tropes of a texan trauma: monumental dallas after john f. kennedy

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Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumentalDallas after John F. KennedyHanneke Ronnes a & Anna Meijer van Putten aa Department of European Cultural History , University ofAmsterdam , Amsterdam, The NetherlandsPublished online: 11 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Hanneke Ronnes & Anna Meijer van Putten (2010) Tropes of a Texan trauma:monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16:6, 390-404,DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2010.512729

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International Journal of Heritage StudiesVol. 16, No. 6, November 2010, 390–404

ISSN 1352-7258 print/ISSN 1470-3610 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13527258.2010.512729http://www.informaworld.com

Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy

Hanneke Ronnes* and Anna Meijer van Putten

Department of European Cultural History, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The NetherlandsTaylor and FrancisRJHS_A_512729.sgm(Received 15 May 2010; final version received 10 June 2010)10.1080/13527258.2010.512729International Journal of Heritage Studies1352-7258 (print)/1470-3610 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis166000000November [email protected]

Dealey Plaza in central Dallas serves both as a ‘cradle’ and a ‘grave’; at thishistoric site Dallas was born and an American president died. The assassination ofPresident Kennedy on 22 November 1963 changed Dealey Plaza, the site wherethe first citizen of Dallas settled in 1841, from a symbol of civic pride into a placeof guilt and shame. After the events of 1963, the Dallas community voiced a wishto forget and hence, the exact location where Kennedy was murdered was initiallyremembered by neither monument nor plaque. At the same time, America grievedand from all over the country US citizens started to visit the assassination site.Dealey Plaza became a place of pilgrimage, which caused a change in themonumental landscape and eventually transformed civic guilt into civic pride.This article offers an analysis of the responses to this Texan trauma in terms ofcommemorative heritage and describes Dallas’ shift from ‘amnesia’ to‘identification’, two contrary responses to traumatic, or mourning, heritage.

Keywords: John F. Kennedy; Dallas; mourning heritage; memory culture;identity; dissonant heritage

Introduction

One of the myriad American responses to the trauma of 11 September 2001 wasmuseological. The events of that day stirred new exhibitions as well as completemuseums, in the process changing the way in which curators appraise and presentheritage sites dedicated to remembrance and mourning, or ‘mourning heritage’(Peckham 2003).1 ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ poses the future National September11 Memorial & Museum on its website. Prior national suffering on a similar scope,voiced in the same ‘where were you when’ idiom that characterises the 11 Septemberdiscourse, was caused by the death of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 onDealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Indeed, immediately following 11 September, publichistorians, museum curators and archivists made reference to the Sixth FloorMuseum in Dallas – the museum commemorating the assassination of PresidentKennedy and housed in the Texas School Book Depository from whence the shotswere fired – in discussions concerning the interpretation and presentation of this latesttragedy and the consequential role of museums in processes of ‘civic healing’ (Gard-ner and Henry 2002, pp. 43–49). The confrontation with ‘the raw material of history’on display in the Sixth Floor Museum was perceived as ‘a powerful step in the

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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International Journal of Heritage Studies 391

process of questioning and understanding broader issues’ (Gardner and Henry 2002,pp. 27–52). This Dallas museum, which took over 30 years to realise, did not onlyserve as a template in the post 9/11 museum landscape, it also hosted one of the veryfirst exhibitions on the subject. Running from November 2001 until December 2002,the exhibition titled ‘Loss and Renewal: Transforming Tragic Sites’ provided a snap-shot of the tragic events of 11 September, framed in the context of other disastrousturns in the United States history such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Visi-tors were invited to share their memories and emotions regarding 9/11 at the close ofthe exhibition, where self-written notes could be affixed on the wall around a photo-graph of an American flag sticking out of the debris of what was once the WorldTrade Centre. The Sixth Floor Museum staff was ‘moved by the way local media andcommunity members were drawn to their venue in an attempt to make sense ofSeptember 11’ (Deen 2003, p. 191). The immediate reaction of Dallasites to thatother national tragedy, the death of John F. Kennedy four decades earlier, was of adifferent nature altogether. The following, touching on questions of memory andidentity, will centre on the traumatic site where the murder happened, and how thissite developed in terms of its monumental infrastructure.Figure 1. The Sixth Floor Museum, the former Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, from where John F. Kennedy was shot. In the foreground is the ‘Bryan colonnade’ built in the 1930s and a tourist gazing at the site of the murder. (All photographs are by H. Ronnes.)

