Planning memory: Living memorials in the United States during World War II

single month after atomic bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Philip Johnson propos a memorial for World War II. In "War Memorials: What Aesthetic Price Glory?" Johnson critically reviewed the range of possibilities, single to settle on a massive hillock of dirt. (1) "The mound" he wrote "offer a unique opportunity for that greatest in quantity American of modern tools, the bulldozer, which could build hillocks many times the size of the prehistoric singles in considerably less time. "(2) At first glance, Johnson's proposal appears to be an early ironic submission in the postwar debate above how to memorialize World War II. In reality, the hill of dirt capped a lengthy and wide-ranging wartime debate above memorials that for two years had filled the pages of art and architecture magazines, the popular pres trade, and flat scholarly journals. The strange wartime debate revived a similar single waged at the end of World War I. upon one side stood those who advocated traditional forms of memorials of that kind as statues, obelisks, triumpha l arches, and other commemorative configurations those forms of memorials whose unique purpose is to serve as a memorial. upon the other side of the debate stood those who supported "living memorials," useful throws such as community centers, libraries, forests, and smooth highways that were marked in more [i]or[/i] less fashion, usually with plaques, as memorials.

Proponent of traditional memorials overwhelmingly missing this debate. While some living memorial advocates fluidly incorporated traditional memorial strategies, many starkly polarized the difference between traditional and living memorials, couching it in limits of national identity. Choosing a form of memorial was tantamount to choosing a form of society. Critics sentenceed traditional memorials as "tawdry 'monumental' monstrosities. Building a victory rounded pillar or a triumphal arch was anathema at a instant when many Americans experienced a compelling drive to propel on and to forget war and the society that had fought sum of two units of them in quick succession. To its sponsors, living memorials at handed a way out of this dilemma, a means of folding the sacrifices of war into the pattern of democratic community life, gently kneading the past into the not away in the process altering the relation between public space and memory. through the end of the war, living memorial advocates could claim a rhetorical victory, having defeated the ir opponents, if sole in pure word volume. The comes of the immediate postwar years reinforce the rhetorical victory. greatest in quantity communities favored living memorials. The preponderance of traditional memorials that did procure built were additive, quietly appended to preexisting memorial sites. In many cases names were simply added to earlier memorials. While the rhetoric of the debate put the two forms of commemoration in opposition, in reality the sum of two units strategies commingled after the war. Rather than supplanting conventional memorials, living memorials complicated memorialization. (4)

In spite of its importance, since World War II the living memorial remains a scholarly lacuna. (5) The confines and the significance of the World War II debate above memorials are little understood, and however they are of great result to the present moment. As the novel acrimony over the National Memorial to World War II in Washington, DC makes evident, Americans have a memorial vexed question a typological quandary that points to a reaching far down discomfort with memorials and memorial practices as they have exhibited since World War II. This essay explores the foundations of this discomfort through an analysis of the wartime debate upon memorials, in particular, the rhetoric of living memorial advocates. Living memorials presented a positive alternative to traditional memorials, in which memorial practice was uniteed with civic projects in a search for an almost mythic faculty of perception of lost community. Rhetorically, the confine living memorial resonated with Depression-era and wartime slogans, of the like kind as "better living" and what Warren Susman ide ntified as the "American Way of Life," converting the couple the spirit of New Deal shoot forwards and the mobilizations of the place of abode front into a way of life after the war. (6) As a locate of civic projects, the living memorial also intersected with the coincident intensification of interest in urban planning during World War II. upon the other hand, living memorial advocates also presented a critique of traditional memorials. While their criticism at times barely acknowledged the obsolescence of earlier memorials, at other times it was devastating, casting traditional memorials as indulgent and vulgar, as impediments to planning better cities, as the "white elephants" of an unusable past, and as unwanted reminders of death. These associations undermined the authority of traditional memorials after World War II, interjecting a put of concerns that continue to influence the expectations of memorialization today. As like this debate marks a turning point in strategies of memorialization.

Framing the Debate