Remaking America

Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

John Bodnar

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691216188
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In a compelling inquiry into public events ranging from the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial through ethnic community fairs to pioneer celebrations, John Bodnar explores the stories, ideas, and symbols behind American commemorations over the last century. Such forms of historical consciousness, he argues, do not necessarily preserve the past but rather address serious political matters in the present.

Part One

MEMORY IN THE PRESENT AND THE PAST

Collective memory . . . is a current of continuous thought

whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from

the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the

consciousness of groups keeping the memory alive.

—Maurice Halbwachs

Fairy tales are told for entertainment. You’ve got to

distinguish between the myths that have to do with the

serious matter of living life in terms of the order of society

and of nature and stories with some of those motifs

that are told for entertainment.

—Joseph Campbell

It will be seen that the control of the past depends

above all on the training of memory.

—George Orwell

Nationalism usually conquers in the name of a

putative folk culture.

—Ernest Gellner

CHAPTER ONE

The Memory Debate: An Introduction

THE STORY of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial underscores a very fundamental point. The shaping of a past worthy of public commemoration in the present is contested and involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments. It is the creation of public memory in commemorative activities celebrating America’s past and the dramatic exchange of interests that are involved in such exercises that constitute the focus of this book.

The debate over the Vietnam memorial involved two main sides. The dominant interest expressed in the memorial originated in the consciousness of ordinary people most directly involved in the war: veterans who fought there and people who cared about them. In the context of American society they represented a vernacular culture which formulated specialized concerns during the war, such as their critique of official interpretations of the conflict, and after the war, such as their reverence for the dead. They manifested these concerns in the memorial itself. Standing opposed to their concerns and ultimately accommodating them were the defenders of the nation-state. The structure of national power was safeguarded by national political leaders who saw in the monument a device that would foster national unity and patriotism and many veterans and other citizens who celebrated the ideal of patriotic duty. These guardians of the nation were representatives of an overarching or official culture which resisted cultural expressions that minimized the degree to which service in Vietnam may have been valorous.

Public memory emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions. The former originates in the concerns of cultural leaders or authorities at all levels of society. Whether in positions of prominence in small towns, ethnic communities, or in educational, government, or military bureaucracies, these leaders share a common interest in social unity, the continuity of existing institutions, and loyalty to the status quo. They attempt to advance these concerns by promoting interpretations of past and present reality that reduce the power of competing interests that threaten the attainment of their goals. Official culture relies on “dogmatic formalism” and the restatement of reality in ideal rather than complex or ambiguous terms. It presents the past on an abstract basis of timelessness and sacredness. Thus, officials and their followers preferred to commemorate the Vietnam War in the ideal language of patriotism rather than the real language of grief and sorrow. Normally official culture promotes a nationalistic, patriotic culture of the whole that mediates an assortment of vernacular interests. But seldom does it seek mediation at the expense of ascendency.¹

Vernacular culture, on the other hand, represents an array of specialized interests that are grounded in parts of the whole. They are diverse and changing and can be reformulated from time to time by the creation of new social units such as soldiers and their friends who share an experience in war or immigrants who settle a particular place. They can even clash with one another. Defenders of such cultures are numerous and intent on protecting values and restating views of reality derived from firsthand experience in small-scale communities rather than the “imagined” communities of a large nation. Both cultures are championed by leaders and gain adherents from throughout the population, and individuals themselves can support aspects of both cultures at once. But normally vernacular expressions convey what social reality feels like rather than what it should be like. Its very existence threatens the sacred and timeless nature of official expressions.

Public memory is produced from a political discussion that involves not so much specific economic or moral problems but rather fundamental issues about the entire existence of a society: its organization, structure of power, and the very meaning of its past and present. This is not simple class or status politics, although those concerns are involved in the discussion, but it is an argument about the interpretation of reality; this is an aspect of the politics of culture. It is rooted not simply in a time dimension between the past and the present but is ultimately grounded in the inherent contradictions of a social system: local and national structures, ethnic and national cultures, men and women, young and old, professionals and clients, workers and managers, political leaders and followers, soldiers and commanders. Its function is to mediate the competing restatements of reality these antinomies express. Because it takes the form of an ideological system with special language, beliefs, symbols, and stories, people can use it as a cognitive device to mediate competing interpretations and privilege some explanations over others. Thus, the symbolic language of patriotism is central to public memory in the United States because it has the capacity to mediate both vernacular loyalties to local and familiar places and official loyalties to national and imagined structures.²