Beginnings

Before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Dealey Plaza, the scene of the murder,marked the birthplace of the city and as such represented the very core of Dallas’ civic

Figure 1. The Sixth Floor Museum, the former Texas School Book Depository in Dallas,from where John F. Kennedy was shot. In the foreground is the ‘Bryan colonnade’ built in the1930s and a tourist gazing at the site of the murder. (All photographs © H. Ronnes.)

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392 H. Ronnes and A. Meijer van Putten

pride. In 1841, Tennessee lawyer and tradesman John Neely Bryan established a trad-ing post on this location along the Trinity River, allegedly naming it after his friend‘Dallas’.2 Bryan settled there where the river’s three forks met and a river crossingcould be constructed, thus ensuring that Dallas became a gateway to the West. Withina few years, Bryan’s post was blossoming: the town was planned, roads were underconstruction, people arrived and businesses sprang up. In 1846, Dallas became thecounty seat. Establishing itself as the primary production centre of cotton and grains,and taking full advantage of its favourable location along the Trinity River, Bryan’strading post developed into a thriving city within decades. An iron suspension bridgeover the river and the railroads, both realised in the 1870s, further contributed to thebustling urban landscape that had developed by the turn of the nineteenth century (Hill1996).

One of the prominent figures in the Dallas arena at this time was English-born andself-made George Bannerman Dealey. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twen-tieth century, Dealey personified not only the influential Dallas Morning News, but ismoreover credited as a civic reformer (Cox 2005). Starting small with the advertise-ment and introduction of the first trash-can in Dallas, placed right in front of the news-paper’s front door, Dealey was soon to embark on a well-orchestrated campaign thatpromoted the realisation of parks and playgrounds, better housing conditions and animproved infrastructure (Cox 2005).Figure 2. Dealey Plaza and immediate environment, Dallas (illustrated by Frits Hoogesteger).1 Field John Neely Bryan2 Courthouse3 Work Projects Administration monument commemorating the birth of Dallas4 John Neely Bryan’s log cabin5 Plaque commemorating John F. Kennedy6 The Sixth Floor Museum7 Philip Johnson’s John F. Kennedy Memorial8 Dal-Tex Building9 Criminal Courts10 Records Building11 US Post OfficeDealey Plaza, named after the noted publisher and civic leader, formed the culmi-nation of development projects in the heart of the old town, which commenced in 1927and continued after the economic meltdown following the Wall Street crash two yearslater. The Great Depression, though touching Dallas and Dallasites as it did all, wasalleviated as a result of the discovery of oilfields in 1930 (Biles 1994, pp. 4–20). Thatsame year, a major development scheme changed the course of the Trinity River,which had been the source of tremendous problems owing to its recurrent overflow-ing. Subsequently, Dealey Plaza – ‘the front door of Dallas’ – was created to establisha new access way to the west side of the city across the now bypassed river. Threeroads coming unto the new plaza from the east end, Commerce Street (which used tolead unto the iron suspension bridge across the river), Main Street and Elm Street,converged at the west end of the square, heading, via a ‘triple underpass’, towardsmore roads and ultimately the river. Towards the triple underpass, the three roads werelined with grass patches, amongst which what was to become the famous ‘grassyknoll’. The east end of the square was flanked by several buildings, amongst whichthe Dallas Courthouse built in 1892, and the early twentieth century Dallas CountyCriminal Courts Building and an office block that became known as the Dal-TexBuilding. The southeast and the northeast of the square were occupied by the PostOffice built in 1937 and the early twentieth-century seven-storey masonry building,initially housing the Southern Rock Island Plow Company, but now known as theTexas School Book Depository (Abbott 2003, pp. 24–25).3

In his article ‘Mourning heritage’, R.S. Peckham (2003, p. 205) notes: ‘Althoughheritage is associated with the preservation of artefacts, buildings and landscapes thathave survived from the past, in many cases heritage performs the obverse function: itpreserves things that have already been destroyed’. Built on the oldest foundation ofDallas, Dealey Plaza’s essential status as the city’s historic centre ‘where it all began’,was first monumentalised in the late 1930s, soon after the iconic Trinity River, closelyassociated with Dallas’ origin, had changed its course and disappeared from sight(WPA 1940, p. 336).4 The fact that the river, imperative to the Dallas origin myth

