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The Yorktown Victory Monument has been the ceremonial starting or ending point for Route 76 for almost fifty years. Many of the first Bikecentennial riders ended or began their rides below this monument. In the nearly fifty years since the Bikecentennial, countless cyclists have celebrated the end or signaled the beginning of a transcontinental ride at this location. In many photographs, cyclists lift their bicycles over their heads, a gesture that both celebrates this endeavor of physical exertion and contrasts the bicycle with other forms of transportation: the bicycle is strong enough to carry a person across the country yet light enough to be lifted overhead by the rider. The monument is immense, rising nearly one hundred feet in the air, overlooking the park and the mouth of the York River as it enters Chesapeake Bay. This episode uses the history and symbolism of Yorktown Victory monument to explore the question of the United States\u2019 role in the world in the nearly two hundred and fifty years since this decisive battle, and the ways that legacies of this history remain visible along Route 76. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Welcome to episode 1 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and about 550 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The battle of Yorktown was a critical moment in the American revolution and thus in United States and world history. In the fall of 1781, five years after the declaration of independence was signed in 1776, American forces led by General George Washington laid siege to British forces in the city of Yorktown, in eastern Virginia. With assistance from French ships and soldiers, the American forces pressured the besieged British troops until their situation was hopeless. On October 19, 1781, General Cornwallis surrendered his troops in Yorktown, thus ending the final military engagement of the American war for independence. After years of protracted negotiations, the Treaty of Paris signed in 1783 formally recognized the independence of the United States of America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Yorktown monument, like all monuments, memorials, and markers, has a history. On October 29, 1781, ten days after the battle and five days after news of the victory reached Philadelphia, Congress passed a resolution directing that a monument be erected at York to commemorate the alliance with France, the surrender by the British, and the victory of American forces led by George Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For almost a century, nothing happened to implement this resolution. Finally, as the nation prepared to celebrate the centennial of this victory, steps were taken to fund, design, and build this monument. After years of planning and construction, the monument was finally completed in June 1890. A brief ceremony attended by United States and French government representatives marked the occasion.
The inscription and design of the monument are illustrative of both political beliefs at the time and the continued impact of these beliefs to the present. The monument has three parts: the base, which includes a dedication as well as explanations of the siege, the alliance, and the peace, as well as emblems of nationality, war, alliance, and peace. The podium in the shape of a drum includes thirteen women, representing the original thirteen colonies, hand in hand engaging in a dance of unity, above the inscription: \u201cone country, one constitution, one destiny.\u201d The column has a start for each of thirty-eight states in the Union as of 1881. The monument was originally topped by a statue symbolizing liberty, which the charter declared is \u201cproof of the possibility of a government of the people, by the people, for the people.\u201d After a lightning strike damaged the statue in 1942, a new statue, this time named Victory, was installed in 1957.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The alliance between France and the United States which produced the victory at Yorktown was a transactional relationship among partners with a shared enemy. The United States needed French military assistance to defeat the British army and especially navy. France looked to the United States to weaken Great Britain, particularly in North America, but also globally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States and France shared an adversary, but politically represented two different, and to a great extent divergent, political philosophies. The United States rebelled against Great Britain in the name of liberty, rights, and democracy, using this objective to mobilize the population to take up arms against the imperial state. Even though the rights were limited and liberty was far from universal, the republican message of revolt against a king and the power of the monarch marked a transformative moment in world history. By contrast, France in the 1770s and early 1780s was an absolute monarchy, with the king possessing almost unlimited legislative, judicial, and executive power. Within a decade of the battle of Yorktown, of course, this monarchy would be overthrown during the 1789 revolution. King Louis XVI, in power during the British surrender at Yorktown, would be executed along with thousands of other members of royal and noble families in the name of the revolutionary slogan and liberty, equality, and fraternity. The mutual interest shared by the American rebels and the French monarchy thus lasted long enough to achieve the shared goal of ending British control of the thirteen colonies, but did not last much longer due to more powerful historical forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the century that followed the battle of Yorktown, the United States primarily concentrated on expanding territorial boundaries, while also building and consolidating within these boundaries. The growth of the US population, fueled by European immigration, resulted in the violent displacement of Native American communities as well as debates about the expansion of slavery into new territories. The American Civil War, driven primarily by the desire of Southern elites to maintain slavery, preserved the union but at great cost in terms of human losses. The decades from the end of the war to the establishment of the Yorktown Battle Monument in 1884 were marked by economic development, further expansion and displacement of Native Americans in the west, and racial segregation in the South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States used military force to expand and consolidate the southwestern border through a series of engagements with Mexico. The Monroe Doctrine sought to exclude European powers from extending their reach in the Americas. In the late nineteenth century, American naval power, particularly in the Pacific, supported commercial interests as the US sought access to raw materials and markets for exported goods. America\u2019s first major war with a European power, the conflict with Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, extended US power in the Caribbean and Pacific while avoiding further entanglement in the colonial rivalries that contributed to the outbreak of the world war in 1914.