Nearly all the advocates for the new memorials on the Mall are quite explicit about wanting to build their memorials in response to the problematic memory of the Vietnam War. For many, the crisis of patriotism produced by the Vietnam War created a need to reassert U.S. nationalism in particular terms, and for all of them, honoring the memory of American soldiers who served in Vietnam inspired a desire to produce more memory of more soldiers. War memorials on the Mall emerged as important sites at which to do just this. These memorial advocates were probably not studying scholarly theories of nationalism, but they may as well have been. The most pervasive theme in scholarly thinking about nations and nationalism is that memories of dead soldiers are central to the construction of nationalism.9 Nineteenth-and twentieth-century theorists of nations return again and again to the creation of shared pasts, particularly shared memories of soldiers. These shared pasts, or memories, are not merely expressions of nationalism; they are constitutive of it. Nations and memories, in fact, exist in mutual dependence—a “memory-nation nexus.”10 In this formulation, nation and memory are inextricably bound; memories constitute nations, and as sociologist Jeffery Olick writes, memory is “the handmaiden of nationalist zeal.”11
In 1882, one of the first theorists of nationalism, Ernest Renan, described the nation as an essentially cognitive construction: “A nation is a spiritual principle, the outcome of the profound complications of history; it is a spiritual family not a group determined by the shape of the earth.”12 Emphasizing the importance of a shared past in creating the nation, he argued, “More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets.” Renan understood these shared pasts as dynamic rather than fixed: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”13 Nations, then, are constructed by, among other things, the daily willful forgetting or misremembering of shared grief. Later theorists complicate this, but Renan’s formulation of how nations operate has had remarkable staying power and suggests that war memorials serve multiple, powerful social purposes.
Historian Benedict Anderson, the most influential of recent theorists of nationalism, builds on Renan’s thinking: “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”14 He continues, “These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: What makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices?” Invented pasts, in this formulation, are so potent that they produce nations for which millions willingly die. In other words, the idea of the nation produced by a past invented by war memorials, for instance, is no trifling matter. In the thinking of these theorists, the stakes in the memorial process could, in fact, hardly be higher. This is also true for recent practitioners in the United States—it is what drove the individuals and agencies who fought to get their war memorials on the Mall built.
In The Invention of Tradition, historian Eric Hobsbawm gives specific form to the process of constructing these crucial pasts. In his formulation, nations are shaped by practices that “imply a continuity with the past” but don’t necessarily involve recalling objects or affects of the past.15 In other words, the memorial does not actually remember a discrete object, but invents a version of the past to be remembered for the purposes of the present and in so doing creates nationalism for its moment. Historian Anne McClintock echoes this point when she argues, crucially, that the past that gets invented is not random but serves social needs of the moment. She pushes for thoughtful, thorough parsing of these invented pasts: “Nationalisms are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind; as systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community, they are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed.”16 In the U.S. context, race and gender are key social differences at play in the reconstruction of U.S. nationalism. In fact, the gendering and racialization of national imagery are essential points of entry into thinking about how nations work. Race and gender appear everywhere in the debates about the memorials on the Mall, sometimes in quite unexpected ways. And they require moving beyond the potentially too loose framing of the “phantasmagoria” of a nebulous, invented shared past—or memory—into the hard particularities of these “shared imaginings.”17 The remembered past, then, is not just any past, reproduced and misremembered. Rather, particular pasts are put to particular uses in particular moments. We need to address these particularities to understand the nationalism of any particular moment.18 This is crucial framing for thinking about the nation and nationalism in the United States in the last thirty years. It is crucial, but not particularly precise framing, and it requires some further thinking about memory and remembering.
We are, as scholar after scholar has proclaimed, in the midst of a memory boom.19 According to historian Jay Winter, we are experiencing an “efflorescence of interest in the subject of memory inside the academy and beyond it.”20 In the academy, this boom has produced a rich body of literature. A good deal of energy in the literature on memory is devoted to developing terminologies and mechanisms for understanding and holding onto processes of memory, however fleetingly. Collective memory, countermemory, narrative memory, habitual memory, prosthetic memory, vernacular memory, official memory, and postmemory are just a few of the useful ways of thinking about memory that scholars have developed. Postmemory and prosthetic memory relate to the interest in memories of previous generations, for example.21 Collective memory tries to understand the broad social dynamics of memory. Vernacular memory tries to understand shared memory produced by individual actors, rather than by the state. Perhaps the two most productive areas in memory studies have been the relationship between history and memory and the links between memory and trauma.22 Historian David Blight gets quite productively at the history/memory problem when he writes, “History and memory must be treated as unsteady, conflicted companions in our quest to understand humankind’s consciousness of the past.”23 Perhaps most usefully, Jenny Edkins evokes trauma to get at the uses to which memory is put when she argues that states produce trauma, and then “by rewriting these traumas into a linear narrative of national heroism . . . [the] state conceals the trauma it has . . . produced.”24 Both ideas need to be present in thinking about memory on the Mall. Most of this sprawling literature on memory is compelling, but it also threatens to make memory so loaded a term as to be nearly meaningless and vulnerable to trivialization, as Winter describes it, “through inclusion of any and every facet of our contact with the past, personal or collective.”25
To bring some measure of precision, if this is possible, to thinking about memory, Winter suggests the term remembrance as a substitute for memory. He likes remembrance because it implies agency, locating memory with the act of remembering and therefore the context of remembering. This is useful not only because it implies agency—memory doesn’t occur in a vacuum but is the work of actors in contexts—but also because it shifts thinking about memory and, with it, the memory-nation nexus, away from actually remembering in the most common sense. Memory, in the memory-nation nexus, seems not to be about recalling an event but rather about producing a past and recollecting for the sake of the future, with a fluctuating sense of obligation to historical detail.
This flexibility of memory is certainly part of the story of war memorials in the United States. The history of American war memorials can be told in two ways. In the first version, it is a story of the democratization of memory shaped by increased interest in the sacrifices of individual citizen soldiers. In the second version, it is a story of the sacrifices of individual soldiers used to define racial difference and a highly racialized nation, despite the historical particularities of the war in which they fought.
The democratization narrative begins in Gettysburg, where the bodies of soldiers were buried in individual graves for the first time. Starting in the 1860s, the local war memorial of choice across the country was the figure of the common soldier in the town center.26 Soldiers in the First World War were issued dog tags so that they might be more efficiently identified in death, buried, and insistently named on headstones and in memorials. Building on this focus on