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Figure 2. Dealey Plaza and immediate environment, Dallas (illustrated by Frits Hoogesteger).1 Field John Neely Bryan2 Courthouse3 Work Projects Administration monument commemorating the birth of Dallas4 John Neely Bryan’s log cabin5 Plaque commemorating John F. Kennedy6 The Sixth Floor Museum7 Philip Johnson’s John F. Kennedy Memorial8 Dal-Tex Building9 Criminal Courts10 Records Building11 US Post Office

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shaping the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991), had retreated, undoubtedlycontributed to the proclivity to remember the site.Figure 3. The ‘Bryan colonnade’ as a part of the Work Projects Administration. Behind on the right is the Sixth Floor Museum. A tourist is taking photographs.Another incentive for the memorial that was conceived was the celebration inDallas of the state’s centennial in 1936 and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attendance to thecentennial parade on Dealey Plaza. After the infastructural building activities on theplaza had seized, the actual memorial site on Dealey Plaza was created as one ofthe many – even within Dallas – New Deal projects (Leighninger 2007, p. 77, Taylor2008, pp. 187–188).5 The Work Progress Administration (WPA) and National YouthAdministration (NYA) initiative consisted of two rectangular and elongated pools onthe east side of the square facing two peristyles, which were placed symmetrically oneither side of Main Street with, in between pool and peristyle, an obelisk. The obeliskon the south side of Main Street was replaced in 1949 by a statue of George. B.Dealey. Towards the western end of Dealey Plaza two mirrored quarter-circularcolonnades, facing each other on either side of the three converging roads and thegrassy knoll, were coined the ‘Bryan colonnade’ and the ‘Cockrell colonnade’, afterthe first inhabitant and founder John Neely Bryan and the settler family Cockrell, ofwhom especially Sarah is noted as an important early figure in the Dallas society(York Enstam 1981, pp. 106–114). Architecturally, the plaza that came into being inthe 1930s is not unlike other contemporary courthouse squares in Texas; it is in factquite typical for its time (Veselka and Foote 2000, pp. 188–189).

The Bryan colonnade carries a simple plaque reading: ‘Work Progress Adminis-tration 1938–1940’. In terms of a more explicit commemoration of Dallas’ origins bymeans of an inscription, a second one on the remaining obelisk is more informative:

Figure 3. The ‘Bryan colonnade’, Work Projects Administration. Behind on the right is theSixth Floor Museum. A tourist is taking photographs.

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Dealey Plaza birthplace of Dallas within this small park was built the first home, whichalso served as the first courthouse and post office, the first store and the first fraternallodge. Dedicated to the pioneers of civic progress by order of the park board.

The ‘first home’ that is referred to is the famous log cabin built by the first settlerJohn Neely Bryan. Opinions differ on the question as to where exactly the ‘JohnNeely Bryan’ – cabin, as it was dubbed, was situated. The Federal Writers’ ProjectThe Dallas Guide, one of the main New Deal initiatives in Dallas, realised approxi-mately at the same time as the Dealey Plaza monument, rated this log cabin as thecity’s number one attraction. The cabin, the guide states, is a reconstruction of theoriginal cabin; its location, however, they assessed to be original (Federal WritersProject 1940, p. 232, Sanders 1981).Figure 4. The pool, obelisk and peristyle on Dealey Plaza that form part of the 1930s New Deal monument remembering Dallas’ origins.

Locale of loss

On 22 November 1963, an anti-Kennedy advertisement, paid for by well-heeledoilmen, appeared in The Dallas Morning News – incidentally, the newspaper of thelate George B. Dealey. Great discontent with Kennedy’s line of policy on the part ofthe Dallas’ white elite was counterbalanced by general approval of his presidency onthe part of the city’s diverse populace. Dallas was made up of various minority groupsconsisting of Catholics, Jews and blacks, many of whom lined the streets in November1963 when Kennedy’s motorcade passed. It is believed that a quarter of a millionpeople, mostly Dallasites, flocked to the city the day of John F. Kennedy’s ill-fated

Figure 4. The pool, obelisk and peristyle on Dealey Plaza that form part of the 1930s NewDeal monument commemorating Dallas’ origins.

