My dear friend and favorite photographer, Hank Savage, took nearly all the photographs in the book. This is the second book he has illustrated for me, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Thank you, Hank.
Scholars Beth Bailey, Pete Daniel, Ed Linenthal, George Sanchez, and Dell Upton each stepped up to provide crucial support at some point in the project. I am grateful for their kindness and their scholarship.
The Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan has been my intellectual and institutional home for a very long time. I am lucky and proud to be part of this community of scholars. I want to thank the AC staff—Judy Gray, Mary Freiman, Marlene Moore, Brook Posler, and Tabby Rohn—for being so good at what they do. Graduate students Aimee Von Bokel and Paul Farber were able assistants as I wrote. And, of course, I am indebted to my friends and colleagues here, past and present, for the time they have given in reading drafts, asking hard questions, and pushing me in unexpected and productive ways. This is especially true of Paul Anderson, Sara Blair, Jay Cook, Julie Ellison, Jonathan Freedman, Joe Gone, Sandra Gunning, June Howard, Mary Kelley, Tiya Miles, Damon Salesa, Xiomara Santamarina, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Amy Stillman, Alan Wald, Penny Von Eschen, and Magdalena Zaborowski. Julie, June, and Mary have also been important mentors for me. Phil Deloria and Greg Dowd both helped me think through this book and saw me through the tenure process with kindness and grace; I will always be grateful to them. Michael Witgen was my closest reader and most focused critic. I am much obliged for his help; he made this a better book.
Niels Hooper at the University of California Press has shepherded this book across what feels like, to both of us I am sure, vast expanses of time and space. Thank you for all the weak coffee in bad conference hotels across the country and for your perseverance. Thanks also to all involved parties at the press, especially the patient and efficient Kim Hogeland and the eagled-eyed Elizabeth Berg.
I cannot thank my friends enough. Marybeth Lewis proofread the whole manuscript. Ann Stevenson kept me going on innumerable occasions; Curt Catallo fed me on innumerable occasions. Deirdre, John, Hugh, and Guy Cross took great care of me when I was in Washington. Heidi and Vincenzo Binetti shared the chaos and the fun of the life of a scholar with a house full of kids. The teachers at Bach Elementary School, Slauson Middle School, and Pioneer High School took fabulous care of these kids. Jean Mandel, Dahlia Petrus, and Sioban Scanlon inspired me to want to do this right. And Frank Mitchell helped because he is Frank.
I have had an unending supply of unconditional love from my parents—Earlene Hass and Robert Hass. Anything I have ever done well comes from them. My family—Leif, Luke, Tommy, Margaret, Sahai, Tom, Brenda, Marilynn, Duncan, Molly, Jenny, Duncan, Josephine, Ella, Fiona, Louisa, Charlie, Leon, Co Co, Bill, Karin and family, Libby and family—have supported me in a million ways, big and small. Of course, Cameron Magoon has been my partner in this and in all things. Thank you for every little thing, really. Finally, I want to thank Finn and Cole and Hazel for being Finn and Cole and Hazel. You guys gave me a reason to write this book.
Introduction
They say, We leave you our deaths: give them their meanings: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends the war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning. We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
In 1943 THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT asked librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish to write a statement to help sell war bonds.1 This is from the poem he wrote. It is just a few lines, but it evokes a pact between the soldier and the nation in no uncertain terms: “We leave you our deaths; give them their meaning.” The life of the soldier is traded for a memory that makes a shared meaning of the death. MacLeish understood the work of remembering soldiers for what it is—grave and consequential. The endless parade of visitors to the war memorials on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., seem to make their pilgrimages with a sense of this gravity. Middle school students who don’t quite get it are hushed by impatient chaperones, and the resulting silence feels something like reverence. Millions of people (these school groups, families on vacation, and visiting dignitaries) go to the war memorials on the Mall every year—and likely will for perpetuity—to witness history and to see for themselves what it means and what it has meant to be an American.
From 1791, when the capital was designed, to 1982, the story told on the National Mall was the story of great American leaders and their triumphant ideas about democracy. There were no national war memorials on the Mall.2 Since 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, the story told on the Mall has shifted to emphasize American wars and soldiers. In fact, in the last thirty years five significant war memorials have been built on, or very nearly on, the Mall. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, the National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism during World War II, and the National World War II Memorial not only have transformed the physical space of the Mall but have also dramatically rewritten the ideas expressed there about the United States. (The Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial was also approved by Congress in this period but has not yet been built.) This book is about this war memorial boom, the debates that surrounded each memorial project, the memorials these debates produced, and the new narratives they created about what it means to be an American. This book asks, in Archibald MacLeish’s terms, what meanings we have made in exchange for the lives of the young, dead soldiers. It also asks if we have made good on our enormous responsibility to them.
This sense of responsibility has, of course, a history. In the United States before the Civil War, many Americans were hostile to the idea of a standing federal army and its soldiers. Most soldiers were volunteers in local militias, and many, though certainly not all, soldiers in Washington’s federal army were “hirelings” to whom little ceremonial attention was paid.3 (Surely there were heroes of the Revolutionary War, but foot soldiers were relatively neglected and there was a continued wariness of the federal army.) During the Civil War the white citizen soldier emerged as a heroic figure and became an important character in the construction of American nationalism. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes it, “They came to belong to the nation, and the nation came to belong to them.”4 This link was reflected in the burial of foot soldiers in marked graves for the first time at Gettysburg and Lincoln’s reimaging of the nation in terms of the sacrifice of those soldiers in his address there.5 (“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”)6 As historian Thomas Laqueur puts it, the Gettysburg Address was “an occasion for redefining of a polity on the bodies of those who gave their lives for it.”7
This emphasis on the fallen soldier as central to the life of the nation led in World War I to dog tags, service flags, and repatriation policies, because the soldier that belonged to the nation required recognition and celebration. The ascension of the figure of the soldier continued through the Second World War, when “our boys” from Brooklyn and Biloxi “saved a world in flames.” It has, however, been complicated in the post–World War II period. The Vietnam War, in particular, tarnished the figure of the American citizen soldier, brought an end to the draft in the United States, and led to a professionalized, although not necessarily egalitarian, all-volunteer military; it changed both the actual terms of service and the terms in which service was understood.
Indeed, Cold War and post–Cold War conflicts have proved challenging to a consistent understanding of American wars as virtuous, and this has complicated the revered social position of the soldier. The Civil War and World War II have been mostly understood—despite the ways in which they were complicated and the contradictory nature of the phrase—as “good wars” fought in the name of freedom and democracy. This framing, which has gained considerable strength through popular histories and films in the last thirty years, has allowed for a post-Vietnam reclaiming of “our boys” as heroic.8 But there continues to be a tension between the wars the United States is fighting and the ideal of the “good war.” This tension has raised high-stakes questions about