My first book, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, contributes to this democratization narrative. There I argue that African Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and working-class Irish and Italian Catholic Americans transformed public memorial practices in the United States by bringing their private practices of grief to the Wall. These rituals, especially the leaving of personal objects, introduced ways of negotiating the liminal position of the dead into national spaces. That some of the least politically and socially powerful people in the United States rewrote nation-forging memorial practices to demand that attention be paid to increasingly personalized individual losses is potentially democratizing. As Linenthal suggests, in this moment, “memorialization had become a significant form of cultural expression. . . . [M]uch more than a gesture of remembrance, memorialization was a way to stake one’s claim to visible presence in the culture,” which often “became a strategy of excavation and preservation of long hidden ethnic American voices and grievances.”28 These elements of the democratization narrative get played out in dramatic terms at the Vietnam Memorial.
There is much to celebrate in this democratization narrative. Honoring citizen soldiers seems laudable, as does public speech from the ground up. The emergence of a powerful, multiracial, multiethnic public memorial form, which demands that attention be paid to the individual bodies of fallen soldiers, also seems worth celebrating. But the democratization narrative is not the only story to be told about the building of war memorials in the United States. Especially since the Civil War, U.S. war memorials have also worked to imagine a white nation. The Civil War has been remembered in Gettysburg, Washington, and beyond in terms of a racialized reconciliation—expressing white unity, repressing the memory of slavery, and erasing race from the memory of the war. Kirk Savage writes, “The commemoration of the Civil War in physical memorials is ultimately a story of systematic cultural repression, carried out in the guise of reconciliation and harmony.”29 Cecelia O’Leary sees this “racialized reconciliation”—of white northern veterans and white southern veterans—expressed in war memorials, battlefield celebrations, soldiers’ reunions, and the emergence of Memorial Day in this period.30 As Blight describes it, “The problem of ‘reunion’ and the problem of ‘race’ were trapped in a tragic, mutual dependence” that defined memorial practice well into the twentieth century.31 This whitening of the memory of war deeply complicates the democratization narrative.
The long period of relative disinterest in war memorials that stretched from the end of the Civil War memorial-building boom in the 1920s into the post–World War II period allowed the visual tension between the democratization narrative and the whitening of the memory of soldiers to lie dormant. It is important to note, however, that the whitening of memory did not disappear in the postwar period. It can be traced in quite dramatic terms to the living memorials that were built after the war. Memorial highways were often constructed over African American neighborhoods bulldozed to create space for them, and memorial pools were often built in suburbs to which African Americans were denied access by the Federal Housing Authority’s redlining practices, which sharply restricted African American access to mortgage loans, and by restricted covenants.32 The representational problem of the tradition of “the white soldier who gets remembered” and the actual populations that served in wars waged by the United States, however, did not return until the 1980s, when interest in memorials was renewed.
This representational problem for memorials needs to be understood in terms of broad shifts in the thinking about race in American culture as well as specific public understandings of race and the military. Further, the specific question of race and military service was, and continues to be, important to debates about the all-volunteer military. The draft ended with the Vietnam War in 1973 in part because of public protests about the racial and economic inequality of the Selective Service System. There were, however, other reasons. As historian Beth Bailey explains it, “A group of free-market economists who gained influence in the presidential campaign and administration of Richard M. Nixon provided the initial and determining structure for the all-volunteer force,” ending the draft as a political liability and turning over military service to the free-market arena.33 Still, a major concern about the all-volunteer military was that it would be predominantly filled by poor African Americans. Bailey describes this concern as cutting across the political spectrum: “Some worried about the exploitation of black Americans, in part because of a powerful and persistent belief that African Americans had been treated as cannon fodder in the Vietnam War and in part because of a belief that volunteers drawn heavily from the nation’s most disadvantaged group would not be true volunteers.” She adds, “Others feared an army composed of poor—and thus presumably angry, degenerate, or unskilled—black men.”34 Both anxieties were in play for the individuals and agencies working to build war memorials, and the memorials they built reflect the difficulties in negotiating the histories of racialized memory and democratized memory.
So while “remember the soldiers, remember the soldiers, remember the soldiers” is a mantra of the memorial conversations on the Mall, the content to be recalled, or recollected, is sometimes only minimally present and is often misconstrued for the purposes of the present. The fact of remembering—or, as Winter would have it, the remembrance—seems to be more important than what happened in the past. James Young comments, “It is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.”35 In fact, on the Mall in the recent past it is almost as if once we gesture toward memory, we divest ourselves of the obligation to remember what actually happened.
Writing about scholarship on commemoration, historian Kirk Savage begins with a reminder that commemoration is defined as a “call to remembrance.”36 He understands this to mean that commemorations “prod collective memory in some conspicuous way.” And though he is thoughtfully skeptical about what collective memory might actually be, his simple definition is salient for contemporary commemoration in the United States. A will for memory to be evoked—the call to remembrance—is expressed unequivocally, but the evocation of memory trumps remembrance itself.37 Memory, in the common use of the word, is both a faculty and an object. Memorializing has as one of its effects linking the faculty of memory with the experience of connecting to the meaning and value of the nation, quite apart from that other meaning, the particular thing remembered. As a result, in thinking about the memorials on the Mall, historian Joanna Bourke’s pithy observation that remembering “operates in the service of social power” is more pressing than tracking the myriad processes of memory.38
For this reason, I stick closely to the conversations about the memorials as they were planned and debated. Witnessing is a methodological imperative for this book. It witnesses the process through which social power is expressed in the minutes of meetings and published reports and stories in the press; it observes and reports on the operation of social power in the details of the process of remembrance.39 Each chapter takes up a specific memorial project and systematically tracks the conversations and debates that surrounded the memorial from the first suggestions for a memorial through always tumultuous site and design debates to the memorial’s dedication. Each chapter studies these debates as they have been preserved in the papers of key organizations, the memories of key participants, and the newspapers reporting on the memorials in progress.40 This allows us to observe the process through which the past is invented to serve the social needs of the present. It reveals complicated, confounding, uneven, and often extraordinary processes of constructing nationalism. Blight has called for studies of memory that are “rooted