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Abstract
We forward a reading of the World War II Memorial, taking several peculiarities of its dedication ceremony as hermeneutic prompts. We contend that the Memorial's rhetoric affirms contemporary U.S. imperialism under the revered sign of World War II, “speaking” more about the present than about the past. We argue that this interpretation forwards important issues for memory studies, about assessing the ethical and political legitimacy of particular renditions of the past in the present.
The authors would like to thank Brian L. Ott, Barbara Biesecker, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful readings of and suggestions for this essay.
Notes
See “ABMC.” The ABMC administers twenty-four overseas military cemeteries as well as twenty-five memorials abroad. It established three memorials in the Washington area, now administered by the National Park Service (NPS). See United States. American Battle Monuments Commission. “Memorials.”
There are defenders, but relatively few. Some of those few have praised the Memorial in rather muted tones. See Forgey.
Loewen (36, 40) argues that “a third age comes into play whenever one visits a historic site—the viewer's own era.”
The first and second authors made ten site visits to the WWIIM, between 2004 and 2009, and attended the dedication. The third author made two site visits to the Memorial, in 2005.
See Rothenbuhler, especially his treatments of political, rhetorical, and civic rituals, and of mediated communication in ritual form (78–104).
Sherman observes in his book on French interwar commemoration that dedication ceremonies were the “delta into which descriptive language flowed and … self-consciously public occasions on which authorities sought to fix certain ideas and images in memory” (194).
The event was held in the context of a hundred-day celebration, running from May through August that featured special museum exhibits and seminars, musical events, and so forth. See “America Celebrates.”
The dedication was covered live on five television networks (Allen). Attendance of 800,000 was expected for the four-day celebration (Janofsky). Speeches delivered at the dedication and the Service of Celebration and Thanksgiving, at the Washington National Cathedral earlier in the day, are available respectively at: “Dedication”; and “Events.”
In addition to Biesecker, “Renovating,” see the following: Armada; Biesecker, “Remembering”; Blair, “Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites”; Blair, “Reflections”; Blair and Michel, “AIDS Memorial Quilt”; Blair and Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights”; Dickinson; Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Memory and Myth”; Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces”; Ehrenhaus; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation”; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Memory as Social Action”; Victoria J. Gallagher, “Remembering Together?”; Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti; Katriel; Mandziuk; Marback; McDaniel; Pezzullo; and Prosise. Also see the essays as well as the editors' introduction, “Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, eds.
Bergman's studies of orientation films at memory sites demonstrate how they offer pre-“readings” of the sites they interpret. See “Can Patriotism”; and “Critical Analysis.”
The closest critical assessments to our own are by Knight; and Doss. Knight claims the WWIIM “celebrates the rise of an American imperium.” While we agree with that claim, much of his article is about the aesthetic of the memorial design and the Memorial's location. His claim is consonant with ours but grounded quite differently. Title notwithstanding, Doss's essay focuses on US war-related memorials at large and the discourses of “gratitude” that characterize some recent World War II memory work. Only about three pages of her article address the Memorial's imperialist “overtones” (241–44). Her essay represents an important set of considerations for US commemoration in general, but we believe that the case for the “imperialism” of the WWIIM needs to be argued more carefully, for it is such a consequential claim.
Our critique does not revisit the long sequence of conflicts over the chosen site and design. We attend to public critical comment made after the final design approval, with most emphasis on coverage of the Memorial during its final construction stages and opening. The sustained public mêlée about the site and design has garnered ample coverage and assessment by others. Documentation of the controversy and the process of building the WWIIM (as well as a lavish defense of it) may be found in Mills.
This paper also does not contest the WWIIM, nor does anyone else we know of, on grounds having to do with US participation in the war. Gopnik suggests, for example, that “the veterans of World War II deserved a work of public art so great and so courageous that it would instantly evoke their greatness and their courage, and the daring ideals they fought for.” Ivy suggests that the Second World War “calls for majestic resolution.” Kennicott sees the need for a memorial as “taken for granted.” None of these commentators was a proponent of the Memorial's specific design, but they are all clear about the fact that World War II and its veterans merit major commemoration. Also see Yardley, “Tunnel Vision.”
The inscription reads: “Here in the presence of Washington and Lincoln, one the eighteenth-century father and the other the nineteenth-century preserver of our nation, we honor those twentieth-century Americans who took up the struggle during the Second World War and made the sacrifices to perpetuate the gift our forefathers entrusted to us as a nation conceived in liberty and justice.”
