Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall. Kristin Ann Hass

however, interest in using the symbolic space of the Mall intensified dramatically. During these years, in moments of crisis or rupture in the national narrative of a triumphant, virtuous, free American republic, people used the Mall to seize the national stage and rewrite national narratives. This process gave the Mall new potency as sacred national ground. Starting in 1939, civil rights activists claimed the Lincoln Memorial and the Mall, and therefore the nation, as their own. They claimed the Lincoln Memorial and the Mall as sites that could lend moral authority and national sanction to their movements.⁵⁵ For example, in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow contralto Marian Anderson to perform in their Constitution Hall because she was African American. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in protest, and the concert was brilliantly rescheduled for Easter Sunday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson sang and the Mall was changed.⁵⁶ Her performance quickly became famous. Scott Sandage quotes civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune as declaring the day after the concert, “We are on the right track, and through the Marian Anderson protest concert we made our triumphant entry into the democratic spirit of American life.”⁵⁷ Arguing that black protesters “refined a politics of memory at the Lincoln Memorial,” Sandage examines the reclaiming of Lincoln at this site through “a formula civil rights activists and other protesters would repeat at the Lincoln Memorial in more than one hundred big and small rallies in subsequent decades.”⁵⁸ In Sandage’s formulation: “It was the unrelenting nationalism that finally offered black activists a cultural language to speak to white America and to elicit support. . . . [T]he famous picket sign, ‘I AM A MAN,’ may have been morally compelling, but winning political and legal rights for blacks required a more focused message: I AM AN AMERICAN. Nowhere was this idea dramatized more vividly than in the Lincoln Memorial protests held from 1939 to 1963.”⁵⁹ Most famously, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech—arguing that equality for black Americans would be the ultimate expression of American nationalism—with Lincoln at his back and the Capitol in his sights.

      Anderson, King, and thousands of other civil rights activists in these decades managed, without inscribing a single slab of granite, to refigure the Mall.⁶⁰ They successfully staked a claim in the memory-nation nexus. They used the best of the “ideas of great men” on the Mall to make an argument about who Americans have always been and to call on the nation to live up to the ideals of the great men on the Mall. Lincoln may have been figured in his memorial as the savior rather than the emancipator, but Anderson and King, standing before Lincoln, evoked him as the agent of their freedom and asked the nation to grant them the rights that he had promised.⁶¹

      Following this lead, protesters opposed to the Vietnam War also seized the Mall. In November 1969, more than 500,000 protesters sought to use the moral authority of Lincoln to argue against a war that they understood as immoral and as a threat to freedom in Vietnam and at home. Years later, the gay rights movement also turned to Lincoln on the Mall. Activist Paul Monette recalls standing on the steps of the memorial during the April 1993 March on Washington and thinking, “We need a Lincoln to stand for equal justice and bind us together again.”⁶² This repeated use of the Mall for protests spoke to the curious success of the McMillan plan. The Mall had achieved the status of sacred national ground. The uses to which it was put may not have been just what McMillan envisioned, but these activists and others who followed sought to refigure the national by claiming and, in some cases, reinscribing the symbolic landscape that Burnham and his associates had charged so highly.

      In 1979, Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs initiated a new era for the Mall when he proposed building a Vietnam War memorial there. This memorial set off a decades-long argument about how the nation should be imagined. This debate has changed the Mall and the argument it makes about the nation.⁶³ It is possible to tell the story of the Mall from 1791 to 1979 without mentioning war memorials because, until 1979, there were no national war memorials on the Mall.⁶⁴ Whereas previously all the memorials on the Mall had commemorated great men and their ideas, Scruggs changed that with the initially controversial, then much beloved and Mall-altering Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

      Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran who was reading Carl Jung and thinking about the collective unconscious, set out quite explicitly to change the collective consciousness in the United States regarding Vietnam veterans.⁶⁵ The title of his book about building the memorial, To Heal a Nation, expresses his intentions accurately: he sought a collective recovery from the personal and national traumas of the Vietnam War. He was particularly interested in recovering the social position of the soldier, and the war memorial he built to do this was successful beyond his wildest dreams. Designed by Maya Lin, the memorial is distinct from anything else on the Mall. It is conspicuously modern, the antithesis of the neoclassical style that pervades the rest of the Mall. Located just northeast of the Lincoln Memorial, it is a black granite V set into the earth and inscribed with the names of all American KIAs, POWs, and MIAs from the Vietnam War. It is not Beaux-Arts triumphalism or a figural assertion of heroism. It is mournful and complicated. It asks its audience to think about the loss of life in the war, and it does not celebrate that loss.

      So much has been written about the Wall by others, and by myself, that I will not rehearse the long arguments about it here, except to say that it was hated for its lack of interest in figurative representation of the heroism of the soldier and loved for its insistent naming of those soldiers. The war is intentionally effaced; it is a veterans’ memorial, not a war memorial. The veterans who fought to get the memorial built made this crucial decision. They wanted a memorial that would “heal the nation” and that would recognize the sacrifices of those who served and died. Lin’s design sought to remember the dead without celebrating the war. Her impulses were antiwar. Scruggs’s impulses were, I think, mixed; he was deeply prosoldier but agnostic about the war. In the end, Scruggs’s vision and Lin’s design (and the heroic figures, the Three Fighting Men, that the Reagan administration required them to add) managed to celebrate the soldiers without celebrating the war. The memorial enables the soldiers to regain their social position because they sacrificed in spite of the deeply troubling nature of the war.

      Architectural historian Dell Upton has claimed that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial made memorials matter again after a more than sixty years of dormancy.⁶⁶ There are two reasons for this. The first and most obvious is that the memorial was an enormous success. After a boisterous period of public debate, people 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