In a recent Time magazine, Radhika Jones had an interesting review of a new novel, “The Submission” by Amy Waldman. The book, published just prior to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, imagines a design contest for a World Trade Center memorial.
In the course of the review, Jones refers to ground zero as “the nation’s most hallowed ground.”
When I read that phrase, I stopped and wondered: Is it?
Two years ago, in the Smithsonian magazine, Robert M. Poole described Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where more than 200,000 American military men and women and their dependents are buried, as “the nation’s most hallowed ground.” Just a few weeks ago, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., used essentially the same phrase.
And then there’s Gettysburg.
A year ago, when opponents were gearing up to oppose successfully the establishment of a casino near the battlefield, they often used that phrase to describe the Pennsylvania site where, over the course of three days, the fate of the Civil War was decided. In fact, in a fundraising letter, Jim Lighthizer, president of the Civil War Trust, a battlefield preservation group, called Gettysburg “The most hallowed ground in America.”
“Hallow” is not a word that’s often used in everyday conversation. The idea of “hallowed ground” goes back to Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863.
In the middle of that short yet eloquent speech, Lincoln noted:
“We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”
When we hallow something, we say that it is sacred, that it’s holy in some way.
Lincoln’s point was that it wasn’t up to him or to the crowd of people there that day to say that the land at Gettysburg is sacred. The soldiers who had died there, whose blood had soaked the ground, had made it sacred — regardless of what Lincoln or anyone else said.
That’s true, of course, at Arlington National Cemetery. And at ground zero.
These are sacred places. No question.
But is one more sacred than the others? Is one the most sacred?
And is one more sacred than other hallowed places, like the battlefield at Antietam or the beaches at Normandy? Or Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated? Or the Alamo? Or the Trail of Tears on which 4,000 Cherokee Indians died? Or Galveston, Texas, where more than 6,000 people were killed in a 1900 hurricane? Or Pearl Harbor? Or the Pentagon?
I guess I keep stumbling over the word “most.”
So much of American life is about competition. It’s natural that we would want to know which sacred ground — which hallowed ground — is in first place.
But maybe, in this case, there is no good, better and best.
Maybe all things sacred are equal.
Ground zero, Arlington Cemetery and the Gettysburg battlefield are all sacred.
Perhaps we should just leave it at that.
Patrick T. Reardon, a former scholar in residence at the Newberry Library, is a member of the advisory board of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.
