On any given summer afternoon, light traffic hums along Route 62 as local teenagers armed with beer, and families with stocked picnic baskets, travel for a day of whitewater rafting, swimming, hiking, and waterfall-jumping in Zoar Valley, New York, a state park located thirty-five miles south of Buffalo. Few notice the grassy field where hundreds of people were laid to rest without dignity. I had made the trek from Buffalo to Zoar Valley several times each summer for nearly a decade, and never noticed the cemetery of the Gowanda Psychiatric Center (GPC) on Route 62. It is easy to miss:  the grave markers lay flat against the ground, with no sign marking the site as a cemetery. To any car cruising past, the space looks like an open pasture amongst the vast surrounding farmlands.

The prisoners of the Collins Correctional Facility, the institution that now owns the property, occasionally mow the cemetery. Riding mowers glide over the field of flat nameless grave markers, with little further maintenance from those mandated to tend to it. But as graves are tended, they are also destroyed. The combination of the weight of the mower and poor drainage had caused many gravestones to sink into the earth. Nothing, then, marks the final resting place of the nameless former inmates of GPC.

The Gowanda Psychiatric Center, a total institution housing people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities, opened in 1898. The residents, under supervision, grew their food, prepared their meals, and buried their dead. GPC was an example of what Erving Goffman studied as a total institution:  the patients slept, played and worked enclosed within the institution’s high walls (1961:5). Every part of their lives was contained in a finite space with clear boundaries—boundaries within which they lived and often died. Those who passed away as patients of the GPC were laid to rest just beyond those high walls, beyond the view of the patients. Even in total institutions, where every act is under surveillance, death in America is kept outside.

In the summer 2007, I stepped into this space which held the forgotten, humbled with my fellow volunteers by the project presented before us. Mainly composed of employees of People Inc., a non-profit that serves the developmentally disabled throughout western New York, the volunteers of Operation Dignity met throughout the summer to try to restore dignity to the forgotten.

The gravestones are simple slabs of concrete, the cheapest materials available, and many were overgrown with grass, moss, and lichen. Several were broken into pieces by expanding tree roots or by the weight of the mower. Careful to “do no harm,” we painstakingly recorded all observable details of each stone—any visible text or number, the location of any cracks, the amount and location of any moss—and cemented the documentation with a photograph prior to restoration. Armed with stiffed bristled brushes (metal bristles were banned for fear it would aid in the disrepair), soap and water, the volunteers spent several hot summer afternoons scrubbing each gravestone until the markings were as discernible as possible—a three digit number, a symbol of religion (a cross to denote Catholicism, wreath for Protestantism, or star of David for Jewish patients) and occasionally a name and dates birth and death. The graves were divided by religion and laid in consecutive numerical order, but only the stones, of those who were buried in the 1980s, on the periphery, had names and dates. The Jewish quarter was separated by line of tall pine trees. Those who constructed the cemetery seemed to consider religion to be significantly more important that personal identity. For over a century, individuals who died in the GPC were buried anonymously.

Erving Goffman describes how the multifaceted identities of individuals are stripped upon arrival to a total institution. Individuals are processed through the bureaucratic system:  “the new arrival … [is] shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment” (1961:16). Those who died within the walls of the GPC took this quantification literally with them to their grave. Tragically, the force that produces this quantification is still at work.

After a summer of dirty fingernails, blistered hands, and sweaty brows, we restored the cemetery on Route 62. All known grave markers were made visible and scrubbed clean. A sign now stands erect at the edge of the busy road, clearly designating the pasture as a site of memory. Landscaping stones encircle three bushes of mums planted in the mulch at the foot of the wooden sign, whose bold golden letters read, “Gowanda Psychiatric Center Memorial Cemetery.” At the entrance of the cemetery, a granite headstone was erected. Also surrounded by mums, the monolith holds smooth pebbles for the deceased of Jewish faith. A dove bracing for flight, perched on a branch of flowers, is etched into the stone, which reads:

IN MEMORY OF THE FORMER RESIDENTS OF THE GOWANDA STATE HOSPTIAL / GOWANDA PSYCHIATRIC CENTER

1895—1994

REST HERE IN PEACE

“DEATH IS NO MORE THAN PASSING FROM ONE ROOM INTO ANOTHER.  BUT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE FOR ME, YOU KNOW, BECAUSE IN THAT OTHER ROOM, I SHALL BE ABLE TO SEE”

HELEN KELLER

David Mack-Hardiman, one of the leading organizers of the volunteers, explained in an interview to a Buffalo News reporter on October 26, 2009:  “Records containing the names of those buried in the cemetery were lost after the hospital shut down.” This, though, proved not to be accurate. A local archivist attended the Ceremony of Remembrance—a moving service in which the signage and monument were unveiled with the release of a rehabilitated red-tailed hawk, Jewish and Christian prayers, and speeches by advocates and self-advocates. He emerged among the reporters, activists, volunteers, and families and told Mack-Hardiman that he had a list of names that corresponded to the numbers on the graves.

