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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 the soldiers fighting in these wars and has fueled the war memorial boom on the National Mall.

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 the individual soldier, the Second World War was remembered with infrastructure (parks, highways, auditoriums) for the victorious GIs and families of the fallen. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—surely a distinctive memorial—the dead are named, and ordinary people bring unsolicited offerings to the site. This intensification of the attention paid to individual loss—from the grave, to the name, to the spoils of victory, to the bottle of aftershave left at the Wall—makes sense as a democratization narrative: the common man (if not the common woman) is honored, rather than the state for which he fought. This is just what Lincoln asked for at Gettysburg: that the soldier be honored above all else. As historian Ed Linenthal describes it, American memorial culture in this period was “characterized by the democratization of memorials and memorial process.”²⁷

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 in deep research, sensitive to contexts and to the varieties of memory at play in any given epoch.”⁴¹ Witnessing the memorial process in this way enables us to reveal the way nationalism is constructed.

Today, Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson all occupy the Mall with such gravity that it is hard to imagine this national memorial space without them.⁴² But, in fact, the story of the Mall is one of periods of great investment in and anxiety about its symbolic potential alternating with periods of neglect and indifference. In the periods of neglect, it has been home to slave pens, untamed gardens, Civil War deserters, “the flotsam of the war,” Army hospitals, brothels, public markets, grazing cattle, the city’s railway station, and temporary military buildings. In periods of great interest, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and now a parade of twentieth-century wars have been reworked to define the nationalism of their moment.

In 1791 Washington charged Pierre L’Enfant with the design of the new capital. L’Enfant wanted the U.S. capital to look like the center of the mighty empire he hoped it would become. As his map shows, the symbolic center of his city was an “immense T-shaped public park”—which would eventually become the Mall.⁴³ L’Enfant and his plan have been much celebrated since 1791, but these celebrations often neglect to mention that, before his plan was realized, he was forced to resign because he had “difficulty in subordinating himself,” and his grandiosity was not fully realized as the capital city was built.⁴⁴ The Mall as a site of explicit national symbolic speech was largely neglected into the 1830s.⁴⁵ In fact, to accommodate the slave trade that had become so central to American life, the early nineteenth-century Mall was home to sprawling slave pens. The brutal reality of slave pens was hardly what L’Enfant had imagined for this grand public space, but it does say something quite pointed about national life in the United States in the early 1830s.

Dramatic changes on the Mall later in the nineteenth century made it more explicitly a national symbolic space, but it was transformed in fits and starts—and with difficulty. The Washington Monument, the beginnings of the Smithsonian Institution, and the development of elaborate gardens shaped the Mall, while sectionalism, the Civil War, and its costs shook the nation. The Washington Monument Society was formed in 1833. Its members planned to spend no less than $1 million and vowed to build “the highest edifice in the world and the most stupendous and magnificent monument ever erected to man.”⁴⁶ In 1848, when ground was broken, the speeches reflected the anxieties of the moment, suggesting that the size of the memorial spoke to the enormity of the project of holding the nation together.⁴⁷

FIGURE 1. Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan of Washington. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

As the monument was being built, other long-lasting changes were taking place on the Mall. An 1846 act of Congress gave the newly formed Smithsonian Institution the land on the Mall from Ninth to Twelfth Streets, and in 1855, the first Smithsonian building went up on the Mall. The Smithsonian Institute Building, known as “the Castle” because of its twelfth-century Gothic-style architecture, was the first of twelve museum buildings that would line the Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Built at a rate of roughly one every twenty years, these museums eventually defined the eastern half of the Mall. These institutions established the Mall as a site of pilgrimage for the linked receipt of knowledge and the celebration of national achievements.⁴⁸

Despite the great height of the Washington Monument and the potency of the artifacts on display on the Mall by the 1880s, a plan for fully developing the national monumental core was not put into place until the turn of the century, when the success of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago inspired a Michigan senator to reclaim and redesign the Mall. The success of the “White City” at the Chicago World’s Fair in articulating a vision of a civilized, contained, vaulted, white nation is well known. Less has been made of the fact that the success of the Chicago fair inspired a revitalization of the real national capital.⁴⁹ In 1900, Senator James McMillan set out to remake the National Mall in the shape of the White City. With presidential and congressional support, McMillan formed the McMillan Commission and asked the fair’s architect, Daniel Burnham, to lead the effort to realize the symbolic potential of the long-neglected national landscape in Washington.