For titles of the bronzeworks, see “The World War II Memorial,” in Brinkley; or “National World War II Memorial Bas-Relief Panels.”
See also Botsford; and Ivy.
Also see Infield; and Dobbin.
Its associations with World War II, however, are undeniable. One commentator suggests moving the sculpture to the Mall to make it the centerpiece of the WWIIM. See Yardley, “Tunnel Vision.”
A special supplement to The Washington Post Magazine the week of the dedication acknowledged this in “World War II: More Than One Memorial.” It listed seventeen additional sites related to World War II, all in Washington or neighboring Arlington, Virginia.
“How are the states arranged?” is one of two “Frequently Asked Questions” on the National Park Service's WWIIM's Web page. The point here is that it is asked enough to merit an answer. Equally interesting, though, is the answer: “Much like a formal dinner table. The host or guest of honor is at the center, in this case the field of stars. To the right of the place of honor would be the second most important, in this case the first state Delaware. To the left of the center would be third, in this case the second state Pennsylvania, then it simply goes back and forth around the circle” (United States. National Park Service). Whether the NPS answer is intended to obfuscate the irrelevant and inappropriate gesture of the ordering of states, or to conjure an image of a formal dinner on the Mall, it adds even more interpretive clutter and nonsense.
The gold star dates to the First World War, when a flag with a blue star was displayed, indicating a family member serving in the military. If s/he was killed or died in service abroad, a gold star replaced the blue one. See “History.”
The genre controversy was most heated before the Memorial was built. See Dodd. But the fascist associations continued to be raised, even after the Memorial was completed. See Flamini. The controversy intensified in 2001, when the press revealed that a general contractor for the Memorial—Tompkins Builders—is owned by a German construction company that used slave labor from the concentration camps during World War II. See Fisher.
Organizers were concerned about health risks, partly because of experience: “At the dedication of the Korean War Veterans Memorial in 1995, 93-degree temperatures resulted in one cardiac arrest and 500 cases of heat exhaustion. Today is expected to be considerably milder … but the crowd is also expected to be considerably older” (Reel, “Very Big”).
Archbishop Philip M. Hannan, a Chaplain in World War II, offered the invocation. And Dr. Barry C. Black, Chaplain of the US Senate, delivered the benediction.
There were other exclusions too. Denyce Graves performed the national anthem and “God Bless America” near the end of the ceremony. But for an event billed as “Tribute to a Generation,” it is odd that all the speakers in the official ceremony were white men.
Band of Brothers “tells the story of Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army.” See “Band of Brothers.”
There is no impropriety in honoring current military troops during a US Memorial Day ritual, although that is not technically the aim of Memorial Day. Its purpose traditionally has been to remember those who have died in military service to the nation, but it has expanded and contracted over time, suggesting that it can accommodate variation (Albanese). We object to a World War II commemorative event serving as a pretext for presencing the Iraq war. Except for Bush's radio address, the settings for these statements were events more specifically targeted and named than the annual public rite of honoring the military dead of US wars.
For example, on July 4, 2003, entrants to the Mall for the Independence Day celebration passed through security checks, but aerial surveillance stayed on the perimeter of the Mall.
We adapt this terminology—respectfully—from the title of Rosenzweig and Thelen's important book, The Presence of the Past.
The number of publications on US empire (and even global histories of imperialism) published during the two Bush terms is staggering. The following are a very few of the many examples: Bacevich, American Empire; Burbach; Colas and Saull; David and Grondin; Foster; Harvey; Judis, Folly; Johnson; Münkler; and Newhouse.
The Project for the New American Century was co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Among the signers of PNAC's “Statement of Principles” were several who went on to hold important posts in the Bush administration: Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Paula Dobriansky, Aaron Friedberg, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Peter W. Rodman, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. Another signer was presidential brother, Jeb Bush. PNAC directors and “staff,” and others associated with PNAC, are regular contributors to influential periodicals, prolific writers of “project memoranda” addressed to “opinion leaders,” spokespersons at congressional hearings, and book authors, etc. Not all advocate imperialism by name, but several do.
According to a PBS Frontline report, which includes the excerpt quoted here, Wolfowitz, then under-secretary of defense, “supervised the drafting” of the 1992 policy statement, an “internal set of military guidelines that typically is prepared every few years … . The 45-page classified document circulated for several weeks at senior levels in the Pentagon. But controversy erupted after it was leaked to The New York Times and The Washington Post and the White House ordered then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to rewrite it” (“Frontline”).
