from every possible political position on the war embraced the memorial. Visitors have flocked to the memorial in unprecedented numbers. A new, highly contagious practice of public mourning was born there, which involves the public in the memorial process through leaving objects. It became a kind of national wailing wall, unlike any other memorial in American history. It really mattered to millions of people. The second reason is less immediately obvious but might have more potent long-term consequences. The memorial, despite its crucial contribution to reviving the status of the soldier, produced much anxiety about possible antiheroic, antiwar, antinational interpretations of the memorial, the soldier, and the nation, and this led to a rash of war memorials on the Mall.
This book is structured chronologically. The memorials appear in the order in which they were debated and (with the exception of the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial) built. The first chapter deals with the Korean War Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in 1995. The hulking, blank-eyed, stainless steel figures marching across the Mall produce an ideological contortionism around the figure of the soldier. The builders of this memorial were determined to respond to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—as well as the nation and the figure of the citizen soldier it imagined—with a not-tragic representation of war and soldiering. The memorial process confronted questions about representing a complicated Cold War conflict in the context of U.S. wars that promise freedom, about representing pre-Vietnam era American soldiers in a post-Vietnam context, and about representing a multiracial fighting force in the context of figurations of the soldier as white and male. Answering these questions in memorial form—refiguring the soldier as not always white; representing armed African Americans, Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Asian Americans on the Mall; glorifying the ideal of blind devotion; and celebrating the heroism of these figures in the context of a Cold War conflict proved to be contradictory and vexing challenges for the veterans and the federal bureaucracies involved. This chapter traces the process through which they shaped the memorial. Here a new cultural logic about soldiers and the nation begins to emerge on the Mall.
Chapter 2 examines the unbuilt Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial. The idea for this memorial did not come from veterans’ organizations or military lobbies. Its principal proponent sought, and still seeks, to use the exalted position of the sacrificing soldier to stake a claim for inclusion of African Americans in literal and figurative narratives of nation formation. This memorial project is quite bluntly a legitimation project: it seeks to make visible and unassailable the contributions of African Americans to U.S. nationalism. Inspired by Alex Haley’s Roots, Washington lawyer Maurice Barboza sought to uncover his own genealogy. He discovered that he was, like many African Americans, descended from black and white soldiers who fought in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. Barboza was determined to use his claim to the revered, sacrificing dead to stake a claim for African Americans in national narratives. The story of the memorial moves through a dense thicket of anxiety about racial purity, miscegenation, the not-white soldier, masculinity, and linked ideas about the nation. Though this unbuilt memorial clearly does not change the Mall, it does demonstrate what was speakable on the Mall in this moment and what was not.
Chapter 3 takes up the Women in Military Service for America Memorial and so must again take up the question of what was speakable on the Mall in this moment and what was not. Approved with some difficulty by the same Congress that approved the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial, the Women’s Memorial sought to make visible the contributions of women to the U.S. military. The memorial’s proponents were insistent and explicit about their desire to make these contributions seen. They were not explicit about challenging the male gendering of the figure of the soldier and the nation, but their project required just this. The memorial was built, and with great effort, it was built on the Mall—at the very far reach of the Mall, but still officially on the Mall. The resistance encountered by this project and the accommodations it was forced to make reveal the national investment in figuring the soldier as male. The memorial is underground and without permanent signage. Shaped by the gendering of the soldier and the nation, as well as by the kinds of wars the United States has waged in the last fifty years, this memorial sought to challenge common understandings of who the troops to be supported are and what that support might look like.
Chapter 4 engages the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II. Like the Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial, this memorial works to claim a place in the monumental core and in the national family for Americans denied access to full citizenship by a crippling racial logic. It uses the moral authority of the World War II veterans to denounce the internment of Japanese Americans. Its advocates also conflated patriotism and military service and, in doing so, not only created deep divisions among Japanese Americans but created a troubling memorial. It is the only memorial in Washington to read, “Here We Remember a Wrong,” but the wrong admitted and the terms of the admission are more complicated than this bold statement might suggest. The process of building this memorial raised compelling questions about the figuring of the Japanese American soldier, about blind devotion, and about the possibilities for antiracist nationalism in the United States.
The final chapter returns to the center of the Mall, where the National World War II Memorial was dedicated in 2004. This “complete architectural rendering of the war” also sought to be a complete architectural rendering of the struggle to define the soldier and the nation on the Mall. A sprawling and determined expression of American exceptionalism and federal power, the memorial began with a Capraesque story about recognizing the greatest generation. However, the competing visions of the Mall, war, and soldiering quickly got complicated. In the memorial process, there was a constant tension between the arguments made for building the memorial—always about honoring our soldiers—and the argument about these soldiers that the memorial itself might make. This chapter traces the epic, seventeen-year struggle to get the memorial built and reveals much about the social position soldiers have attained in the United States.
Throughout the book I explore two key, and linked, uses to which the memory of the soldier is put in these memorials. First, the soldier is used to overcome the problems of war and military service raised by the Vietnam War, enabling and encouraging an unfettered celebration of military service. Second, and this is not a secondary argument, the soldier is used, with mixed results, to legitimate African Americans, women, and Japanese Americans as fully equal national subjects. These legitimation projects use the soldier to redraw primary boundaries of national inclusion. 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 use the elevated status of the soldier, despite what the soldier is doing in the world, to make claims of national belonging based on military service, and the results are revealing. The memorial to black patriots has not been built. The memorial for women was built underground with no permanent signage. And the Japanese American memorial foregrounds the apology for the internment.
The key uses to which the figure of the soldier is put in these memorials require an articulation of the centrality of soldiering to U.S. nationalism and serve to minimize the accounting of loss. Both uses participate in making the argument that national belonging and military service, even under the most profoundly contradictory and discriminatory circumstances, are inextricably bound. Military service becomes the ultimate expression of national belonging, regardless of the terms of that service or what that military service does in the world.
The book begins and ends with the two largest and most central memorials: the Korean War Veterans Memorials and the National World War II Memorial. These projects are the most preoccupied with celebrating sacrificing soldiers, and they are ultimately the ones that most powerfully rewrite the meaning of the National Mall. The memorials in the three middle chapters participate in elements of this celebratory logic. They are crucial to the story of the Mall and U.S. nationalism because they reveal a powerful but less successful drive to use the elevated social position of the soldier to refigure U.S. nationalism as not always white and male. In so doing they mark the maintenance of seemingly outdated boundaries of national inclusion. It is important to understand the impulses of these two kinds of memorials as linked and as producing together the story of what
