The Bladensburg World War I veterans memorial is more than a monument. It’s a gravestone for 49 men and boys who died in defense of our freedom on European soil.
The mothers whose sons never returned from the war to end all wars put it near what should have been their hometown, not knowing whether their bones would ever come back to American soil.
How much longer it will stand is now up to the U.S. Supreme Court, the last hope for preserving this 90-year-old memorial Peace Cross.
After standing for nearly 100 years, the Bladensburg memorial is under siege. Not from the metro D.C. traffic that careens past it every day on Maryland’s Veterans Memorial Highway, but from a handful of angry atheists offended by its shape.
Last fall, two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, located in Richmond, Va., determined that this cross-shaped gravestone somehow violates the Constitution’s establishment clause, prohibiting state-sponsored religion. During oral arguments, one of the judges actually questioned whether or not the memorial would be constitutional if “we just chopped off the arms.”
Chop the arms off of a veterans memorial?
Gold Star mothers chose the shape of the Peace Cross to recall the crosses marking the countless American graves on the Western Front of that war — the ones their sons were buried under in Flanders Fields, including the son of Mrs. Martin Redman. She explained the sentiment animating the choice of the shape of the memorial in a 1920 letter to Sen. John Walter Smith: “[T]he chief reason I feel so deeply in this matter, my son, Wm. F. Redman, lost his life in France and because of that I feel that our memorial cross is, in a way, his grave stone.”
The cross shape became an internationally recognized symbol uniquely associated with WWI.
Financed privately by the American Legion and donations raised by Gold Star mothers like Redman who lost their sons on the foreign battlefield, they located the gravestone on private land. Forty years later, the state of Maryland took the land on which it stands through its power of eminent domain. Maryland needed to expand the highway, but it didn’t dare bulldoze the memorial to the ground.
The Fourth Circuit’s ruling may well send bulldozers rumbling down the road to the Canadian Cross of Sacrifice and Argonne Cross at Arlington National Cemetery. That’s why my firm, First Liberty Institute, will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision.
As we take time as a nation this Memorial Day weekend to reflect on the sacrifice of those who died in defense of our freedoms, we face this question: Will this be the last Memorial Day for the Peace Cross? Will this be the last Memorial Day for the gravestone of Mrs. Redman’s son?
It shouldn’t be. Americans should honor the way Gold Star mothers chose to remember the service and sacrifice of their sons who died defending our freedom.
Perhaps no one put it better than Judge Harvie Wilkinson in his dissent from the Fourth Circuit’s decision to deny an en banc hearing of the Bladensburg case when he argued, “The dead cannot speak for themselves. … This memorial and this cross have stood for almost one full century. Life and change flow by the small park in the form of impatient cars and trucks. That is disturbance enough. Veterans Memorial Park may not be Arlington National Cemetery, but it is the next thing to it. I would let the cross remain and let those honored rest in peace.”
We forget what we do not see. The Gold Star mothers and the American Legion who erected this gravestone to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County knew that we would forget the service of their sons and husbands unless the living honored their sacrifice. The Bladensburg memorial does just that.
The Supreme Court should let it stand.
Hiram Sasser is General Counsel to First Liberty Institute, a non-profit law firm dedicated to defending religious freedom.