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visit (Phillips 2006, p. 159). The anti-Kennedy ad confirmed Dallas’ reputation foractive ultra-conservative extremism and cast a shadow of guilt over the city afterKennedy’s death on Dealey Plaza. As a result of both this reputation and corroboratingadvertisement, Dallas would be blamed to a greater extent for this murder than othercities were held responsible for past and future political murders in their streets(Philips 2006).

Immediately following the assassination, the people of Dallas came to mourn atDealey Plaza. Flowers, notes and souvenirs were placed at the site, creating a tempo-rary memorial, which in turn was visited by thousands of Americans from around thecountry. ‘We love you. Please forgive us. The Ted Wilson Family’, one of the notesread. A nine-year-old girl from Dallas wrote: ‘I’m sorry Caroline and John John.Forgive us’. Still another one begged: ‘God forgive us all’ (Exhibition Sixth FloorMuseum). Public opinion polls conducted shortly after the assassination indicated thatmore than 80 percent of the Americans accused ‘the people of Dallas’ for the crime,while 86 percent of the locals reported feelings of shame that the event had occurredin Dallas.6 ‘The eyes of the world are upon us – and they will be looking with a criticalstare’, a state judge summed up the general belief (Exhibition Sixth Floor Museum).Whilst Dallasites tried to cope with their feelings of guilt and shame, the nation triedto come to terms with a loss. For the former this meant that their national identity,which spoke of grief, collided with their local, city identity, which implied culpability.Joe Dealey, George B. Dealey’s grandson, commented: ‘We are a tormented town’(Abbott 2003, p. 30).

In the years that followed, collective national grief continued over the loss of anever more loved president, whereas Dallas’ feelings of guilt developed into a slowbut sure amnesia (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1996, p. 108). Already in the firstmonth after the assassination, in discussions concerning the possible need for aKennedy memorial, R.L. Thornton, former Mayor of Dallas, stated: ‘For my part, Idon’t want anything to remind me that a president was killed on the streets ofDallas. I want to forget’ (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 24). Civic leader and futuremayor J. Erik Jonsson maintained: ‘The decent thing to do is let some time lapse’(Exhibition Sixth Floor Museum). Indeed, in the first seven years followingKennedy’s death, the city of Dallas dedicated no memorials, monuments or plaquesto the former president. However, in spite of local political reluctance, federal poli-ticians, a few Dallasites as well as a media offensive, stage-managed the raising ofmoney amongst the public for a monument. A 30-day mourning period wasannounced during which fund raising, ‘a way for [an] individual to show his/herlove and faith in our country’, commenced (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 6). TheJohn F. Kennedy Citizens Memorial Committee asked the public to send in sugges-tions as regards the type of monument, which fostered a great response (Sixth FloorMuseum 2000, p. 6).

The Kennedy Memorial turned out to be a hapless project, plagued from the startby much hesitation and considerable delays. Heated discussions arose between themembers of the Dallas Historical Monument Commission, soon succeeded by theJohn F. Kennedy Citizens Memorial Committee, over the form the monument shouldtake. Some desired a national monument rather than a local memorial site, othersopted for a Dallas monument, recognising ‘a need for a symbol of the city’s real loveand deep grief over Kennedy’s assassination’, and then there were those whoremained against any kind of tangible memorial (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 6).Eventually it was decided that the monument would ‘not be constructed as a place

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marking the scene’ but as ‘an effort to express the sympathy and dedication of thepeople of Dallas’ (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 3). Importantly, the Kennedy Memo-rial ‘was never intended to address the assassination’. It was meant to symbolise thefreedom of John F. Kennedy’s spirit, not his death (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 3).The memorial was located on ‘neutral grounds’ one block east of the assassination siteand protected visually from that site by the Dallas Courthouse. A proposal to situatethe monument on the eastern border of Dealey Plaza was rejected on the basis ofpredicted ‘traffic flow issues’ and ‘large numbers of visitors’ (Sixth Floor Museum2000, p. 10). It seems curious that a site occupied with buildings that needed to bedemolished in order to make room for the memorial, was chosen over a spacioussquare like Dealey Plaza.Figure 5. Philip Johnson’s John F. Kennedy Memorial. In the background on the right is the courthouse.Even when the decision was finally made to establish what was to become theKennedy Memorial conceived by Philip Johnson, it took seven years to realise, mostlyas a result of setbacks related to the simultaneous construction of an undergroundparking garage below the designated memorial site. The combined construction ofmemorial and parking garage in the meantime also meant that the log cabin, Dallas’first house, would have to be moved from the courthouse yard to Elm Street and NorthMarket Street. The cabin from now on was out of sight of Dealey Plaza, the verysquare celebrating the city’s origins.