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For more than a century after independence, the United States tried to avoid further involvement in European politics, thus heeding George Washington\u2019s caution in his farewell address in 1796 to “steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” This isolation ended in 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and thus found itself allied with Great Britain, against whom the US rebelled, and France, who supported the US rebellion. Soldiers in the American Expeditionary Force fought on the Western Front during the final decisive battles of the war which ended on November 11, 1918.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In spite of President Wilson\u2019s efforts to use American involvement in the war to build a new framework for sustained peace based on liberal principles, the United States entered a period of isolation in the 1920s and 1930s. New technologies fueled the so-called \u201croaring twenties,\u201d until the Wall Street Crash of 1929 signaled the onset of the Great Depression. Even as fascist regimes in Italy and Germany and a militarist state in Japan challenged the post-war order, strong currents in the United States blocked even small steps to protect the ideals of democracy and self-determination. Japan\u2019s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the subsequent declaration of war against the United States by Germany and Italy ended this isolationist moment and brought the country fully into the world war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The United States in alliance with Great Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union, and many other states fought against the axis states across the world, with major battles in Europe, North Africa, East Asia, and both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The war cost the US more than 400,000 military deaths, making this war the most costly after the civil war in terms of total deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The decades from the end of the second world war to the bicentennial celebration in 1976 saw the United States assume a global role on a scale unprecedented in history. The Cold War brought the United States and Soviet Union into conflict in Europe and then across much of the world, with proxy wars fought in Korea and Vietnam costing hundreds of thousands of US lives. Nationalist anti-colonial movements in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa challenged the United States to choose between principles of national self-determination and the imperial interests of allies such as Great Britain and France. In Latin America, popular movements against dictators aligned with the United States brought governments to power willing to challenge Cold War dichotomies. By the time Bikecentennial riders began their journeys in 1976, the end of the war in Vietnam, crises in the Middle East, and unrest across the globe called into question American assumptions about global trajectories toward democracy and self-determination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The nearly fifty years since the Bikecentennial have further complicated America\u2019s relationship with the world. After a period of intensifying hostility between the United States and Soviet Union, particularly after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Cold War suddenly came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Decades of increasingly global connections, improvements in living standards, and technological revolutions suggested that the post-cold war order might, finally, achieve Wilson\u2019s vision of democracy and self-determination in a well-ordered world. The last twenty years, however, have been marked by the growth and consolidation of authoritarian regimes, cycles of violence resulting in high numbers of civilian deaths, and rivalries among powers that defy international norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Yorktown Battlefield Monument commemorates one moment in US history in which the principles of democracy and self-determination triumphed with the assistance of an international partnership. As cyclists ride on Route 76 across Virginia, they will encounter many other reminders of the more complex, and costly, relationship between global power and human costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These reminders take the form of veterans\u2019 cemeteries, military monuments, and war memories in cities, towns, and counties across the state. At York Hall, located just a few miles from the start of Route 76, the War Memorial Monument lists the names of soldiers killed in America\u2019s wars from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The Veterans Memorial of Damascus, in southwestern Virginia, has a granite stone with more than four hundred names of veterans from the surrounding region. In Abingdon, Veterans Memorial Park includes a monument recognizing the sacrifice of veterans and their families during the time of their service. In Wytheville, the Wall of Honors lists names of residents who lost their lives during service while the Wounded Warrior Monument recognizes men and women who suffered physical or emotional wounds during their service. In Troutville, just north of Roanoke, the town park along Route 76 includes a marker designating a Blue Star Memorial Highway with bricks that list the name, branch, and years of service for veterans. As cyclists ride across the state, they will encounter these, and many more, durable reminders of how the changing role of the United States in the world brought human costs in pursuit of political, ideological, or principled objectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You have been listening to episode 1 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and about 550 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. To learn more about the stories in this episode, visit our website or follow us on social media, all accessible for the homepage for this podcast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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