Public memory is a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future. It is fashioned ideally in a public sphere in which various parts of the social structure exchange views. The major focus of this communicative and cognitive process is not the past, however, but serious matters in the present such as the nature of power and the question of loyalty to both official and vernacular cultures. Public memory speaks primarily about the structure of power in society because that power is always in question in a world of polarities and contradictions and because cultural understanding is always grounded in the material structure of society itself. Memory adds perspective and authenticity to the views articulated in this exchange; defenders of official and vernacular interests are selectively retrieved from the past to perform similar functions in the present.

Adherents to official and vernacular interests demonstrate conflicting obsessions. Cultural leaders orchestrate commemorative events to calm anxiety about change or political events, eliminate citizen indifference toward official concerns, promote exemplary patterns of citizen behavior, and stress citizen duties over rights. They feel the need to do this because of the existence of social contradictions, alternative views, and indifference that perpetuate fears of societal dissolution and unregulated political behavior.

Ordinary people, on the other hand, react to the actions of leaders in a variety of ways. At times they accept official interpretations of reality. Sometimes this can be seen when an individual declares that a son died in defense of his country or an immigrant ancestor emigrated to build a new nation. Individuals also express alternative renditions of reality when they feel a war death was needless or an immigrant ancestor moved simply to support his family. Frequently people put official agendas to unintended uses as they almost always do when they use public ritual time for recreational purposes or patriotic symbols to demand political rights.³

Most cultural leaders in the United States come from a broad group of middle-class professionals—government officials, editors, lawyers, clerics, teachers, military officers, and small businessmen. They are “self-conscious purveyors” of loyalty to larger political structures and existing institutions. Their careers and social positions usually depend upon the survival of the very institutions that are celebrated in commemorative activities. The boundaries of the leadership group are permeable, however, and can be crossed by rich and very influential individuals. Seldom are they crossed by factory workers, homemakers, millhands, farmers, and others whose work and social position allow them little time and access to the organizations that shape most public commemorative events.⁴

The term “ordinary people” best describes the rest of society that participates in public commemoration and protects vernacular interests. They are a diverse lot, are not synonymous with the working class, and invariably include individuals from all social stations. They are more likely to honor pioneer ancestors rather than founding fathers and favor comrades over patriots as some did regarding the Vietnam memorial. They acknowledge the ideal of loyalty in commemorative events and agree to defend the symbol of the nation but often use commemoration to redefine that symbol or ignore it for the sake of leisure or economic ends. There is certainly patriotism in much of what they honor, but they do not hesitate to privilege the personal or vernacular dimension of patriotism over the public one. They are less interested than cultural leaders in exerting influence or control over others, and are preoccupied, instead, with defending the interests and rights of their respective social segments.

Because numerous interests clash in commemorative events they are inevitably multivocal. They contain powerful symbolic expressions—metaphors, signs, and rituals—that give meaning to competing interpretations of past and present reality. In modern America no cultural expression contains the multivocal quality of public commemorations better than the idea of the nation-state and the language of patriotism. On a cultural level it serves as a symbol that “coerces” the discordant interests of diverse social groups and unites them into a “unitary conceptual framework” which connects the ideal with the real. Officials use it as a powerful metaphor that stimulates ideals of social unity and civic loyalty. And its very real structure of local, regional, and national government constantly seeks loyalty and respect. But the component parts of the nation-state—its families, classes, ethnic groups, and regions—also attract loyalty and devotion. Citizens view the larger entity of the nation through the lens of smaller units and places that they know firsthand. And they frequently see the nation as a defender of their rights rather than simply a source of obligation.⁵ The symbols of the nation-state and the patriot do what all symbols do: they mediate both official and vernacular interests. By themselves they do not privilege one interest over another. That task is performed admirably by men and women living in space and time.

