Inquiring Minds: Michael Vorenberg on Lisa Beamer and widow activism

Lisa Beamer lost her husband, Todd, on Sept. 11 after he and others on Flight 93 battled hijackers for control of their plane. She has since created a foundation to help the families of Flight 93 and to combat terrorism.

"Twenty-two children lost parents on Flight 93, and I wanted to make sure they'd be taken care of," Beamer said in a recent interview. Michael Vorenberg, assistant professor of history, recently addressed questions about the activist role war widows have played throughout history with GSJ reporter Kristen Cole.

Have there been other Lisa Beamers in the history of our country?

If you mean, have there been other widows who have worked to keep the memory of their husbands alive, then the answer is yes — war widows throughout American history have led movements to memorialize their husbands and other war dead. But Beamer's effort represents something different. First, her husband was not a soldier in an established war. Rather, he was a civilian who saved fellow Americans' lives at the expense of his own before a war had been declared. That makes Lisa Beamer a rather untraditional war widow; indeed, some would argue that she is not technically a war widow at all.

Second, Beamer's effort is less about memorializing the dead than providing tangible help to the living. Other war widows in American history have committed themselves to helping the living — serving as nurses, charity workers, or activists for pension legislation — but they have tended to work through official channels rather than initiating a private foundation.

I'm sure that other widows have acted similarly to Beamer, but this sort of privately initiated, privately targeted support system seems to me a phenomenon of more recent history. It has cropped up in the last 50 years or so.

Beamer's foundation reminds me of Barbara Sonneborn's film, "Regret to Inform," an award-winning 1999 documentary in which Sonneborn, the widow of an American soldier killed in the Vietnam War, interviewed war widows in both the United States and Vietnam. Of course, Sonneborn's effort, unlike Beamer's, offered no financial compensation to the relatives of the dead, but it did offer a sort of emotional compensation, and, like Beamer's initiative, it was a private project born of a personal motive.

Sonneborn's film helped lead to the War Widows International Peace Alliance, an organization in which women left widowed by war can connect with one another and work together toward peace. Such efforts as this one and Beamer's represent living memorials, as opposed to more traditional memorials that mark the dead without doing much for those left behind.

In what ways have wartime widows played an activist role?

Widows in the United States have always played a leading role in organizing, monitoring and regulating the mourning process. Prior to the American Civil War, mourning was something of a private, family affair. During the American Revolution and in the early Republic, widows — especially war widows — were supposed to be sturdy creatures: good, republican mothers and wives who would grieve with control rather than sullenly, and keep the memory of the dead alive within the family.

The Civil War produced an unprecedented number of war widows, and simultaneously, the culture of honoring the war dead began to shift. Instead of burying the war dead in unmarked or poorly marked mass graves, which was the custom before the Civil War, war dead were now memorialized with personalized markers and tributes, a process that began with the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield in November 1863.

Because of the traditional mourning role played by widows and because of the new public nature of memorializing the war dead, women naturally came to play a leading role in publicly memorializing the war dead after the Civil War. Women were the key players in Decoration Days, local rituals in which widows and other women of communities, North and South, would place flowers on the graves of the war dead.

Eventually these localized events were centralized into one Memorial Day. Women also were instrumental in setting up large statuary in honor of the war dead, though in many cases these efforts were spearheaded not by the widow of the dead veteran but by larger groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Finally, women have been crucial activists in pension legislation. The Civil War helped establish a huge pension bureaucracy within the government, and widows and orphans from the Civil War onward greased the wheels of the legislative process to make sure that pensions were maintained at an adequate level.

What effect have their actions had on our collective memory of wars?

Women have worked indirectly and directly to preserve and shape the memory of wars. Of all the American wars, I know the most about the American Civil War, and I think the most vivid examples of women affecting the memory of war come from this conflict. Already I have mentioned Memorial Day, a day of observance that would not exist without the active role of widows and women's organizations.

If you tour just about any town, no matter how small, or any Civil War battlefield, you will most likely find a memorial of some kind. Many of these memorials are the product of initiatives begun by war widows. War widows sometimes were willing to tweak history a bit to improve the reputation of the dead. Probably the most famous example of such a manipulator was LaSalle Corbell Pickett, the widow of the Confederate Gen. George E. Pickett. Even before General Pickett's death, his reputation suffered because of his defeat at Gettysburg and the more shameful defeat at Five Forks. After his death, Mrs. Pickett resuscitated her husband's reputation by lecturing widely about the romantic quality of his failed charge at Gettysburg. She also published a number of his private letters that showed a sophisticated strategic mind and a firm commitment to the Confederate cause.

Most historians now agree that at least a few of these letters were forged by Mrs. Pickett. Of course, this sort of distortion was the exception rather than the rule, and, for the most part, we have widows to thank for preserving an accurate memory of those who have been lost to war.