The abstract design of the monument, completed and approved in 1966, was afurther attempt to even out the rough edges. Philip Johnson’s memorial was ‘oddly,and appropriately enough, a place as much about the “forgetting”’ as about the

Figure 5. Philip Johnson’s John F. Kennedy Memorial. In the background on the right is thecourthouse.

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“remembering”’, Richard Brettell, Founding President of the Dallas ArchitectureForum, noted (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 29). The minimalist structure, whichconsists of 72 concrete columns, measures fifty feet square, is 30 feet high and roof-less. Once inside, the visitor faces a granite square austerely engraved with only threewords: ‘John Fitzgerald Kennedy’. Remarkably, the decoration of the corners are saidto possess a striking yet unintentional resemblance to the round log cabin of the JohnNeely Bryan log cabin (Sixth Floor Museum 2000, p. 27).

Dealey Plaza pilgrimage

The actual site of the murder thus, for the moment, remained an empty place, devoidof any monumental reference to what had occurred there in 1963. What was more,both local citizens and officials toyed with the idea of demolishing the Texas SchoolBook Depository; an unsanctioned attempt to burn down the structure failed.Concurrently, Dallasites were faced with a situation in which more and moreAmericans visited Dealey Plaza as a national site of mourning. G.J. Ashworth (2002)distinguishes three common motives for people to visit ‘dissonant heritage’, which hecoined the uniqueness motive, the horror motive and the empathy motive. All threeare applicable in the case of Dealey Plaza. The fact that so many questions regardingKennedy’s murder – why, who, how – were left unanswered, may be added to thesemotives. Visitors who went to the murder scene seeking explanations by means ofvisible reminders found neither. Place authenticity being the principle pull – peoplewished to view and be in the very place, the exact spot, where the assassination hadhappened – meant that Philip Johnson’s memorial one block away did not resonatewith its supposed audience and attracted few visitors. Dealey Plaza, on the other handbecame, with time, a place of pilgrimage. At some point an X was drawn to mark thelocation where Kennedy died and when this faded a second one was added, either asa replacement of the previous X or as a means, as is sometimes suggested, to indicatethe two shots that were fired; who was responsible for the initiative is not clear. Whatis certain though is that the self-designated ‘ephemeral monument’ proved far moresuccessful and enduring than the ‘officially sanctioned monument’ (Holtorf andWilliams 2006, p. 246).

For decades, Dallasites were reluctant to establish an in situ reminder of theatrocity that had come to define their city. In 1975, the Dallas Landmark PriorityDesignation assessed both the Texas School Book Depository and John Neely Bryan’slog cabin of ‘second priority’, as ‘landmarks significant to the history of Dallas’ only,not to the history of America at large. The Dallas Historic Landmarks Survey (1975)made no reference to the John F. Kennedy assassination; equally, the Dallas HistoricPreservation Plans of 1981 and 1988, containing extensive historical accounts of thecity’s buildings and its history, made no mention of the assassination of John F.Kennedy or any buildings or monuments relating to the event. Concomitant to a lackof monuments commemorating the slain president, few to no schools, streets, orbuildings were named after him, unlike in other cities in the United States. Between‘amnesia’ and ‘identification’, two contrary responses to the heritage of trauma oratrocity associated with perpetrators vis-à-vis victims, those Americans that alsohappened to be Dallasites for a long time opted for the former (Tunbridge andAshworth 1996, pp. 106–109, Sneed 2002, p. xxiii).

However, the sheer number of people visiting – ‘gazing’ upon – (Urry 2002)Dealey Plaza made the telling of the story of the assassination on the location of the

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murder almost inevitable and eventually forced the reluctant Dallasites into action. In1989, the Sixth Floor Museum opened its doors. Robert Decherd, one of the initiators,affirmed this pragmatic stance: ‘The tragedy is a part of our city’s history and … thefact that it occurred here in modern times [is] going to bring people to Dealey Plaza’(Exhibition Sixth Floor Museum). Although plans for the museum remained contro-versial with the public – some even feared that the exhibition would commemorate,and in that way endorse Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions that took place from the ‘sixthfloor’ – the majority of the funding for the $3.8 million project came from organisa-tions and individuals in Dallas County.

