5 objects as part of conversation about how the war should be remembered.
9 average age of those killed 19
10 core of VVMF by no means politically or socially unified - though nearly all white and felt outcast.
11 complicated political position gave rise to strange alliances
13 paradox that it was possible to name all dead because there were so few compared to other wars.
15 references to "John Wayne" experience of many veterans
18 Frederick Hart's "Three Fightingmen" statue added at insistence of conservative lobbyists.
19 one argument against women's memorial was it would be precedent to other special interest memorials; implying idea that one symbolic gesture should be enough. Liu said wall signifies how people can't resolve the war. This sense of impossibility of representation draws individual contributions as a way of making personal sense.
23 by 1993 over 250000 objects.
26 argues there are two collections - one spontaneous, immediate, the other intended for preservation. Sees these as intrusions. says people want to get in on the act because the war changed culture for everybody.
30-33 issue about scholarship of material things.Dominant method of interpreting things via signs as a system of language doesn't do these justice. (134 footnote) If a little structuralism leads away from the concrete, a lot of structuralism leads back to it.
35 until 1860s memorial tradition relatively static. Limited use of symbolism, celebrated state as divine power, little attention to ordinary soldiers. notes that volunteer soldiers central to creation of imagined nation.
38 modern memorialising of the body; awkward contradiction about a nationalism predicated on individualism. Nationalism and individualism both products of mid C19 and dependent on each other.
39 VVM imagined and constructed as nation suffered a legitimation crisis. VVM does not celebrate nation, it celebrates dead.
42-3 Greeks named dead, unlike everyone else - tradition of democracy and citizen soldier. Basic elements of western memorial architecture lifted from Egyptian and Roman practice, not Greek.
43 believes development of citizen-soldier armies around American and French revolutions dramatically reshaped ideologies and mythologies that surrounded soldiers and nation - introduced sacrifice and sacred heroism. I'm not sure about that - maybe introduced it to a wider field, but surely the idea of the heroic sacrifice has always been around. Usually for the upper classes. I also think civil religion is bound up in this somewhere, introducing a different notion of the citizen and their relation to both state and formal religion.
44 increasingly literate soldiers began to create a literature
45ff Gettysburg memorials emerged through competition of rival lawyers Wills, who the governor asked to attend to the war dead, and McConaghy who purchased parts of the battlefield to memorialise the battle - sacred ground.
49/50 Pre Civil War state militias mostly poor and recent immigrants: 60% Irish. Low status. During war social base expanded.
51 burial practices being redesigned to accommodate urban living - "rural" cemeteries.
54 1898 Spanish-American War civilian morticians hired to disinter bodies and bring them home.
55 First World War changed practice from celebration of grandeur to memorial of loss, and warning. Masses of names. Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
57 local American WW1 memorials patriotic, celebratory and relatively practical - wanted memory of fallen to contribute to progress. Became part of civic beautification projects or to provide meeting places etc. e.g. San Francisco Veterans Building, Opera and Civic Centre; Indiana War Memorial Plaza.
58 Bureau of Memorial buildings established 1919 to lend official weight to that purpose.
59 most WW1 memorials not complete when WW2 began. US ideology was of genuine commitment to material expectation (post Depression as well as post WW2). So built useful things - football fields, playgrounds, highways, and called them memorials - 61 despite argument that just calling things memorials didn't make them memorials. Often said to be for the next generation. Prosperity, a good life for children, and patriotism became inseparable.
64 C19 cities for the silent - that shifted responsibility for public grief from the church to the city and sometimes to the nation.
65Refers to Protestant and RC traditions as if popular religion.
68 Brahmin class; growing sense of its own importance and value of its public culture.
72 embalming expanded during Civil War as response to desire to have bodies returned home. Lincoln's body embalmed and subjected to 16 day procession through major cities. Furthermore funerals became a commercial business, taken out of the hands of the family (women). E.g. ornate monuments discouraged because cemetery owners wanted a streamlined process.
77 Other traditions not standardised e.g. Mex-Am, Italian-Am, African-Am - all keep notion of relation between living and dead.
79-80 African-American graves - leaving artefacts - shells, cups etc - to ward off the dead.
82 Mex-Am lively tradition of relation to dead - San Fernando cemetery, San Antonio 83-4 grave decoration in a variety of American traditions. 84 belief in vital ongoing material relationship. civil religion is public but not necessarily official - VVM isn't
argues that in the absence of government position memorial tacitly asked people to respond with their own interpretations. Design is in tradition that has been driven by problem of representing individual sacrifice in name of imagined national community. Departs from that tradition and makes a place for private grief and powerful resentment and a whole range of funerary practices based on the idea of an active relation between the living and the dead to seep into the crack in civic and patriotic tradition.
88 General Marshall in the average rifle company, the strength was 50% composed of Negroes, Southwestern Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Guamanians, Nisei and so on... but a real cross section of American youth? Almost never.
88 the liminal contested place of the war disrupts the expectation that dead soldiers will be remembered as heroes.
91 at end of VW, Memorial Day and Veterans Day hardly observed.
95 the objects: five broad and overlapping categories:
Most popular objects - POW paraphernalia, notes, clippings. 80% of dog tags are not of the dead, though catalogues don't always give names. Some may be of suicides.
102 collection is reminder of the potency of the nation in the imaginations of grievers at the Wall... too intensely involved in negotiations with that nation to have abandoned it; they are trying to recover a usable idea of the nation in the face of the betrayals and contradictions of Vietnam.... These things do not mark the death of the nation or patriotism on the contrary they mark a tremendous effort to reconstitute the nation and the citizen's faith in it.
104-6 issue of POW/MIA - uses restless not-dead soldiers as powerful emblem for the restless dead.
1992 Veterans Day 10th anniversary of Wall - most of marchers white
Lengthy analysis of POW/MIA issue. Insertion via commercial means, e.g. selling bracelets, into the conversation at the Wall. Disliked by Scruggs, who compares them to money changers in the temple.