represent, once more, the enduring American truth: From many we are one.” This is a very generous, perhaps aspirational reading of the memorial that celebrates a nationalism justified by diversity in a moment when diversity was becoming an important trope. But without Clinton’s framing, this diversity is hard to see in the memorial. As the notes of the ad hoc committee make clear, the kind of diversity the memorializers could tolerate was quite limited. Clinton’s 1969 letter does a much better job of representing the problem that drove the building of the memorial than this 1995 speech does of representing the memorial itself.
In the end, though, the memorial is not unintelligible. Kent Cooper says of the memorial, “We have tried to give the veterans here what we could not give them with the Vietnam memorial.”106 He continues, “We are not glorifying war, but esteeming the honor of service to country. That is what the vets cried out for. . . . [T]he Korean War Veterans Memorial is in some way a tribute to simpler times. This is a monument to blind devotion.”107 What Cooper misses here is that simpler times would not have required blind devotion, and that the terms of the memory that became so determinative for this memorial were not what the veterans had cried out for. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were different in important and consequential ways. The memory of a UN-waged war with broad international support should not be used as a corrective to the memory of a war broadly criticized by the United Nations and by nations around the world.
Simpler times would have made for an easier memorial, but the problem of how to remember ultimately cannot be disconnected from the war itself. The problem of the “nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization” or of the racial and gender composition of that imagined nation did not disappear in the memorial process; rather, it drove the memorial process.108
What is just under the surface here, what Kent Cooper assumes will be logical, is that honoring service in this context requires avoiding all that the builders of the KWVM sought to correct in the Wall—especially the presence of loss and the implication of tragedy. The blind devotion of soldiers can only be celebrated when their deaths are honorable rather than tragic. Otherwise, cannon fodder is just cannon fodder. To ensure honorable deaths, the soldiers needed to be understood in terms of the sacrifice they made, with only the most oblique references to what they did in the world. The memorial, by celebrating the soldier in this context, allows the soldier to represent war and allows the work that the war might have done in the world, the global implications of the war and the challenges that it might have presented to U.S. nationalism, to recede out of sight and therefore out of both the past and the present that the memorial constructs.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial is a complicated, multidimensional response to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the questions it raised on the Mall about remembering American wars and remembering American soldiers. The need for a particular kind of nationalism, manifest—militarized and domesticated—in the Korean War Memorial process, gains momentum, gets complicated, and is refigured in the monuments that follow it on the Mall. During the time the Korean War Memorial was fought over and built, three attempts were made to use the ascension of the figure of the soldier to challenge the figuring of that soldier and the figuring of the nation. The problem of sacrificing soldiers as “traced with race” and that of the insistent figuring of the soldier as not only male but masculine in particular heroic, virile terms were taken up and fought over in the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, and the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II. The chapters that follow take up the stories of these memorials.
TWO
Legitimating the National Family with the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial
My own great grandfather, John Curtis, a white man from Maine, gave his life for the cause of freedom during the Civil War when he was gunned down at Cold Harbor, Virginia. But for the photograph he took days before, and which was passed down to me, there would be no memorial.
MAURICE BARBOZA
THE STORY OF THE BLACK Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial recounts a failed attempt to use the revival of the status of the sacrificing soldier to redraw primary boundaries of national inclusion. The story of the memorial reveals the tenacity with which the Daughters of the American Revolution, who are central to this story, fought to maintain these boundaries, and the less tenacious but still successful maintenance of these boundaries by the various individuals and federal agencies involved in the memorial process. It also reveals the limits of the revival of the sacrificing soldier. Finally, it reveals how an obvious but, for some, untenable truth—that African Americans served in the Revolutionary War and that they are both figurative and biological creators of the nation—is repressed in the maintenance of these boundaries and remains outside the scope of soldiers celebrated on the Mall in this moment.
A few years ago, Reverend Al Sharpton described the genealogical discovery that he is descended from slaves owned by the family of the late Senator Strom Thurmond as “probably the most shocking thing of my life.”1 While Sharpton’s shock is entirely understandable, it is also useful for understanding the struggle over the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial. Removed from the personal circumstance of two larger-than-life public figures with radically different worldviews, the possibility that a Thurmond might have been owned a Sharpton, given where they come from in South Carolina, isn’t all that remote. Further, given the nature of the relationship, it is not at all surprising that it was unrevealed for generations. Of course, Sharpton knows this, and he is still shocked.
A cousin of the late Senator Thurmond, Doris Strom Costner, responded to news of the connection to Sharpton by saying, “He’s in a mighty good family.”2 There is a fascinating elision in Ms. Costner’s comment and, in this elision, a riot of U.S. histories. She moves immediately from “owned by” to “in the family” without contending with the ways in which these descriptions might and might not be distinct. The question of the Thurmond family genealogy is linked to the story of the still unbuilt Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial by the large questions it raises about race, legitimation, and nationalism in the United States. (The memorial is also linked in more specific terms to the not-white genealogy of the family of one of the twentieth century’s most ardent segregationists, whose mixed-race daughter would become an advocate.)
Thurmond would likely have been shocked as well, despite his intimate knowledge of miscegenation and his lifelong (and failed) struggle to keep both his own family and the national family white. This shock is linked to the senator’s efforts to keep the Thurmonds and the Sharptons distinct despite what was actually happening between them. It is surprising that the famously white man and the famously black man are possibly kin because so much energy has been put into distinguishing between black and white, repressing the long formative history of miscegenation in the United States. The Black Patriots Memorial is an attempt to use the figure of the soldier to rewrite this history. The Sharpton-Thurmond story illustrates the ideological enormity of the project.
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