In establishing the museum, the Dallas community leaders sought to ‘create anenvironment that recaptures the optimistic days of the Kennedy presidency’ (Hunt1997, p. 6). Some voiced the hope that the museum would provide an opportunity toclear the city’s name. In 1988, psychologist James Pennebaker questioned 200 Dallasnatives, and an equal number of outsiders, about the assassination. All those ques-tioned were over the age of 30 (that is, they were old enough to remember the attackon John F. Kennedy). The results were that 78 percent of the Dallasites believed thatthe rest of the world still held them responsible, whilst only 25 percent of those notnative to Dallas pronounced that they blamed the city and its inhabitants for what hadhappened on Dealey Plaza (Maraniss 1988).

The Sixth Floor Museum, located on the sixth and seventh floors of the formerTexas School Book Depository, follows a route that zigzags through the permanentcollection via information panels, TV-sets and display cabinets. The route starts withan introduction of the slain president (which is anything but revisionist, excluding, asit does, all accounts of Kennedy’s darker side) (Dallek 2003) and his short presidency,including a piece of the Berlin Wall complementing the account of Kennedy’s famousBerlin visit in 1961. The exhibition goes on to relate the story of Kennedy’s trip southin November 1963, and more specifically his ill-starred visit to Dallas on the twenty-second of that same month. One of the display cabinets exhibits the original tablewarethat was laid out for the Dallas lunch that Kennedy never enjoyed. Next, the routepasses by the windows of the former Texas School Book Depository, providing a viewover Dealey Plaza and the corner from where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots thatkilled the president. This corner has been restored to its 1963 appearance with card-board boxes arranged according to photographs of the day of the shooting. Set off byglass, it is the one place in the museum that is not accessible to visitors, ‘to protect thehistoric flooring’ perhaps, but maybe also to avoid identification with Oswald and toenable a detour around this most tangible aspect of the trauma. The presentationcontinues with an overview of the numerous investigations into the murder, the crisishours immediately after the murder, and the national and world responses to the event.Upon leaving the museum, visitors pass so-called ‘memory books’, in which personalreflections, emotions and memories may be put to paper.

Newfound identity

In a research conducted on the collective memory of political events, a resemblancebetween Dallas and Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated in1968, was found. Whereas Dallas’ urban landscape lacked any reference to the assas-sination of John F. Kennedy in the years following the event, the same was true forMemphis with regards to Martin Luther King. In the same vein, several buildings andstreets had been named after King in Dallas, in Memphis various schools and streets

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had been called after Kennedy; yet not vice versa. And just as Dallasites opened amuseum in its downtown area approximately 25 years after the assassination ofKennedy, authorities in Memphis did so roughly 25 years after the murder of thefamous civil rights leader (Pennebaker and Banasik 1997, p. 12).Figure 6. In white, the 1930s New Deal memorial celebrating the birth of Dallas City. Visitors only pay attention to the later monument commemorating John F. Kennedy, situated between the peristyle and the obelisk.Six years after the opening of the Sixth Floor Museum, in 1993, Dealey Plazawas destined a National Historical Landmark District. This official recognition of thesite as a place of national importance came long after the site had become a ‘destina-tion’ for the American people (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Two bronze plaqueswere unveiled on the square on the day of the thirtieth anniversary of Kennedy’sassassination. The first one displays part of the 1963 route taken through downtownDallas before the car carrying the president, the Texan governor and their wivesreached Dealey Plaza. The plaque moreover shows some of the landmarks in thearea, such as the courthouse, the triple underpass and the Texas School BookDepository, the latter highlighted in bas-relief. Accompanying the map is thefollowing inscription:

On November 22,1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the UnitedStates, visited Dallas. A Presidential Parade traveled north on Houston Street to ElmStreet and west on Elm Street. As the parade continued on Elm Street at 12:30 P.M., rifleshots wounded the President and Texas Governor John Connally. Findings of the WarrenCommission indicated that the rifle shots were fired from a sixth floor window near thesouthwest corner of the Texas School Book Depository Building, Elm and Houston, ablock north of this marker.

