![]() A century later, however, the Civil War Memorial may be better understood as an artifact of a fierce battle that continues to roil American culture today: the fight to control the narrative of American history and thus the politics of the present.įrom the outset, the Civil War Memorial was as much about the politics of the day as it was about memorializing the past. In its design and intention, it stands as a monument to peace and reconciliation. He had good reason to think so: Unlike any other northern university’s Civil War memorial, Yale’s listed the names of fallen Confederate soldiers alongside the Union dead. “I want my boys, and the boys I send to Yale, to see this Yale history of her sons,” he wrote, “and come home, more mindful of a larger country and the great united forces-North and South-sons of men whose names are out on the tablet or arch.” Strong believed the memorial would impart a sense of national unity, the arch a figurative bridge between sections of the country that had sought to vanquish each other a half-century prior. What did Strong so insistently want us to absorb? As the president of an association of southern alumni, he viewed the memorial as a source of instruction to the next generation of Yalies he was helping to recruit. ![]() Most students - myself included - spend their years on campus never stopping at the panels of names or trying to decipher the words beneath their feet. Much of the inscription, etched into the floor under the archway, has become an inscrutable code of dashes and dots, eroded by more than a century of foot traffic. However central the memorial is physically, its meaning has faded into obscurity-literally. ![]() In another sense, though, Strong’s fear has come true. Four high-relief classical figures support the archway’s corners, the tablets between them listing the names of the dead. Dedicated in 1915, Yale’s Civil War Memorial is an archway leading students into one of the central passageways of campus, the rotunda that connects Woolsey Hall to the newly constructed Schwarzman Center. “I want it out in the open.” Strong, a southern-born alumnus, got his wish. “I do not want it anywhere hidden,” Charles Strong wrote of Yale’s proposed memorial to alumni who died in the Civil War.
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