Memorial reflects new trend in remembering history

Friday, April 7th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- The American landscape is dotted with national memorials, from the towering white spire of the Washington Monument to the gleaming, stainless steel expanse of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

Many of these monuments trumpet the labors of great men who orged the country's spirit. Lincoln. Lewis and Clark. The Wright Brothers.

Other monuments pay heed to the battles and wars that have tested the country's mettle. Vietnam. Pearl Harbor. Gettysburg.

Memorial expert and author Ed Linenthal said the Oklahoma City National Memorial represents something new -- a courageous protest to an act of mass murder.

Linenthal said Americans have tended to erase evidence of horror from their midst, not wanting senseless tragedy to tarnish the purposeful visage of the historical landscape. He cited the destruction of the Milwaukee apartment building of Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys.

Even Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., was extensively remodeled after two students shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher there last April.

But the way America remembers its history is slowly beginning to change, said Dwight Pitcaithley, chief historian for the National Park Service.

He said throughout the past decade, Congress has directed the service to start managing a different set of parks and memorials, which present the less glorious -- but no less important -- sides of American history.

"If we only study the uplifting or inspiring things we do and not the other things, we get a very strange view of how we've developed as a people," Pitcaithley said.

He said that is the reasoning behind places like the Manzanar National Historic Site in the California desert, once home to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Elsewhere, a group of 42 national historic sites covers the blood-smeared history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Pitcaithley agreed with Linenthal that the Oklahoma Cit yNational Memorial is part of this new remembrance, notable for taking a physical and symbolic stance so soon after the April 19,1995, bombing of the Alfred. P. Murrah Federal Building.

The memorial also reflects a change in how Americans study history, Linenthal said. No longer does simply plopping down a towering statue or a glittering monument satisfy America's thirst for its history.

Like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Oklahoma City National Memorial will present a "memorial environment" complete with archives, video clips and personal testimonies in a museum scheduled to open by the end of the year.

It is all intended to ensure that Americans do not forget.

"Some memorials, once they're built, almost excuse people from remembering, like it's meant to do the remembering for us," Linenthal said. "In that way, memorials can be kind of inert, inactive, dead things. But when someone goes to a memorial and comes away with a spark to learn more about it having seen the people involved, that's when a memorial comes alive."