Figure 6. In the foreground, the 1930s New Deal memorial celebrating the birth of DallasCity. Visitors only pay attention to the later monument commemorating John F. Kennedy,situated between the peristyle and the obelisk.

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President Kennedy expired at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00 P.M. The JohnFitzgerald Kennedy Memorial plaza is nearby, bounded by Main, Record Market andCommerce Streets.

Notwithstanding the factual narration of the events, this landmark, as was intendedwith Philip Johnson’s monument 23 years earlier and with the museum six yearspreviously, remembered Kennedy’s spirit rather than his death. The former first ladyof Texas, Nellie Connolly, who had been in the car with the Kennedy’s and herhusband John Connolly on the day of the assassination, articulated the hope that ‘thelegacy of John F. Kennedy will inspire [future generations of Americans] to reach forgreatness in their own lives’ (Exhibition Sixth Floor Museum). An idiom of shameand guilt was now shunned and replaced by one of optimism. The need to beg forforgiveness was no longer felt so ardently. The credo had become: ‘Step into DealeyPlaza, and you feel you are on sacred ground… This is the necessary pilgrimage’(Exhibition Sixth Floor Museum).

From a situation in which the people of Dallas were more or less ousted, orbelieved themselves to be ousted, from the nation by fellow Americans – unworthy tobe called Americans, even – they now harboured a piece of sacrosanct American soil.The brochure of the Sixth Floor Museum carries the caption: ‘the Sixth Floor Museumat Dealey Plaza. Where history was made. Have you visited?’; the museum’s introduc-tory book speaks of ‘this sacred ground’ (Hunt 1997, p. 6). The pendulum swingbetween ‘amnesia’ and ‘identification’ that is said to characterise the general responseto dissonant or traumatic heritage, had now firmly swung from the former to the latter.‘The deaths that structure the nation’s biography are of a special kind’, BenedictAnderson (1991) wrote in his famous Imagined communities; ‘to serve the narrativepurpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as “our own”’. Dallas‘owned’ Kennedy’s death, and whilst that ownership had been a burden for decades –endemic of a specific Dallas’ biography and identity – this ownership now became anasset. In 1993, it suddenly sounded: ‘Dealey Plaza has become a new source of pridefor the city and serves just as G.B. Dealey envisioned it – as the “Front Door ofDallas”’.7

The location of the 1993 plaque, in this respect, is interesting. Set right within theNew Deal memorial celebrating Dallas’ birthplace, visitors often mistake the obelisk,pools and colonnades that form a part of the New Deal projects for the John F.Kennedy memorial. The two monuments, and hence the two moments in history theyrefer to, have almost become amalgamated. A near fusion of both memorials andhistorical events is also suggested by the two structures facing each other one blockaway on either side of Main Street, west of North Market Street: John Neely Bryan’slog cabin vis-à-vis Philip Johnson Kennedy Memorial. As said, the latter is believedto resemble the former and both occupying an almost empty square, the monumentsemerge as virtual mirror images. An amalgamation is also hinted at by the discovery,during the construction of the Sixth Floor Museum, of John Neely Bryan’s cornfield.The museum itself seems equally hybrid: this history museum is at the same time anidentity museum, which serves as a template for the presentation and communicationto the public of national traumas.

A further analysis of the site, however, raises the question whether one shouldnot, rather than of amalgamation, speak of the birthplace being encroached upon,intruded or contaminated by the memorials commemorating John F. Kennedy.Situated right in the heart of the New Deal memorial celebrating Dallas’ birthplace,

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the 1993 Kennedy plaques dwarf the former monument on account of the muchgreater appeal of John F. Kennedy. Hardly anybody pays any heed to the 1930smonument commemorating the city’s foundation; all attention is geared towards the1990s addition celebrating the former president. Moreover, John Neely Bryan’s lodge– regarded either as the very first house in Dallas or as a replica of this house imbuedwith symbolic value – was moved from what was taken to be its original location inthe 1930s and where it had been since, in order to make room for Philip Johnson’scenotaph. The Sixth Floor Museum, lastly, a world famous museum, overshadows theneighbouring Old Red Museum of Dallas County History and Culture, housed in theformer courthouse.

