Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26603 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-27
• Released on: 2009-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802715487
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com In the folds of its hills on the Virginia shore of the Potomac, where its vast array of white tombstones evokes the mesmerizing image of an assembled army in its last resting place, Arlington National Cemetery splendidly honors the generations of self-sacrifice embodied in the nation's military dead. It also encapsulates the flawed story of a country still struggling to come to terms with the human cost of its wars. The central character in "On Hallowed Ground," Robert M. Poole's gracefully written, often deeply affecting history, cannot speak. However, Poole succeeds grandly in giving voice to the more than 600 acres of what virtually all Americans consider sacred soil. As Veterans Day approaches, the almost daily arrival of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base reminds us that the dead of today's wars will continue to come to rest beneath Arlington's gentle hills. Arlington was the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee, and before that of George Washington Parke Custis, the stepson of George Washington. After Lee threw in his lot with the Confederacy, the property was confiscated by the federal government, which in 1864 began burying Union soldiers on the estate's slopes. During the Civil War, the slain were typically dumped into shallow graves on the battlefields where they died, with little ceremony and no identification, and forgotten as the armies marched on. Poole writes that bodies were stuffed in temporary burial grounds all around Washington, and "contractors handled their dead soldiers with less care than they would accord a load of turnips bound for market." Poole's story travels from the burial of the cemetery's first occupant, William Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, to the interment of victims of the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Along the way, we learn about the extraordinary work of the field and laboratory teams that identify the remains of service members lost on half-forgotten battlefields, often from mere scraps of bone. The United States has been committed to this difficult task for more than a century, and the teams have been astonishingly successful at it. In spite of the solemn memorializing of the unknown soldiers entombed at Arlington, they are by far the exception rather than the rule. Of the Civil War's more than 600,000 dead, 250,000 were never identified. But during the Spanish-American War, specialized teams were dispatched to Cuba and the Philippines, where they identified almost 90 percent of the dead. Researchers identified all but 2 percent of the soldiers killed in World War I and all but 3 percent of those lost in World War II. So refined had this process become by the late 20th century that the Vietnam War claimed virtually no unknown service members: The Vietnam-era remains interred in the Tomb of the Unknowns later had to be removed when they were proved to be those of a downed airman, Lt. Michael Blassie. Poole reminds readers that the planners of the Pentagon intended to plant the enormous building at the end of Memorial Bridge, smack in front of the cemetery, which would have ruptured the majestic view from Arlington House across the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial. Fortunately, Franklin D. Roosevelt personally ordered the Pentagon to be built in its present location. Poole also recounts the inside story of John F. Kennedy's hastily improvised but nonetheless magnificent funeral, culminating in the panicked efforts of Arlington personnel to craft the first "eternal flame" from a Hawaiian luau torch, a length of copper tubing and a tank of gas. Given the thoroughness of Poole's reporting, it is surprising that he almost totally ignores the long history of racial segregation at Arlington, flitting over the subject with a couple of brief references. (He is notably more attentive to the longtime segregation of deceased enlisted men from officers.) Until 1947, the black and white dead, with a tiny number of exceptions, were strictly separated: whites at the top of the hill, blacks at the bottom, in a cruelly symbolic demonstration of the races' status in Jim Crow America. Black leaders were justifiably infuriated when the cemetery erected a monument to Confederate dead interred there when no such honor was given to the African Americans who had fought and died in the nation's wars. Poole fares better in his saddening account of the fate of the thousand or more freed slaves who during the Civil War were settled at Arlington in a deliberate thumb in the eye to the Lees (who later spent years trying unsuccessfully to recover their estate). "The new settlement at Arlington was applauded by those who believed that slavery was a sin and Lee was a traitor," Poole writes. However, he adds, "Just as the federal effort at Reconstruction ran out of steam in the 1870s, compassion for Arlington's freedmen seemed to waver." Beginning in the 1880s, the freedmen and their descendants were unceremoniously expelled as the nation forgot its commitment to the rights of African Americans in the name of reconciliation with the South. Like the nation itself, Arlington bears the scars of its history, as Poole eloquently shows. Today, black and white, officer and enlisted, male and female, recent arrivals from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Pvt. Christman's Civil War comrades, lie intermingled on those grassy slopes overlooking the Potomac, in their melancholy democracy of the dead.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

Review
"This engaging history of Arlington National Cemetery, America's most hallowed military burial ground and home to over 300,000 soldiers, officers and statesmen, is also the story of America's maturation through death and war .... An editor and journalist, [Poole] is an adroit sketcher of historical events, but even more of character."--"Hope Eternal" in The Economist.

