Memorial Hall Pietas

To the Editors of the Crimson:

In your page one article on the proposal of "honoring Confederates" in Memorial Hall (March 21, 1988), your writer, Mr. Troyer, cites "a proposal by an emeritus professor to add the names of Harvard's Confederate dead to the celebrated transept at Memorial Hall." As the emeritus professor whom Mr. Troyer consulted, let me correct him by saying that I have never urged commemorating the Harvard Confederate dead in the transept, properly consecrated to Harvard's Union dead. If, as was done in the Memorial Church for Harvard's German dead in World Wars I and II, the names of some 64 Harvard men who died on the Confederate side, fighting for a cause in which they believed, were--as a long overdue act of pietas--to be commemorated in Memorial Hall, an appropriate space might be found in the Great Hall--which is rather a Valhalla of Harvard's past than specifically a commemoration of the Union side of the Civil War.

The Great Hall already contains a number of busts and at least one memorial (to John Gorman Palfrey) which are not relevant to the Union forces. The condition is, indeed, laid down in the deed of gift by which the Alumni Association transferred Memorial Hall to the Harvard Corporation in 1878 that no memorial should be put into it inconsistent with its purpose of commemorating not only the Union dead but all Harvard men who served in the Union forces. But it does seem that after the lapse of more than a century, this condition might be waived, either by the Alumni Association or by legal action, to permit the installation of a memorial elsewhere than in the transept to recognize that Harvard's dead on the Confederate side gave their lives for a cause in which they selflessly believed. Mason Hammond '25