The origin myth which is usually so important for the identity of a nation or a citycommunity, and which was orchestrated so carefully in Dallas in the years beforeWorld War II, has been supplanted by this other, much later, memory. The death ofJohn F. Kennedy at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald bequeathed Dallas with a newStunde nul: to be a Dallasite is related more to what happened to a president in 1963than with the city’s birth through the arrival in the early 1840s of a first settler on theTrinity riverbank. In short, to be an American as well as a Dallasite, is to visit DealeyPlaza.

Conclusion

For almost half a century now, Dallas has been struggling with the controversy ofhaving to address a site that has served both as ‘cradle’ and ‘grave’; a historic placewhere Dallas was born and an American president died. Today, Dealey Plaza signalsthe death of John F. Kennedy more than its status as the birthplace of the city. The1930s memorial of Dallas’ origins – not surprisingly conceived the moment one of thestrongest signifiers of that origin, the Trinity River, had disappeared from the site – isimpeded upon by the commemoration of John F. Kennedy.

The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963, changed the sitefrom a symbol of civic pride into a place of shame and guilt that the Dallas communitywished to wipe from their city. At the same time, America grieved collectively andmillions of people visited the assassination site. It was these millions of visitors, notthe Dallas community, who turned Dealey Plaza into a site of commemoration.

R.S. Peckham (2003, p. 205) notes that heritage manages a loss and ‘functions asa cornerstone in the construction of national identities’. The same is true for localidentities. Heritage is often as much concerned with remembrance as with the act offorgetting and even though Dallasites initially wished to forget, rather than to identifywith the tragedy of 1963, ‘traumatic events in the past can become so deeply imprintedon a group’s collective memory that they become an indelible part of its identity’(Peckham 2003, p. 212). Guilt and shame played a lesser role in later decades, as wasevident from the opening of the Sixth Floor Museum in 1987, the 1993 commemora-tion on Dealey Plaza of Kennedy’s assassination, and from the 2001 exhibition inresponse to 11 September. Dealey Plaza, from a murder scene, became a ‘site ofmourning’, and then ‘a site of pilgrimage’. As such, it came to serve, rather than toblemish, the American landscape and an American as well as a Dallas identity(Peckham 2003, p. 212). Dealey Plaza is now a ‘National Landmark’, an inclusiverather than an exclusive American ‘destination’; a destination wherein an Americanflag, albeit a flag sticking out of the rubble of the World Trade Centre, is no longerincongruous.

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Notes1. See the developments as regards the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum: http://

www.national911memorial.org/site/PageServer?pagename=New_Home [Accessed 21April 2010]; note also the exhibition at Smithsonian (until 2006), titled ‘September 11:Bearing Witness to History’, http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11 [Accessed 21April 2010]; the exhibition at the Library of Congress ‘Witness and Response: September11 Acquisitions at the Library of Congress’, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/911/911-over-view.html [Accessed 21 April 2010].

2. The uncertainty surrounding the origin of the city’s name has been taken to be indicativeof the ambivalence of Dallasites towards their past.

3. In 1898, a five-storey warehouse was built on the northwest corner of Elm Street and Hous-ton Street. It was destroyed by fire in 1901, after which the same company built again onthe same location. It was this building that was the later Texas School Book Depository.

4. The WPA Dallas guide and history (Saxon and Holmes 1992), published in the 1940s, isone of the first guides to celebrate the plaza as a tourist site.

5. To name but a few of the projects: the Dallas Zoo, a park system and the Dallas Guide.6. See http://www.jfk.org/go/exhibits/dealey-plaza/change-of-focus [Accessed 13 January

2010].7. See http://www.jfk.org/go/exhibits/dealey-plaza/reconciliation [Accessed 13 January

2010]).

Notes on contributorsHanneke Ronnes, lecturer at the University of Amsterdam in the department of Europeancultural history, studied social and economic history, cultural anthropology, and post-medievalarchaeology. Her PhD thesis titled, Architecture and elite culture in the united provinces,England and Ireland, 1500-1700, was published by Pallas, Amsterdam University Press (2006).

Anna Meijer van Putten holds a BA in cultural studies (2008) and an MA in cultural history(2010) from the University of Amsterdam. Her MA thesis examines the role of Dutch heritagein New York’s urban culture and identity around 1900. She currently works as a researcher inthe field of media.

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tropes of a texan trauma: monumental dallas after john f. kennedy

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