"Mr. Poole recounts the somewhat shameful origins of what would become a national treasure, going on to tell the Arlington's story down to the present day .... Arlington's later history, as told by Mr. Poole in graceful and dignified prose, is ... inspiring .... War for Americans has become a sort of sacrament ... There is ample evidence of sacramental need in the many Arlington trituals that Mr. Poole relates in such moving detail."--"Grave Matters: The Surprising Origins and Enduring Importance of Arlington National Cemetery" in The Wall Street Journal

"Poole's book tells the stories of many of those buried in 70 sections across these rolling hills just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. On Hallowed Ground is part history less, part tourist guide, part mystery novel."--"Arlington, alive with history: On Hallowed Ground tells stories of veterans from the Civil War to the fresh 'saddest acre in America'" in USA Today

Customer Reviews

Highly engaging historical account of the physical representation of intangible beliefs and values
This history of the Arlington National Cemetery kept me thoroughly completely engaged throughout. An chronological accounting of our nation's cemetery through individual stories of the people who were buried there, it made an great companion to the more thematically structured and excellent Civil War history by Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which I had previously completed.

Poole's account details the complex political and bureaucratic processes around the selection of unknown soldiers, and the developing culture of memorial to war dead as well as the role of the cemetery in attempting to heal internal national divisions (Civil War, Vietnam "war"). His detailing of how Robert E Lee's wife's family plantation was slowly appropriated alone is well worth the reading time. I also greatly appreciated how Poole's highlighting the design--land use, vistas, monuments, tombstones, rituals etc--deftly demonstrates that attention to detail reinforces beliefs and values. Examples include the categorization--by war, race and sex--of people buried, to a soldier's description of the practice needed folding a flag apparent simplicity of folding the flag at a state funeral.

There many things and further questions (areas of inquiry) that came to my mind as I read this book. Overall areas that left me intrigued are: the discipline of architecture's relationship to war memorials (I know that Maya Lin, while at Yale, designed her winning design for an architecture class on war memorials); 2) any possible ramifications of the flattening of army hierarchy through the elimination of burial practice for enlisted men and officers; (as of 2009, all people, officer or enlisted, killed in action are granted full-honors ceremonies); and 4) the future of practice of the Unknowns and its relationship to accountability...

Fascinating book. Highly recommended for the content as well as the writing and as a way to approach history writing--not through the history of a single person or an organization, but around the changing, physical manifestation of intangible beliefs and values . I am going to seek out Robert Poole's other book, Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made, with great confidence that it will be as illuminating as this.

Note: I won this book in the Goodreads First Reads Giveaway.

