Features

Veteran's Day In Berkeley: Did You Notice?

By Steven Finacom
Friday November 11, 2011 - 08:49:00 AM
One Berkeley World War I memorial stands along University Avenue next to a battered flagpole at West Campus.  It was placed in “Remembrance of the boys of the Burbank School who gave their lives for humanity during the Great War.”   Seven names are listed.
Steven Finacom
One Berkeley World War I memorial stands along University Avenue next to a battered flagpole at West Campus. It was placed in “Remembrance of the boys of the Burbank School who gave their lives for humanity during the Great War.” Seven names are listed.
A 1939 plaque on a chipped base and memorial giant sequoia at the Berkeley Rose Garden near the tennis courts honor a commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Steven Finacom
A 1939 plaque on a chipped base and memorial giant sequoia at the Berkeley Rose Garden near the tennis courts honor a commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The oldest veterans memorial on the UC Berkeley campus is the Mitchell monument, honoring a 19th century Congressional Medal of Honor winner who later served as the campus armorer, maintaining weapons for the University’s Cadet Corps.
Steven Finacom
The oldest veterans memorial on the UC Berkeley campus is the Mitchell monument, honoring a 19th century Congressional Medal of Honor winner who later served as the campus armorer, maintaining weapons for the University’s Cadet Corps.

Friday, November 11, 2011 was a work or school holiday for many in Berkeley, including this writer. But it’s probably safe to say that very few people in Berkeley commemorated the date either for the original reason it was established, or for its later, broadened, purpose. 

Now it’s called “Veteran’s Day”, an occasion for generic recognition of servicemen and women. Before that, it had a more specific meaning. 

Combat on the Western Front in World War I—then called the “Great War”—ended with a negotiated armistice on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” or November 11, 1918. The day was designated by most of the Allied powers as a permanent memorial occasion, called Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. 

Like many cities, Berkeley once commemorated Armistice Day with ceremonies and parades. There were solemn flag raisings, cannon or rifle salutes boomed in Downtown, and veterans and various other contingents marched along Shattuck. In the 1920s and 30s hundreds of locals would regularly participate in what was called the “Service on the Waters”. A chartered ferryboat took them out on the Bay where they dropped wreaths and flowers in a ceremony designed to remember airmen and seamen killed in service. 

Local events often centered on Berkeley’s Veterans Memorial Building, completed in 1928, and sited prominently on one side of what was then only a proposed civic center park site. The building housed offices and meeting spaces for Berkeley’s numerous veterans groups. The large auditorium was, for decades, one of the most heavily used facilities in Berkeley, ensuring for generations that locals would be familiar with the memorial. 

Berkeley veterans included organized groups of Union Army (Grand Army of the Republic) Civil War veterans, Spanish-American War veterans, World War I veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The GAR men had pride of place, and some were alive in Berkeley well into the 1930s, more than seven decades after the end of the Civil War. Berkeley even hosted, in the 1930s, two “encampments” of GAR men and their families and supporters. 

There were also many local affiliate or “auxiliary” groups, including women’s organizations representing spouses, mothers, and/or daughters of servicemen. Some worked hard to remember and honor veterans. Others, from the newspaper accounts I’ve read, seemed to have devolved into primarily social clubs or organizations from which the living could derive prestige from association with the dead. 

Berkeley also had many war or veteran memorials from different eras from a Spanish-American war cannon that once stood Downtown to California Memorial Stadium. Last year I identified eleven memorials on the UC Berkeley campus alone, which a UC Media Relations staffer organized into an on-line slideshow that can be seen here. 

Off-campus, Berkeley also once had numerous veterans’ monuments. The largest of course is the Veterans Memorial building itself, but there were also many plaques, memorial trees, and other smaller monuments donated and dedicated over the decades. My guess would be that there were at least a dozen veterans and war memorials dedicated off campus in Berkeley, and most likely many more. 

As far as I know there is no comprehensive list of these, and many have fallen into disrepair or even been obliterated. Most are on public property but I’m not sure that anyone in local agencies off the UC campus pays much attention. 

If you go to City Council meetings you’ll pass several largely unnoticed veteran’s monuments. In the lobby of old City Hall, for example, there’s a 1940 stone bench honoring GAR veterans. Outside the building are several trees and monuments at the northwest corner of MLK, Jr. Way and Allston Way. They were put there as prominent memorials, but now attract little attention. There are plaques in place honoring tree plantings that no longer seem to exist, and other trees that have no plaques, but appear to be memorial plantings, as well as unidentified memorial fragments. 

I’ve come across mentions of many of these monuments in old newspaper articles and other accounts, and by happenstance. John Aronovici at the Berkeley Historical Society has done good work unearthing local veteran’s monuments and memorabilia. 

This year alone I noticed two monuments I’d never seen before. At the Berkeley Rose Garden there are two towering giant sequoias just east of the tennis courts, apparently planted as a Civil War memorial; sadly, one of them had its roots partially chopped up by a repaving project. And on University Avenue, outside the largely vacant old West Campus, there’s a curbside monument to former students of Burbank Junior High School who served and died in World War I. 

The most recent off-campus veteran’s memorial in Berkeley is a plaque to local servicemen who died in Vietnam. Country Joe McDonald wrote a description of the project to create the Berkeley Vietnam veteran’s memorial in the 1880s and 90s, here. 

Some years ago I participated in an ad hoc committee that worked to revive a local Veteran’s Day event in Berkeley. A few were held, but then the activity died out again. During that process I realized that, as with most historical issues and causes, people are primarily interested in those anniversaries with which they have a personal connection (a side prediction; a half century from now, almost no Americans will be participating in, or paying much attention to, “9-11” commemorations). 

The veterans on the Berkeley committee were largely Vietnam era servicemen. They were very respectful of those from earlier conflicts, but their identification and enthusiasm was largely focused on connecting with veterans and issues from their own war. That’s quite understandable. 

I also understand that many locals have a justifiable distaste for the overly political “patriotism” that can overlie activities honoring veterans and provide cover for hard right ideologues to promote their destructive agendas. 

As many others have pointed out, during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts “supporting our troops” has all-too-often become the self-contradictory mantra of those who are most enthusiastic about putting those same troops indefinitely in harm’s way in conflicts with murky motives, justifications, and outcomes. 

Yet it should be possible, particularly in cities like Berkeley, to honor servicemen and women for their personal risk and commitment and at the same time avoid jingoism. But that can only come about if people view memorial commemorations as something worth doing even if they weren’t personally involved. 

As Vietnam veterans age and pass away, veterans commemorations will largely center on Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan veterans around the country, and it will be generally left up to “someone else” to remember earlier conflicts and veterans. 

Who that will be in Berkeley, I don’t know. But take a moment during Armistice Day / Veteran’s Day to remember. 


Steven Finacom is the current president of the Berkeley Historical Society. He wrote about Berkeley’s connections to the Civil War in the April 12, 1911, Planet.