Remembering a Forgotten War: Memorial Day and World War I

Published in 'Beyond the Dead Horizon', editor Nicholas J. Saunders, published by Oxbow books. Often overlooked in the vast literature on First World War commemoration, memorials to American veterans – the ‘Doughboys’ – often exist in contested space. Many have faded from popular memory, while others are remembered in ways not intended by those who commissioned, built, and used them. Some survive in legally contested landscapes, where efforts are being made to increase their national importance, or arguments rage about cross-shaped monuments and their appropriateness vis-à-vis political correctness, and the American ideal of separation between church and state. Others have been subsumed within memorials to more recent and better-remembered wars. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to study the changing meanings of these memorials, according to shifting social and cultural attitudes in the United States, and to explore the different attitudes towards First World War memorials on American soil and those in Europe. The aim is to reveal what these memorials and their landscapes tell us about the ever-changing engagements of the United States with the Great War for Civilization.

Journal of First World War Studies 3(1) (87-106).

This article examines the history of the Great War in New York City and the means by which it has been remembered and forgotten through the presence and absence of war memorials. New York City played a unique role in the history of the Great War, contributing to the war effort even before the declaration of war by the United States in 1917. The wartime experiences in the city were accompanied by political and racial tensions as fears of foreign influences undermining the city and the wider nation were ever-present. In a city which had witnessed large-scale immigration over the preceding century, fears of unrest or unpatriotic and un-American behaviour preoccupied both the city and the federal government. Nevertheless, the wartime contribution of the city's foreign-born residents was substantial as large numbers registered for military service. As a means of reaffirming the principles of patriotism and an ‘American’ identity for the city, after the Armistice the official bodies and veterans groups worked to develop a singular expression or ‘spirit’ for the local war memorials. As the schemes for a central war memorial for the city floundered, the local memorials served as a means for residents to adopt and adapt this hegemonic expression of ‘American’ identity and form specific memories of the war for each community.

Local monuments were rising in prominence in the wake of the most devastating global conflict to date: The First World War, or "The Great War." The District of Columbia War Memorial is a single example of many that fit a distinctive decorative program and commemorative use. It was placed at a site befitting its purpose of commemoration on the local level in Washington, DC; however, the site, one chosen from many, was rising towards prominence in the 1920’s and would become the symbolic center of the country as the National Mall with its myriad war and state memorials. In this way, the DC War Memorial predates and belies its significant location: it is a local monument on the National Mall dedicated to only 499 men and women who died from the District. Additionally, it is a monument to World War I where there are few in the capital. Seventy years after the dedication of the memorial, issues over statehood came to light as it belongs solely to the District, which, yet, does not have full legislative representation in our national government. Legislators in the early 2000’s pushed to have the monument refurbished to better fit with the memorial landscape that grew around it, dredging up issues of statehood for the District and demonstrating the significance the memorial attains during its lifetime. This paper will examine memorials in the wake of World War I, introduce the District’s war memorial and also briefly compare some of the other prominent examples of war memorials that commemorate the Great War. It will then discuss the attempt to rededicate the memorial in the early 2000’s. This includes the social and political battle that ensued and what the memorial means today surrounded by predominately national memorials.

This article adopts a heterotopological approach to the spatial organization of the National September 11 Memorial and Memorial Museum. We argue that although numerous organizational stakeholders, such as the families of 9/11 victims, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the New York Police Department, and the Port Authorities, had monolithic propositions about how to commemorate 9/11, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum ended up transforming into a heterotopic space marked by contestations, juxtapositions, and contradictions. Although many wanted to simply tell a unified tale about heroism and resilience, the social constructions of Ground Zero space have resisted monolithic historical accounts of remembrance despite the influential forces of utopian visions. This analysis contributes to the study of spatial and mnemonic representations by demonstrating the uses of heterotopology as a heuristic tool for unpacking polysemic and polyvalent spaces of commemoration that may otherwise appear consensual and monoglossic.

Journal of American History, 2015

From 1930 through 1933 an unusual program funded by the federal government and popularly known as the gold star mother pilgrimages sent bereaved mothers and widows of World War I servicemen to Europe to witness their loved ones’ graves. But the War Department outraged African Americans by segregating the pilgrimages, leading the NAACP and the Chicago Defender to urge eligible black women to boycott the program. While some 25 mothers and widows ultimately heeded this call, 279 black pilgrims made the trip. Over the course of two weeks, they not only visited the American cemeteries, but also went on sightseeing expeditions, dined at elegant restaurants, and attended variety shows staged by famous African American expatriates. Upon their return, many of the pilgrims disputed negative coverage in the black press and encouraged other eligible black women to participate. The story of the black pilgrimages, which unfolded in a time of vicious racism and economic free fall, is rife with paradox: even as the government segregated the black pilgrims, it recognized their civic contributions as war mothers and widows in an unprecedented and lavish manner. This jarring contradiction stemmed from a fundamental conflict between the ideal of martial citizenship, which promised compensation for military service, and racially based conceptions of American identity. It also reflected the Hoover Administration’s strained attempt to mollify white southern voters (by enforcing segregation), while quelling black protest and averting international censure (by treating the black pilgrims royally). The outcry over the pilgrims’ segregation points to the centrality of gender and class within the rapidly shifting terrain of interwar black politics. Due largely to ties to the Republican Party, leading African American clubwomen played little role in the protests, even though the immediate victims of the policy were all women. Instead, elite men from outside the South organized the boycott, arguing that to accede to segregation would be to dishonor the dead and render their sacrifices meaningless. The campaign they waged reflects the long shadow cast by World War I, as well as the rise of a masculinist ethos that conflated the fight for racial justice with a defense of the rights of black manhood. At the same time, it exemplifies a much longer tradition of civil rights activism, in which blacks appealed to federal authority to demand inclusion within the national body. Most importantly, the episode allows rare insight into the views of society’s most dispossessed members. Those who sailed declined to act as self-denying race mothers and instead laid claim to an unusual survivors’ benefit and the opportunity for international travel it afforded. They defended their decision using a language of respectability typically associated with the black elite; emphasizing how courteously they had been treated, they implied that their civic status had been honored in an appropriately gendered manner, despite segregation. In the end, however, the pilgrims’ experience of state-sanctioned segregation proved so anomalous as to be disbelieved, and by 1932, a rumor that they had been consigned to cattle boats had gained widespread credence in black communities. Democratic operatives used this rumor to powerful effect, helping to fuel the seismic shift in black voting patterns away from the Republican Party. However inaccurate, the arresting image of black women huddled on cattle ships, insulted and demeaned, lodged in collective memory because it captured essential truths about the civic exclusions and gendered forms of humiliation that African Americans had endured in times both past and present.

This course examines how memory has been constructed, used and reshaped in myriad ways and for a multitude of reasons amid a half century of cataclysmic cultural and political upheaval in the United States, beginning with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ending with the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City in September 2001.

1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2019

The centenary of the First World War brought greater focus on how the war was remembered across the United States. The conflict is often regarded as "forgotten" within American society, and the advent of the centenary was promoted by federal and state organisations as a means of retrieving it and defining it as the formative point of the "American Century". This particular process of remembering was at the centre of exhibitions and displays from 2014 onwards and constitutes a modern American memory of the First World War.