“REMEMBER, REBUILD, AND RENEW”: CONSTRUCTING AMERICA’S COLLECTIVE IDENTITY AND THE NEW WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE IN NEW YORK CITY _______________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University _______________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies _______________ by Courtney Michelle Jue Fall 2010 iii Copyright © 2010 by Courtney Michelle Jue All Rights Reserved iv ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS “Remember, Rebuild, and Renew”: Constructing America’s Collective Identity and the New World Trade Center Site in New York City by Courtney Michelle Jue Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing Studies San Diego State University, 2010 The events of September 11th served as a nation-wide and globally reaching, tragedy. The attacks acted as symbolic threats, challenging American identity as symbolized in the WTC’s, representing trade and American economic policy; the Pentagon representing the American military; and an attempted attack on the White House, a symbol of American government, and more specifically, democracy. As the destruction represented in the debris at Ground Zero is cleared away, and new buildings arise, the very act of building and creation acts as a symbolic representation of the American identity. It asks the question: how do we remember, rebuild and renew this space post 9/11? This study will analyze of rhetorical use of space and the discourse surrounding the WTC redevelopment to inform the study of how the two buildings at the WTC site: the Freedom Tower, or One World Trade Center, and the September 11th Memorial, communicate aspects of American national identity construction. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iv LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2 REMEMBERING AT GROUND ZERO: THE VOICES OF THE 9/11 MEMORIAL ..................................................................................................................5 3 RENEWING AT GROUND ZERO: THE FREEDOM TOWER ...............................16 4 VERNACULAR CRITIQUE AT THE WTC SITE ....................................................22 5 CONCLUSION: THE DIALECTIC OF RECONSTITUTION AT GROUND ZERO ...........................................................................................................................27 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................32 vi LIST OF FIGURES PAGE Figure 1. Reflecting Absence: Aerial View of the 9/11 Memorial. ...........................................6 Figure 2. North Pool Sectional View. ........................................................................................7 Figure 3. Completing the Vision. .............................................................................................18 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you so much to my thesis committee whose flexibility, understanding, and encouragement made this thesis process possible. My thanks go especially to Dr. Ornatowski, for his tireless dedication to the growth of all of observations and conclusions made within this work. Thank you to Dr. Boyd and Dr. Carruthers for your guidance and willingness to work with the pressure of tight deadlines. Thanks to my friends and family for your support in keeping me on task and working responsibly. Special thanks to my parents for intially encouraging me to look into graduate school and the possibilities it had to offer. To all of the professors at SDSU in the Rhetoric and Writing Department, thank you for opening my eyes, ears, and mind to the infinite possibilities of “language.” 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In spring 1946, a year after the conclusion of World War II, an idea occurred to William Coblenz, assistant director for Public Information (a division of the Justice Department) after a visit to the National Archives. During a lunch break, Coblenz visited an exhibit that showcased Nazi documents on the inner workings of Fascism juxtaposed next to American charters of liberty and freedom just recently retrieved from storage. Inspired by the eloquence of the contrast between the documents, Coblenz decided to propose a “traveling exhibition of the German and American documents” so that all Americans would get the chance to see them. The idea was enthusiastically welcomed by the Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Tom Clark (Fischer). A year later, on September 17, 1947, a specially built train left Philadelphia for a two- year trip around the United States, the longest train journey in American history. On board were 126 documents comprising the Anglo-American heritage of “freedom,” from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Charter; there were also flags from the major battlefields of the Pacific War. The train was lead by a “streamlined locomotive . painted glossy white, with stripes of red, white, and blue from head to tail, and a name in gold letters three feet high: FREEDOM TRAIN’” (Fischer 567). At the time, America was recovering from the aftermath of WWII, with thousands of GIs returning home (including members of racial minorities for whom common service at the front made it impossible to simply reenter former social roles), changed roles for women, economic changes that came with the New Deal, and a new global power and identity for the 2 United States. The “Freedom Train” was intended to re-unify the country around a renewed sense of collective purpose and thus strengthen the foundations of collective identity, “to reestablish,” in the words of Attorney General Clark, “the common ground of all Americans” and “to blend our various groups into one American family” (qtd. in Fischer 569). Clark worried that “young Americans were losing touch with the founding principles of liberty and freedom, at a historic moment of a great test by ‘fascism, communism, or the various degrees of socialism’” (Fischer 568). In assembling the documents exhibited on the train, efforts were made to avoid controversy and to build consensus, to demonstrate, in the words of Barney Balaban, President of Paramount Studies--one of the many media and PR executives involved in this project of “selling America to Americans” (Clark’s phrase)--“the essential unity of the American system” (qtd. in Fischer 569). The “Freedom Train” represents a significant instance of what John Bodnar, in the title of his book on public memory and patriotism in the twentieth century, referred to as Remaking America. This essay explores a current instance of such symbolic remaking: the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the World Trade Center site in New York City. Like the “Freedom Train,” this site represents a space of renegotiation and reconstitution of American identity around a set of fundamental values at a time of national and global transition following the collective shock of the 9/11 attacks, the continuing war in the Middle East and the controversies surrounding it, changes in America’s global image, anxieties concerning the changing patterns of immigration (especially immigration from the Middle East and North Africa following America’s commitments in the region), and the election of the first African-American president—to mention just a few factors that appear to play themselves out in the debates surrounding the reconstruction of Ground Zero. 3 While the World Trade Center towers themselves had always been invested with symbolic meaning (which is why they were targeted), the tragedy of their dramatic and public destruction (including over 3000 lives lost) magnified the symbolic potential of the site and thus the rhetorical potential of any discourse pertaining to its reconstruction. As Joseph Tuman notes, terrorism itself is to a significant extent a “rhetorical” phenomenon; its political value lies in the public reactions it seeks rather than the material destruction it accomplishes. The attacks of 9/11 were intended as a “message” from the terrorists to the American government and public and were received as such; the reconstruction of the site thus becomes America’s response directed at both the domestic and global audiences (including the perpetrators). As Tuman suggests, the 9/11 attacks were an “inherently rhetorical” act (which does not diminish but magnifies their horror) that introduced a powerful new symbol with a “serious political meaning” into American public space (104). The magnification of the symbolic meaning of the WTC site results from its recontextualization: from the context of New York City (as a synecdochic space, New York City represents America’s cosmopolitan makeup as well as an epicenter of national/international business, trade, fashion, and media) to that of a global contest of values--a recontextualization that emerges in the controversies surrounding the reconstruction. If, as Tuman and many other scholars have already noted, architecture is to a significant extent also rhetoric (see, for instance, Ackerman; Atkinson and Cosgrove; Stuart), the site itself, in its still bare “silence,” is already powerfully so, and anything constructed on it