Forgetting The Dead

(A note to the reader: this paper was written from sources that were made available in class, and as such, not all of the sources are publicly accessible, and I did not have full information to construct a proper bibliography.  Where possible, I've tried to include links to comparable sources.)

fallen autumn leaves 
memories of days that passed 
wait for winter snow 
(Lindsay Zike, personal collection, 2013)

While no event at any point in history is so fully documented as to know every possible fact, the twentieth century introduced several key innovations that changed the way people interact with memory and history. Photo albums, rolls of film, video collections, and scrapbooks around the world hold a greater number of clues to personal and collective memories than at any previous age. Using those kinds of primary sources, a group of University of Illinois Historians and students spent a year “explor[ing] 'the fate of the twentieth century'” by casting a wide-net that pulled in the perspective of the famous victors and the defeated poor with no special regard for race or political associations, which culminated in Imagining the Twentieth Century, a “frankly unauthoritative history” (Charles C. Stewart and Peter Fritzsche, pg. viii). Despite the broad scope of the project, the photographs and essays that dug deep into likely forgotten collective memories still missed several major events.

The Memory of Fear: Scarcity and the Consumer Culture

            The fear of scarcity during the Great Depression gave rise to diverse social changes that drove American progress in new directions.  A child growing up in the middle of the Depression may not have been aware of the hardships and difficulties their own parents faced, which would have seemed much harsher given that the memories of the Roaring 20s and the pre-Great War economic boom were still fresh in the adult minds.  Events that adults use to mark the passage of their lives are not as easily accessible to children because “general and historical conceptions play only a secondary role [in memory]: they actually presuppose the prior and autonomous existence of the personal memory”, and a child’s personal memories are limited in both scope and meanings of events (Maurice Halbwachs, "Historical Memory and Collective Memory", pg. 58-59).

A Field for Three

Standing in a Wisconsin field, 12 year-old Vera Whaley (later Zike) likely had no point of reference to compare the general suffering in 1937, while she posed for a photo clutching what would become her most prized possessions, two dolls named Maize and Patsy.  Her beaming smile tells a story that almost seems to conflict with the well-trodden path of the historic narrative; her picture speaks of the happiness of a child.  “Parents and children each have their own interests,” and the world of adults is to a child “an unknown land” (Halbwachs, pg. 62). 

            However, the adult world of the time doubtlessly caught up with her parents, as economic hardships forced her father, a horse trainer, to move the family from her birth-state of Iowa, and later drift multiple times between Wisconsin and Michigan in the 1930s in the search for work—a common Depression-era story.  Had she not had access to “ready-made reference points” from history and collective memories external to her own perceptions, she would only have recalled the entirety of the Depression in the child-like terms and “images of lesser events”, (Halbwachs, pg. 58-59).  Personal memories that she relayed to her own children were the dissatisfaction of moving to new towns with new schools, forced to leave old friends behind, but one could hardly say that she remained unaware of the greater historic significance because she had reference points to fix her personal memories to collective and historical memories.