Whether September 11 represented a stark discontinuity is subject to debate. Alexander argues that the “world changed in an instant,” when “the attacks transformed our nation from a benign hegemon into a ferocious avenger” (5). Others see the events following September 11 as part of a broader scenario. Bacevich maintains that “the terrorists succeeded only in reinvigorating the conviction that destiny summons the United States, the one true universal nation, to raise up a universal civilization based on American norms” (New American Militarism 13).
In this same article, Boot maintained that “the September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.”
Such language was apparently not completely absent, however: “When the White House offered former Sen. Bob Kerrey the job of head of the Provisional Authority in Iraq … officials asked him if he were interested in being ‘viceroy.’ Kerrey, taken aback, turned down the job” (Judis, “Bush's Neo-Imperialist”).
This bill, entitled “The American Heroes Repatriation Act” (United States. Congress), specified France and Belgium as the only two locations from which such repatriation could occur.
See Younge and Henley; and Dunleavy, for how venomous this “debate” became.
According to Caruso, despite other countries' criticisms of US policy, “it is the French who have borne the brunt of U.S. scorn” for their opposition.
Although ceremonies for the return of US war dead (including media coverage of the coffins) had occurred during the Reagan, G. H. W. Bush, and Clinton presidencies—even into the first two years of George W. Bush's presidency—news coverage and public circulation of images of these grim homecomings were banned again by the Pentagon immediately before the Iraq war.
The incorporation of state seals at Henri-Chapelle seems to have been an afterthought, compelled by aesthetic, not political considerations. In the ABMC Secretary's Report in November 1956, Brigadier General Thomas North reported that “to relieve the plainness of the twenty-four flat pylons, we plan to carve the seals of the various States.” Worth noting also is that those pylons at Henri-Chapelle are not framing features of the space, as they are in the WWIIM.
Statistics on war-related deaths are notoriously unreliable, sometimes varying from source to source by as many as twenty million (worldwide). Still, it is important to recognize the differential between US casualties and those of the war at large, not to diminish the US role, but to place it in perspective. One source estimates US deaths at 500,000 (“Statistics”). That source puts worldwide death at over 52 million. A fair comparison to the US casualty numbers might be that of France, given the anti-French sentiment circulating in 2003 and 2004, especially having to do with France's “surrender” to the Germans in 1940. The same source estimates French casualties at 340,000 military deaths and 470,000 civilian deaths, totaling 810,000 (“Statistics”). Another source lists US deaths at 298,000 and French at 563,000 (McDonald). Also see Fischer et al.
The officers quoted are: Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, Generals Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George C. Marshall. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman each have two quotations. Walter Lord, author of books about the war, is quoted once.
The only other exception that we can find is the US Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, in Washington, DC. In that case, a quotation inscribed on the Memorial is attributed to George H. W. Bush.
It is interesting to contemplate why the text from this dedication stone and the names of the states and territories are the only inscriptions not reproduced in Brinkley or the ABMC fact sheet; both enumerate all of the other inscriptions. We will leave it to readers to speculate with us. See “World War II Memorial”; and “National World War II Memorial Inscriptions.”
See Brummett's charming description of categorical interpretation: “Think of any given discourse as a bricolage of signs, a collection of sights and sounds, the scattered contents of a child's collection of varicolored plastic blocks … . The most delightful block structure is that which uses the most blocks; the best claim for a category is that which uses the most available signs.” He suggests that “one who categorizes a discourse also says what it is like or unlike, giving it discursive allies and enemies … . Since discourses are known by the companies in which they are seen, this identification of like and unlike can be grounds for evaluating the discourse” (128. Emphasis original).
See, for example, Rosenzweig and Thelen; Sturken; Irwin-Zarecka; and Hobsbawm and Ranger.
See, for example, the many fine essays in Olick, ed. For useful literature reviews, see Misztal; and Wertsch.
See Nora 3; and Huyssen 17. As hopeful signs of things to come in memory studies, wherein ethical postures are beginning to be addressed and in which the remembering-forgetting dialectic may be regarded as something other than an all-too-easy dodge, see Biesecker, “No Time”; Prosise; Connerton; and Olick, Politics, especially 40–54.
With apologies to our colleague for putting words in his mouth.