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Contents
20th Century Context: Cramped Spaces and a Smoky City
Situated in Scholarship
In the introduction to their book Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, Greg Dickinson et al. describe how rhetorical study can complicate and augment scholarship of public memory as well as how spaces and places can be mediums of special rhetorical significance within the arena of public memory. They argue that contemporary scholars of public memory often share certain foundational assumptions which lack specificity and which should more precisely articulate the means by which a narrative becomes entrenched as public memory. Rhetorical study, with its focus on “meaningfulness, legibility, partisanship, consequentiality, and publicity as they manifest in and among discourses, events, objects, and practices” (Dickinson et al. 12), can often fill in some of these gaps when placed into conversation with public memory scholarship. Rhetorical study is often concerned with how the significance of specific “discourses, events, objects, or practices” might “inflect, deploy, and circulate affective investments” (Dickinson et al. 3), where “affect,” is used to refer to the feelings and emotions that precede rational cognition. This concern allows it to more deeply explore and account for how specific features of a given narrative can create the affective intensity necessary to create a memory that resonates with a group and how different mediums work to support that narrative. A rhetorical investigation of the Westinghouse Memorial must consider which emotions specific features of the spatial medium, such as its position, materials, and subject matter might spark in its visitors, and how those emotions fit into the broader public image of the city.
Scholarship on the rhetoric of space and place also features prominently at the intersection of scholarship of rhetoric and public memory. Places, especially what Dickinson et al. term “memory places,” such as “museums, preservation sites, battlefields, memorials, and so forth” (Dickinson et al. 24), wield strong rhetorical power. A memory place commands special attention because it “announces itself as a marker of collective identity” (Dickinson et al. 26), and by performatively connecting visitors to a significant past, can convince them to “understand the present as part of an enduring, stable tradition” (Dickinson et al. 27). The ability of memory places to prescribe how they are experienced through paths, signs, and constraints of locatedness affords them special rhetorical significance as well. As one such memory place, the Westinghouse Memorial is a highly visible statement of Pittsburgh’s identity, both in the early 20th and 21st centuries. Each component of the monument–the materials it uses, the prescriptions for how it is to be viewed, and the image of Westinghouse himself–situate themselves within a specific narrative of the city’s identity. The private, naturally appealing homage to a captain of industry in 1930 celebrated Pittsburgh’s industrial prowess. The more open, eco-friendly version of the memorial hailing a beacon of ingenuity in 2016 remembers the man and the city as part of a tradition of creativity rather than industry. Therefore, my study of the Westinghouse Memorial contributes to scholarly conversations at the intersection of the rhetoric of space, place, and public memory by providing an example of how each given narrative of Pittsburgh’s identity is announced rhetorically by the Westinghouse Memorial.
As an investigation of a memory place that is deeply tied to the identity of a city and that has recently undergone a restoration, this exploration of the Westinghouse Memorial is also relevant to scholarship in the rhetoric of urban communication. Such scholarship examines the inherently rhetorical nature of urban plans, viewing them as a “complex interplay of…diverse rhetorics” which have the purpose of persuading “audiences to accept proposed explanations, embrace inspiring visions, attract and channel emotional attachments, and/or undertake recommended actions that shape the course of the future” (Pojani and Stead 583). Any plan for an urban memory place must position it within the prevailing narrative of public memory. Much scholarship in urban communication explores how certain common narratives emerge within urban plans to perform this rhetorical function, as well as the often unequal consequences such narratives have for different stakeholders. For example, rhetorics of urban planning which foreground the values of innovation in economic development have been flagged by some scholars as hiding the negative effects of gentrification on the urban poor (Gries et al.). Other scholars note that the increasing push of post-industrial cities to “brand” their cities to invite investment and tourism “risks destroying place identity and culture” (Pojani and Stead 607) and “deepens the affliction of the poor and the marginalized” (Wilson 123). The Westinghouse Memorial provides a concrete example of how such narratives play out, with its most recent restoration in 2016 marking it as a contributor to the rhetorical goals of a post-industrial Pittsburgh.
One of the memorial’s particular rhetorical appeals relates to the tension between the natural environment of Schenley Park on the one hand, and the memorial’s man-made elements as well as the surrounding urban space on the other. The way in which the aesthetic appeals of the natural environment can rhetorically influence public identity has often been the subject of rhetorical study (Zagacki and Gallagher; Allen). One potential mechanism by which natural qualities have rhetorical implications for urban identity is discussed by Kenneth Zagacki and Victoria Gallagher in their in depth investigation of sculpture museums which they use to theorize that presenting natural and urban settings in close connection can intensify the significance of both. They found that the experiences of simultaneously existing both inside and outside the city and moving quickly from one type of space to another provided visitors to the sculpture gardens with a unique angle through which to appreciate their relationship to their environment and their city (Zagacki and Gallagher). In this article, I hope to continue and expand on the tradition of interrogating the rhetorical significance of the intersection of humans and nature by viewing the natural appeals of the Westinghouse Memorial’s man-made, urban space through a bioregional lens. Bioregionalism is a decentered, grassroots movement developed in response to the deleterious environmental consequences of industrialization. As a scholarly lens, bioregionalism sheds light on the rhetorical capabilities of the memorial’s natural appeals by imagining a transformed consciousness of the environment as a primary means of fostering affiliation with it. The movement seeks to inspire people to “reimagine places from geopolitical to primarily ecological terms” (Glotfelty 2), allowing them to live in harmony with their particular environments.
The term “bioregion,” coined by Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann in 1977, describes a place reimagined in this way. Describing a bioregion as both “a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place” (36), the two scholars contend that the creation of a bioregional sense of place entails a transformation of consciousness. An industrial consciousness, as characterized by Berg, revolves around an image of “material progress, transforming things, mutating things, changing their being…changing everything about them” (Berg 94), in short reducing the natural world to interchangeable material objects to be acted upon. An ecological consciousness by contrast, encourages relating to the natural world as particular and sacred. Such a transformation of consciousness can be accomplished through what bioregionalism scholars call “reinhabitation,” which refers to “learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation” (Berg and Dasmann 36). One of several methods of fostering this process of reinhabitation explored by bioregional scholars is the “place based story.” In this zone of focus, the work of bioregional scholars overlaps with that of rhetoricians interested in “ecocomposition,” the area of rhetorical study which considers the relationship of written discourse with the places it comes across (Weisser and Dobrin 2). In the case of bioregional discourse, place based stories are intimately related to the places they depict, and are designed to in turn affect how that place is perceived. Bioregional scholars contend that such stories can “restore the imagination of a place,” allowing people to visualize an ecological connection with land they previously viewed in industrial terms. Such imagination “makes a place out of raw space, bequeathing it a sense that transcends its being usable or economically valuable” (Iovino 111). In 1926, the relative natural seclusion of Westinghouse Memorial’s section of Schenley park contrasted with the rest of the rapidly industrializing city. Like a bioregional scholar’s place based story, the natural space of the park might have offered an alternative narrative, restoring the “transcendence” of Pittsburgh in the minds of its alienated residents.