The commission published its plan in 1902. Its principal elements involved shifting the Mall to realign the Capitol and the Washington Monument; moving the train station off the Mall; placing the Lincoln Memorial at the west end of the Mall facing east; building a Jefferson Memorial on the north-south axis of the Mall facing the White House and the Washington Monument; and building a memorial bridge, lined up behind the Lincoln Memorial, that would connect the Mall to Arlington National Cemetery. The effect of the plan was to create a clean, clearly delineated ceremonial federal space that was removed from the city itself. (This separated it from the local space, allowing for a literal whitening of the most heavily black city in the United States at the turn of the century.) The plan also added two “great men of ideas” to the Mall: Lincoln and Jefferson.

With this plan, Burnham and his associates were able to reproduce some of the successes of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. They achieved this on a grand scale. They made order out of chaos, expressed insistent national pride, and most importantly, drew sharp lines around highly charged national symbolic space. Though this space would continue to be refigured and fought over, the McMillan Mall would become, in the minds of many, the Mall—a finished work of art that defined a finished nation, a high point of democratic civilization embodied by Lincoln and Jefferson and their enormous Doric columns.

The early twentieth century on the Mall was also marked by a much less compelling, but not unimportant, centralization and federalization of patriotic practices and productions of the past in national space. A slew of federal agencies were established to oversee the Mall. It makes sense that as the Mall took on greater significance, the mechanism for maintaining and controlling it tightened. In 1916, the National Parks Service was formed as part of the executive branch of the federal government to “conserve natural and historic objects.” The National Parks Service assumed responsibility for oversight of national monuments, historic parks, national memorials, historic trails, heritage areas, battlefields, and cemeteries. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts was established in 1910 by an act of Congress, and the National Capital Park Commission was established by an act of Congress in 1924 to maintain and oversee District of Columbia parks.⁵⁰ In varying degrees, these agencies were created for and charged with the protection of the Mall that had emerged from the McMillan Commission Report. The Commission of Fine Arts was, in fact, a direct response to the controversies surrounding the Lincoln Memorial.⁵¹ Clearly, the Mall remade by the McMillan Commission represented a triumph of the national that Congress and others deemed worth protecting.⁵²

FIGURE 2. McMillan plan. (Courtesy of the National Capital Planning Commission.)

The intense interest in building on the Mall dissipated after the major elements of the McMillan plan were completed. Between 1935 and 1979, there was another long period of relative neglect and disinterest in adding to the McMillan plan. Museums filled out the center of the Mall, and there were impassioned debates over their architectural forms, but little attention was paid to the memorial core. In fact, the western end of the Mall, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, was crammed with temporary military buildings during World War I that were not removed until the 1970s. Nixon, who flew over them in his helicopter almost daily, complained that they were eyesores.⁵³ He wanted them to be replaced with “Tivoli-like” gardens. Although the agencies responsible for the Mall found Nixon’s plans to be too elaborate, his request resulted in the creation of Constitution Gardens. Stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, just north of the Reflecting Pool, which runs between the memorials, these gardens were dedicated in 1976 as a modest bicentennial tribute. In 1982, a few months before the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the humble Signers Memorial for the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence was dedicated in Constitution Gardens.⁵⁴

Also in the period 1935–79, 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 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 happened on the Mall. The ascension of the figure of the soldier is linked to the maintenance of boundaries of inclusion and shapes thinking about war and soldiering in ways that have real consequences for the endless parade of pilgrims to the memorials. This is how we have remembered our young dead soldiers who do not speak.