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

Art Bulletin

Volumn 84, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 130-147

  Shanken, Andrew M ^a  

^a OBERLIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27744486344     PISSN: 00043079     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3177256     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Philip Johnson, "War Memorials: What Aesthetic Price Glory?" Art News 44 (Sept. 1945): 25
2. Kenneth Reid, "Memorials? Yes-but No Monuments!" Pencil Points 25 (May 1944): 35
3. William L. Bird, "Better Living": Advertising, Media and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935-1955 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999)
4. Martha Candler, "The Community House as a War Memorial," American Architect 116 (Aug. 13, 1919): 195
5. For instance, see Claude Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), 1-51, in which Bragdon argued that a new form of democratic life was evolving out of the community centers on military bases
6. See Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Savage perceptively sees monuments as a forum through which Americans worked through the social and psychic reconstruction that paralleled the physical reconstruction after the Civil War
7. For a study of American icons, see Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
8. "When the Boys and Girls Come Home," American City 53 (Aug. 1943): 2
9. Lewis Mumford, "Monuments and Memorials," Good Housekeeping 120 (Jan. 1945): 17, 106-8
10. James Earle Fraser, "Let Our New Monuments Inspire - and Endure," Rotarian 68 (Feb. 1946): 24-27, 50-52
11. Anne Holliday Webb, Commemoration through Community Services (New York: American City Magazine, 1945). For the pamphlet, architect Antonin Raymond created a design for an expandable community center in a modernist vocabulary
12. John Dinwiddie, A Monument the Living Can Use (New York: Revere Copper and Brass, 1944)
13. "Alden Dow Winner in Texas Memorial Competition," Michigan Society of Architects Bulletin 18, no. 46 (1944): 14
14. Barre Granite Association, War Memorials of Reverence: Summarized Description of the War Memorial Contest Designs [Barre, Vt.?: Barre Granite Association, ca. 1945]
15. Joseph Hudnut, "Twilight of the Gods," Magazine of Art 30 (Aug. 1937): 480-84, 522-24. After World War II, the Magazine of Art abandoned its support, publishing only George Howe's spirited call for a modern form of memorial, which scrupulously avoided taking sides (see n. 41 below)
16. George Howe, "Monuments, Memorials, and Modern Design - an Exchange of Letters," Magazine of Art 37 (Oct. 1944): 202-7
17. "Living Memorials to Our War Dead," Better Homes and Gardens 24 (Nov. 1945): 12
18. Joseph Hudnut, "The Monument Does Not Remember," Atlantic Monthly 176 (Sept. 1945): 57
19. For the Iwo Jima Memorial, see Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991)
20. Edith M. Stern, "Legacy to the Living," Coronet 17 (Feb. 1945): 12
21. Paul Zucker, ed., The New Architecture and City Planning (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 588
22. Elvira Slack, "No Victory Arches Wanted," New York Times, June 24, 1943, 20
23. "Unattractive Back," Architectural Forum 82 (Jan. 1945): 38
24. "Why Not Build Living War Memorials?" Tennessee Planner 4 (June 1944): 149
25. Archibald MacLeish, "Memorials Are for Remembrance," Architectural Forum 81 (Sept. 1944): 170
26. Zilpha Franklin, "Communities Plan Living War Memorials," National Municipal Review 34 (Mar. 1945): 154
27. "Planning Memorial Community Buildings," American City 59 (June 1944): 113
28. Julie Wright Merrill, "Public Libraries as War Memorials," American City 58 (Dec. 1943): 79
29. "War Memorials," American City 58, no. 1 (1944): 36
30. George Nelson, Main Street: Now and Postwar (New York: Revere Copper and Brass, 1943), unpag
31. Horace Peaslee, "A National War Memorial," Journal of the American Institute of Architects 7 (Mar. 1947): 116
32. Percival Goodman, "Real War Memorials," New York Herald Tribune, May 17, 1944, 18
33. Paul Goodman and Percival Goodman, "A Master Plan for New York," New Republic 111 (Nov. 22, 1944): 656-59
34. John Scott Williams, "On War Memorials," Art Digest 20 (Oct. 15, 1945): 32
35. The idea is not so ludicrous as it may seem. The Cold War, as an extension of World War II, prevented a full sense of closure and accounts for some of the difficulty in memorializing World War II. See G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995)
36. James Earle Fraser, "Let Our New Monuments Inspire - and Endure," Rotarian 68 (Feb. 1946): 52
37. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15, 107
38. Millicent Easter, "Living Monuments," Recreation 39 (Jan. 1945): 518
39. Louis Bromfield, "Let's Have Living Memorials," Recreation 38 (Nov. 1944): 415
40. Similar rhetoric continued after the war as well. See William Mather Lewis, "Useful Ones Best Honor the Hero," Rotarian 68 (Feb. 1946): 50
41. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)
42. Geoffrey Gorer, "The Pornography of Death," Encounter5 (Oct. 1955): 49-52, reprinted in Death, Grief, and Mourning (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967)
43. For two challenges to Gorer and Ariès, see William Joseph Gavin, Cuttin' the Body Loose: Historical, Biological, and Personal Approaches to Death and Dying (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995)
44. and Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1998), 119-27
45. David Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 171-74
46. Paul Greenberg, "Monumental Mistake," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 30, 2001. His was a common criticism
47. Sally Kalson, "World War II Memorial a Classic Example of Excess," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 30, 2001
48. Herbert Muschamp, "New War Memorial Is Shrine to Sentiment," New York Times, June 7, 2001, A1
49. Arianna Huffington, "A Monument to Distorted Priorities," syndicated column, June 11, 2001