The Garden of Stones
Robert Poole comes closer to the heart and soul of Arlington than any other book that has been written. Much of the other information that has been published before is guidebook/history information. Unlike other superficial accounts that show pictures of the grandeur of the cemetery and the ceremony, there is much background, including how close our ceremonies are to those of the Grecian warrior's and how no other country goes to the extent the United States does to honor their common military men, including returning them to their home country.
I have been with the military all of my life. Arlington is a family and friend's cemetery, a very personal place and `On Hallowed Ground" comes the closest to touching the feelings that those of us that regard Arlington have as our personal hallowed remembrance as any book.
With that said I wish that there was more of the tales of the common military man here. Out of 267 pages more than 80 are devoted to the very detailed history of the Lees, the Civil War and the acquiring of the Lee land for this cemetery. I wish there was less of Lee, which has been previously covered by other books and more of the soul of the men and women of Arlington. The Old Guard is covered, but not to a great extent.
There is little of the expansion of the cemetery in and after the Vietnam era, which he attributes not to the war but to the popularity after Kennedy's burial, which he does a magnificent job of describing. But I remember an officer whose office suddenly overlooked the growing number of headstones as being insulted that, that was now the view from his office; and I of course could not reply what I was thinking, that maybe that is what he needed to see.
The days and effect of 9/11 are touched upon, but that was a tremendous effect with the coming of section 60 and the comfort and companionship of families together who have lost those buried together from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts instead of scattered around the grounds.
The constant noise of airplanes taking off from nearby National/Reagan Airport is again briefly mentioned, but not the eerie silence that followed in the many days that Reagan was shut down after 9/11 and having stood at my father's funeral in sight of the wounded Pentagon and with just the noise of the construction repair from across the highway we all knew that eerie silence brought a world forever changed.
This is a wonderful book, I wish it could have gone further into some of the changes that have occurred with honoring the military both in life and death, they are touched upon; and having been spit upon during Vietnam and called baby killers by Americans at home, to enter Arlington was a place we knew we would be honored...those are the stories that make Arlington part of the heart of America.
Poole points out that much could not be included, but even Pete Conrad is not listed among the astronauts buried there. There is one map of the Arlington today but a few of how the cemetery has expanded would have done much to show the changes. When I was very young, a family friend who was a member of the Old Guard called Arlington a garden of stones, a place of honor and remembrance, this is a magnificent story that has been well covered by Robert Poole.

History and Overwhelming Awe
Millions of people come to Arlington Cemetery every year, some come as visitors and take the standard tour, some come to mourn and seek the grave of a loved one, and many come solemnly as a part of multiple daily funeral processions. Having done all three and having had the opportunity to drive by and around the National Cemetery on a daily commute for almost two decades I still found it to be a mysterious and, if given into, a mentally overwhelming place. "On Hallowed Ground, the Story of Arlington National Cemetery, by Robert Poole, takes out the mystery. But his work only pushes the mentally overwhelming nature of Arlington, and what it stands for, to new heights.

I received this book as Christmas gift this year from a disabled Iraqi vet making a new life for himself along the Space Coast with me here in Florida. We have become friends. In honesty my initial reaction to the gift, was of course gracious, but as I thought about the pile of unread books seeking priority, my gut told me, having lived in Northern Virginia most of my life, what more stories about the old cemetery did I need to hear? Well, for whatever reasons, I cracked the cover. Ironically on a flight from Orlando to Regan National I read about the history of the land once belonging to Robert E. Lee as my flight covered the whole of the Confederacy in just less than two hours. I was hooked on the story. I assume Mr. Poole chose the word "story" as opposed to history, because the history of the cemetery is more appropriately contained within the lives of the thousands upon thousands of individuals now resting eternally.

But it is indeed a history of the Cemetery itself, which was mired in controversy from its beginnings, belonging to the Lee family and acquired from the government in questionable fashion during the Civil War, a wrong that was later set right and continuing on to present day when the US Army finally realized in January 2009 that the practice of recognizing officers buried in the cemetery with more honors then those of enlisted men who were killed in combat was a latent form of elitism and class discrimination. This has also now been corrected. Along the way he discusses the evolution of the cemetery during each of our Nations conflicts including the War of 1812, WWI and WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and our current clashes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Conspicuously missing from his history is Desert Storm.

The mystery of the cemetery, its size, its look, how it operates, and the meaning of many of its icons have now been explained. What is also clear is that even the most somber and noble of our Nation's practice's to do what is right, when it comes to the Government; one can never escape the politics of a situation. With two sides to every argument and each side vying to use whatever influence they have to push their agenda. Nothing stands as a clearer indicator of this political maneuvering than the ill advised burial of the "Unknown" from the Vietnam conflict. Who was in fact known but whose burial was insisted upon to close an ugly page in our Nation's history. That episode has ironically demonstrated a decade after a war plagued with lies and cover-ups, that the highest echelons of our government were still not immune from a good one.

With a rich history of meaning, I will never walk the fields of Arlington with the same mystery of how they came to be. I will still be awed and overwhelmed by the sacrifice they represent.