Volunteers then hoped to finish their work, to use this new information for a memorial that would list the newly identified graves. But the local community, according to Mack-Hardiman, resisted the erection of a marker which would identify the names with the numbers. Gowanda is home to less than three-thousand residents, and the stigma of having a loved one institutionalized still resonates there. Many families did not want to discover that they had an aunt, cousin, or brother who was committed to the institution. They were pleased that the stones were cleaned and the cemetery respectfully marked, but the fear that a family name would appear publically associated with the institution was not communally acceptable.

Mack-Hardiman explained “Support for the restorations was slow in coming because mental illness [and disability] has long carried a stigma, and the institutionalized were deemed ‘not so worthy’ of proper burial by the state that cared for them and even by their families.” The once invisible were now seen, thanks to activist intervention, but not named. The opposition of the good people of Gowanda to the naming is a testament to the staying power of the stigma.

Gary Alan Fine is a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and teaches at Northwestern University. He is the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial.  He considers here a very difficult example of what has been one of his ongoing research concerns.  Jeff

Although I feel abashed admitting it, I find my sympathy for Jared Lee Loughner is swelling. Mr. Loughner is, as every sentient American is aware, the young man who pulled the trigger – again and again – killing six, wounding others, including his local Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords in a mall in Tucson, Arizona.

Note that I do not say that he is an accused assassin, killer, or murderer, which legally he certainly is under our rule of law. I am entirely prepared to accept that Mr. Loughner was, last Saturday, a violent man, who deserves whatever a jury or set of juries (both federal and state) will eventually determine. I will not call for parole in 2061. I am also prepared to admit that a court may determine – although it probably will not, given American attitudes – that this young is not fully culpable for his violence because of mental illness.

What I am not prepared to accept is how from the moments after the attack, Mr. Loughner’s identity has been taken from him to be used as a political football by smart people who are willing to be ignorant. Again and again we see that we do not truly care about the self-imagined identity of this 22-year old, but only about what we need for him to be. Perhaps we need him to be a tea party manqué boisterously inspired by Sarah and Rush, perhaps an out-of-control, drug-crazed Goth worshipping at the altar of a skull, perhaps a follower of Hitler or Marx, or perhaps we just need for him to be, as is often stated, “a nut job.” But these are what we need for Mr. Loughner to be, and not what he is. The truth is that Jared, we hardly know you.

So we search through the shards and debris of a life to find those oddities that make our case. We scrape away complexity to build a reputation. We forget that to know someone is to know contradictions, moods, and ambivalence. Perhaps when the dust settles we will discover that Mr. Loughner was a boy scout, volunteered at a soup kitchen, or fed pigeons (not poisoning, following Tom Lehrer). Perhaps he was in pain. Or perhaps not. But only with time, justice, and fairness will the self of Jared Loughner appear. Selves are multiple, not singular. As Louis Zurcher pointed out selves are mutable and multiple.

Jared Loughner is neither the first nor surely the last “unintended celebrity” that the public maw transforms according to their need. In my book, Difficult Reputations, a study of a set of public figures with evil, inept, or controversial reputations – and few today have a more difficult reputation – I found that when poorly known figures splash onto the public scene a set of reputational entrepreneurs will see it as being in their interest, using resources at hand, to construct a meaningful self for this stranger, however much it strays from what we eventually come to know. In the days in which Americans cared about the treason of Benedict Arnold, the claim was that as a child he spread broken glass on the sidewalk to harm innocent children. Surely it was more myth than reality, but myth becomes reality.

I offer no brief for Jared Lee Loughner. His killing spree was repellant and might, no matter how idiosyncratic, prove to be another step by which elected officials separate themselves from their voters. But I also see that actions that might otherwise be considered odd and harmless – a sense of creepiness without any particular threat – have been made into markers of madness. We claim that angry words are taken as inspiration for violence, even though these words occur in a Civilizing Society where there is less public anger, rather than more – and in which the tools of violence are held by the state as social theorist Norbert Elias pointed out. Strange acts and hot words might or might not be linked to the violence in Tucson, but we treat them as persuasive while we scurry for a past that makes sense of the present. In the case of Mr. Loughner and in the case of all challenging reputations, we read history backwards. We search for clues that perhaps have different meanings, but that now can serve to support what we knew all along. Even if we show no mercy, we owe it to ourselves to let Jared be Jared.