My Comment:  Not many  spoke up when they were going to erect a mosque at ground zero.  Enough said…..

It has become an iconic image of America’s fighting spirit and an emblem of hope.

Yet the immortal photograph of three New York City firefighters raising the U.S. flag at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks was nearly left out of the 9/11 Memorial Museum because staff thought it was too ‘rah-rah’ American.

Creative director Michael Shulan was among staffers who believed the Thomas E. Franklin photo – which has been compared to the World War II Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima image – was too kitsch, according to Elizabeth Greenspan’s new book Battle for Ground Zero.

Thomas E. Franklin’s iconic post-September 11 photo has become an emblem of hope

‘I really believe that the way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently,’ Shulan said, according to Greenspan’s book.

The New York Post reports chief curator Jan Ramirez offered a compromise – that the Franklin shot be ‘minimized’ in favor of three different photos of the flag-raising scene at three different angles.

Michael Shulan, 9/11 Memorial Museum creative director, initially agreed with some staffers that the iconic Ground Zero image was too ‘rah rah’ American to be included in exhibition

Ramirez believed it could be valuable to show the event from ‘multiple points of view, like the attacks more broadly’.

‘Several images undercut the myth of ‘one iconic moment,’ Ramirez said, according to the book.

‘Shulan didn’t like three photographs more than he liked one, but he went along with it.’

Shulan later told the New York Post that reducing the historical event to one picture was too simplistic.

‘My concern, as it always was, is that we not reduce [9/11] down to something that was too simple, and in its simplicity would actually distort the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event,’ he said.

Franklin’s moving image, first published by The Record the day after the attacks, has become an enduring emblem of hope for Americans.

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