Public commemorations usually celebrate official concerns more than vernacular ones. This does not mean that cultural differences are removed from the discussion over memory. Most citizens can honor the basic political structure of the nation, for instance, and still vigorously disagree with cultural leaders about what the nation stands for and what type of devotion it merits. They often express this disagreement not in violent terms but in more subtle expressions of indifference or inventive historical constructions of their own. For instance, the pioneer was a popular historical symbol in midwestern commemorations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its appeal to ordinary people resided in its vernacular meaning of sturdy ancestors who founded ethnic communities and families, preserved traditions in the face of social change, and overcame hardship. These defenders of vernacular culture were especially important to mid-westerners who were anxious about the pace of economic centralization and the impact of urban and industrial growth upon their local places. Their commemorations of pioneers were so pervasive, in fact, that officials attempted to redefine these figures from the past as builders and defenders of a nation rather than of small communities or staunch supporters of local institutions.

Because the expression of patriotic and nationalistic texts, moreover, reflects both the interests of cultural leaders and ordinary people, it does not follow that an equitable compromise is reached. Negotiation and cultural mediation do not preclude domination and distortion. Usually it is the local and personal past that is incorporated into a nationalized public memory rather than the other way around. Local, regional, class, and ethnic interests are sustained in one form or another in the final product, but the dominant meaning is usually nationalistic. And this does not seem to be particularly wrong to most citizens. In fact, it appears to be “fundamentally true.” As Maurice Godelier argues, it is when ideologies do not appear to the “exploited” as illusions or as instruments of their exploitation that they contribute effectively to persuading people to accept them. They can only do this if they incorporate—as the symbols of the pioneer and patriot do— meanings dear to a number of social groups that participate in the memory debate.⁶

One implication of the argument that the abundant patriotic messages of American public memory are rooted partially in the quest for power by leaders of various sorts is that patriotism is invented as a form of social control and that it does not naturally find resonance within the hearts and minds of ordinary people. Obviously this study cannot pretend to explore private hearts and minds. But it does present clues as to what the masses think and feel when they demonstrate loyalty to the nation-state. They certainly respond enthusiastically to patriotic messages and symbols with referential connections to their immediate environs and group. National commemorations such as the 1976 bicentennial, for instance, celebrated both local, ethnic, and national history. But are they performing? Do they exhibit patriotic sentiments in the dramatic exchanges that take place in commemorative activities because they know that is what those in power want them to do? Or is the observation that American patriotism is “indigenous” and not fabricated as it is in Europe correct?⁷

This study of commemorative activity suggests several points on the matter. Leaders in the period under review here expended a very substantial effort to stimulate loyalty to large political structures. Ordinary people demonstrated a considerable interest of their own in expressing attachments to structures of a smaller scale such as local and cultural communities. Ordinary people also exhibited indifference to patriotic messages at times, especially when it came to paying for monuments, and a periodic determination to use commemorative time to pursue personal rather than civic interests.⁸

More suggestive is the widespread effort on the part of ordinary people to celebrate symbols such as pioneer ancestors or dead soldiers that were more important for autobiographical and local memory than for civic memory. In fact, because the vernacular dimension of memory would not go away it was susceptible to reformulation by officials. Constantly they honored pioneers for building a nation and fallen soldiers for defending it. But the patriotism they evoked on the part of ordinary people was not always grounded in official expressions but in the power of vernacular meanings officials tried to constrain.

Ordinary people do two things when they affirm loyalty to the nation. They do what leaders expect of them, but they also insist that much of what they value on a smaller and less political scale is important to them. The prominence of patriotism in American commemorative activities does not signify the complete triumph of the power of the nation-state. Patriotism itself embodies both official and vernacular interests, although most patriotic expressions tend to emphasize the dominance of the former over the latter.⁹

Indeed, a striking comparison could be made with French history. The pioneer symbol, regardless of the extent it served the interests of the nation, originated in the attempts of local communities and ethnic enclaves to mark their communal origins. In a similar fashion, Maurice Agulhon shows how the most powerful symbol of the French Republic by the late nineteenth century—a female figure named Marianne—originated in the vernacular culture of peasants in the south of France before it came to serve the of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Prologue: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
• Part One: Memory in the Present and the Past
• Part Two: Communal Forums
• Part Three: A Regional Forum
• Part Four: National Forums
• Conclusion: Subcultures and the Regime
• Notes
• A Note on Sources
• Index