Gettysburg: Memory, market, and an American shrine

Gettysburg occupies a unique and paradoxical niche among America's sacred places. On the one hand, the 1863 Civil War battlefield represents revered soil fiercely defended by legions of enthusiasts against commercial defilement. On the other, Gettysburg is a locus for consumption of its own icon, often by these same enthusiasts. Yet the commercial exploitation of Gettysburg is hardly a creation of recent interest in the Civil War or even twentieth-century tourism. Gettysburg entered the marketplace immediately after the battle, and the process of packaging Gettysburg has grown ever since by adapting itself to greater abundance, leisure, and enhanced technologies.As a shrine, Gettysburg reflects the traditional tension between sacred and secular. The two are paradoxically antithetical yet symbiotic. The sacred quest to remember the great battle often has conflicted with the secular of site reproduction---images and attractions---and tourists' need for services and release. Running parallel courses, they have sometimes intersected, and sometimes diverged over four chronological phases from 1863 to 2000. These phases include (1) efforts to establish a resort for genteel touring in the immediate aftermath of battle (2) widening access in the 1880s for working class tourists, propelled by furious railroad promotion (3) the transformation of Gettysburg into an automobile touring destination and Cold War shrine for family touring and (4) the most recent manifestation, heritage tourism, which aims to recapture an authentic encounter with 1863. A trade-off has occurred in the process. At the same time restoration in the latest phase swept away visual impurities including evidence of play, abstractions about the battle's larger meaning dissolved into fixation on the battle itself.Yet the tension between sacred and secular is more subtle and nuanced than veneration versus play. True enough, Gettysburg early on resembled a medieval shrine with sacred ground fringed by a carnival of barkers, souvenirs, relics, medicinal springs, and fakirs. But from the beginning, abstractions about Gettysburg as sacred ground competed with the narrative of the battle. The sacred meaning changed as America and its role in the world changed, while commercial venues delivered increasingly realistic reproductions of the battle. For the first three phases of Gettysburg's development, cultural authority prevailed by asserting Gettysburg's larger meaning through symbolic representations on the landscape. In the fourth and latest phase, however, the narrative has triumphed with the collapse of cultural authority and the end of America's self-assurance in the post-Viet Nam era. Instead of the universal shrine it once was, Gettysburg today is the purview of enthusiasts who build leisure around the battle narrative. Whereas once memory and tourism were distinct activities, today they have merged on the sacred ground.