January 6 laid bare our national fissures. One year later, the day's memories still divide us
Some events are so cataclysmic they can be universally recognized by their date alone: 9/11, for one, and Dec. 7, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorably declared as a day that will "live in infamy."
And now Jan. 6.
Unlike the aftermath of those earlier episodes, though, marking one year since the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol isn't likely to be a moment of national reflection and unity. It's more likely to spotlight bitter divisions over why it happened and why it matters. Amid an ongoing congressional inquiry and the fog of conspiracy theories, Americans don't even agree on what happened.
On that winter day a year ago – for the first time since the War of 1812 – the Congress was under siege, this time by attackers who smashed windows, beat Capitol Police officers with metal pipes and erected a mock gallows, threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence.
In a striking finding in a Paste BN/Suffolk poll as 2021 came to a close, Americans were divided on how they viewed the insurrection. While 50% called the Capitol rioters "criminals," 44% saw their actions having at least some justification. Six percent said they "acted appropriately," and another 38% said "they went too far, but they had a point."
Those who study history say the nation's collective memory matters – to heal the past, to understand the present, to figure out the future.
One year after the 9/11 attacks, mourners across the country held candlelight vigils, and then-President George W. Bush placed a wreath at Ground Zero. One year after Pearl Harbor, as U.S. forces battled in World War II, Americans attended religious services and joined blood drives; the War Department used the occasion to release more information about the losses from the sneak attack.
But the closer parallels to Jan. 6 could prove to be the aftermath of the Civil War.
"There was no Pearl Harbor Day; there was no D-Day" to commemorate the first anniversary of the end of the Civil War, said Caroline Janney, director of the Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. One year after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, some in the North worried that celebrations would only exacerbate the nation's wounds at a time they needed to mend.
In the states that had joined the Confederacy, however, days of remembrance in cemeteries fueled what became known as the Lost Cause, a revisionist history of the reasons for the war and for its outcome. In versions at odds with the historical record, the South was portrayed as the victim, and states' rights, not slavery, was given as its justification for seceding. Statues were erected and schools named to honor Confederate generals; only now are some of them being debated and deconstructed in a national reckoning over racism.
Now Jan. 6 is sparking its own debate over what happened and why.
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Consider: On Thursday, the House plans to commemorate the day with a moment of silence in the chamber at noon; members of the House and Senate will stand on the Capitol steps at 5:30 p.m. for a prayer vigil marking what they decry as an insurrection. But former President Donald Trump, while he has canceled plans for a 5 p.m. news conference at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida, continues to press his unsubstantiated claims that the dispute is really over an election that was stolen from him.
Trump's message has found an audience. Nearly 3 in 10 said the Jan. 6 protest was "aimed at preventing a fraudulent election," even though no evidence of significant voter fraud has been found in post-election audits and investigations in states including Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Texas.
The poll of 1,000 registered voters Dec. 27 to Dec. 30 has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
A year later: Americans say democracy is in peril but disagree on why: Paste BN/Suffolk poll
Even so, at least 19 states passed 34 laws last year imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, and several are considering bills that would strengthen the hand of partisan officials to oversee election processes and even reject vote counts. Supporters say they are acting to avoid fraud; critics say they are undermining access to voting and safeguards designed to protect the count. Both sides argue that democracy itself is at stake.
"One of my fears is not just Republicans think the last election was stolen and have been completely misled about how elections work," said Susan Stokes, director of the University of Chicago's Center on Democracy. "Now we have all this counteraction by Republican-led state legislatures and voter suppression measures and measures allowing them to change the count."
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With those new procedures in place, she said, "Democrats aren't going to believe the election, either."
Still, she sees "countervailing forces" and some "chastening" on the part of Jan. 6 rioters facing court trials and judicial sentencing; some have expressed regret for what they describe as being caught up in the moment. The judicial process, still unfolding, could reveal more about those who organized, directed and financed the protests.
What's more, the House committee established to investigate what happened on Jan. 6 is preparing to hold public hearings in the next few months and to release an interim report this summer and a final report in the fall. Officials say the panel will shed light on the planning and financing of that day's rally near the White House and the attack on the Capitol that followed, including Trump's role. The committee hasn't ruled out criminal referrals to the Justice Department for the central figures involved, perhaps even including the former president.
In a special report in Paste BN, dozens of members of Congress recalled what they saw and heard on that day.
Rep. Ron Kind singled out Pence for praise, calling him "one of the heroes of the day in saving our democracy by refusing to kowtow to the President's wishes, and refusing to do their bidding.” He also praised state and local election officials who held the line in the face of intense political pressure from the White House.
“They, too, are huge heroes in defending our democracy that day, and through the whole process," the Wisconsin Democrat said in his interview. "We came perilously close to having a violent overthrow on January 6, and I don't know how many people realize just how dangerous and how close we did come to losing our democracy."
Trump and his core supporters aren't likely to accept the House committee's conclusions, and the panel itself is expected to be disbanded if Republicans gain control of the House in the midterm elections. The former president derides the panel as "The Unselect Committee of Radical Left Democrats, and two failed Republicans" and calls its inquiry a "witch hunt."
Janney sees lessons in today's fraught moment from the aftermath of the Civil War. "The long tentacles of the war's meaning are still very much with us, and that reckoning that didn't happen in 1865, that perhaps couldn't happen in 1865, is happening now," she said. She sees a need for "thinking, stopping and taking stock, rather than just trying to move forward."
A need to remember.