorialize is currently absent and irrelevant in the public sphere. The existing granite structure could be replaced with a glacial erratic, randomly dropped, and still be called “The Monument”. Most locals would never blink an eye. 

As a performer, this character attempts to emote the sadness and loss for, and martyrdom of, the white soldiers who died for a Cause. But being stuck in time, he must ignore the subsequent 150 years of failure in bringing about true equality and justice that the end of slavery purported to bring about. It is time to end this particular performance, and look to other means to support creating a just world, and honor those who do that work.

• Alison Croney Moses & Matthew Hinçman, March 2022

Funded By New England Foundation for the Arts’ Collective Imagination for Spatial Justice grant, Matthew Hinçman and Alison Croney Moses invite you to join the conversation.