Conceptual:

     • Memorialization and Commemoration are important aspects of the sociology of culture. It shows us how a society can relate to the past.

     • “That process confronted several distinct, but related, problems: (1) the social problems of  fixing painful parts of the past (a military defeat, a generation of unredeemed veterans) in the public consciousness, (2) the political problem of commemorating an event for which there is no national consensus, and (3) the cultural problem of working through and against traditional expectations about the war memorial genre” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 378).

     • Durkheim: Commemorative rites and symbols, Durkheim tells us, preserve and celebrate  traditional beliefs; they ‘serve to sustain the vitality of these beliefs, to keep them from being  effaced from memory and, in sum, to revivify the most essential elements of the collective consciousness. Through [commemoration] the group periodically renews the sentiment which it has of itself and of its unity.

     • Commemoration requires a certain unity and collaboration.

     • “Current analytic approaches to culture define commemorative objects, and cultural objects in general, as ‘shared significance embodied in form’” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 379).

 

History and Process:

     • “The first official recognition of the Vietnam veteran was not bestowed until 1978, three years after the last American was flown out of Saigon” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 385).

     • This recognition was not well publicized. A small plaque behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, not part of the actual crypt.

     • Fall 1978, Congress began work on what would become the memorial.

          o One of the original ideas was to have a week declared “Vietnam Veterans Week”

     • Congress man Grisham’s words, “We may still have differing opinions about our involvement in the Vietnam War, but we are no longer divided in our attitudes toward those who served in Vietnam” (U.S. House of Representatives 1978, p. 12588)

     • Veterans were stigmatized or ignored on their return from the battlefront. This made it necessary, but also difficult to make a memorial.

     • “Transforming the Vietnam soldier from an Ugly American into a patriot who innocently carried out the policy of elected leaders, Congress tried to create a positive image that all Americans could accept” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 387).

     • “When one notes all the negative references to the veterans—their employment problems, their physical problems, their psychological problems, their sense of alienation, their inclination toward drugs and crime—it becomes evident that an idiom more relevant to social deviants than to returning soldiers dominated congressional discourse. And this discourse cuts deeper and seemingly truer insofar as its topic included men who had been the agents, if not the architects, of America’s first military defeat” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 388).

     • The total support of the Senate and strong support of the House were based on one idea: that the Memorial make no reference to the war, only to the men who fought it.

     • Scruggs was a Vietnam Veteran and came to represent the Veteran’s interests. He was wounded and many suggested that this made him a more likeable and popular representative.

     • Scruggs promised that the Memorial “will stand as a symbol of our unity as a nation and as a focal point of all Americans regardless of their views on Vietnam” (U.S. House of Representatives 1980, p. 4805).

     • Memorial was dedicated on November 11, 1982 (seven years after the last American died in Vietnam). 150,000 spectators and 15,000 Veterans. Before the dedication there was a 56-hour candlelight vigil where 57,939 names of American killed in Vietnam were read out.

     • Dedication day invocation: “Let the Memorial begin the healing process and forever stand as a symbol of our national unity” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 378).

     • One Veteran suggested that the memorial should have been built in 1971 when the soldiers returned from Vietnam. President Reagan said that everyone is now “beginning to appreciate that they were fighting for a just cause” (Washington Post, November 14, 1982).

     • The process consisted of seven stages

          (1) The Pentagon’s decision to mark the war by an inconspicuous plaque in Arlington Cemetery

          (2) congressional activity culminating in a Vietnam Veterans Week and a series of veterans’ support programs

          (3) a former Vietnam soldier’s conception and promotion of a tangible monument

          (4) intense controversy over the nontraditional monument design selected by the United States Commission of Fine Arts

          (5) modification of this original design by the incorporation of traditional symbols

          (6) the public’s extraordinary and unexpected reaction to the Memorial

          (7) the ongoing controversy over its further modification

     • “When the cause of a lost war is widely held to be immoral or at best needless, then, in James Mayo’s words, ‘defeat… cannot be forgotten and a naiton’s people must find ways to redeem those who died for their country to make defeat honorable. This can be done by honoring the individuals who fought rather than the country’s lost cause’” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 380).

     • This same principal—the separation of the men from their cause—was used by President Ronald Reagan’s supporters to justify his visit to Bitberg to honor Nazi Germany’s war dead.

     • Memorial as a tool for national healing. Example: Soviet Union after its evacuation of Afghanistan forgave their own POWs who “succumbed to enemy pressure” in the name of National Healing. The Veterans Memorial was created to promote national healing.

     • “The Vietnam War differed from other wars because it was controversial, morally questionable, and unsuccessful. It resembled other wars because it called forth in its participants the traditional virtues of self-sacrifice, courage, loyalty and honor” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 381).

     • Should the memorial be based on past memorial designs? In America there is a standard type of memorial. We can reference past memorials in building new ones. In Germany this was not acceptable. Memorials of the Holocaust could not be based on memorial inspired by history (not a history that should be memorialized).

     • There are already a few acceptable styles of American war memorial. Traditional expectations are satisfied by a variety of forms, including memorial buildings, realistic statues of fighting men, obelisks, arches, granite monoliths, and other structures that prominently name the war being commemorated and combine particular physical elements (like vertical preeminence, grandness of size and lightness of color) with national symbolism.

     • Questions must be raised with the new form:

          (1) the nature of the war (declared vs. undeclared; just vs. unjust, victory vs. defeat)

          (2) the nature of the nation’s response to the war (consensus vs. dissensus)

          (3) the nature of the public’s reading of the returned veterans’ social status (heroes vs. deviants)

          (4) the political climate of the times (conservative vs. liberal)

          (5) the nature of political action (majoritarian vs. constituency-based interest groups)

     • Who gets to decide what is memorialized? Attitudes and interests are translated into commemorative forms through enterprise. Before any event can be regarded as worth remembering, and before any class of people can be recognized for having participated in that event, some individual, and eventually some group, must deem both event and participants commemorable and must have the influence to get others to agree.

     • “When the realities of a particular social experience, such as the Vietnam War, thrust themselves against previously formed assumptions, individual and institutional discourses must realign their terms or remain incapable of making that war understandable” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 384).

 

 

Design:

     • Designer: Maya Ying Lin, Yale University Student

     • Description: Two unadorned black walls, each about 250 feet in length, composed of 70 granite panels increasing in height from several inches at the end of each wall to 10 feet where they come together at a 125 degree angle. Although this angle aligns the two walls with the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, the walls themselves are placed below ground level, invisible from most vantage points on or near the Mall.

          o The Vietnam War is thus defined as a national event, but in a spatial context that brackets off that events from those commemorated by neighboring monuments.

          o The walls add to this sense of detachment by their internal format, which draws the viewer into a separate warp of time and space.

          o As one moved from the edge of one wall to the point where it joins the other, one experiences a descending movement in space and a circular movement in time, for the 57,939 soldiers’ names appear on chronological order of their deaths, such that the war’s first and last fatalities are joined at the walls’ conjunction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     • Because of criticism, a flag and statue were added to the Memorial complex. The statue is of three soldiers.

          o The soldiers are identifiable as black, Hispanic and white.

          o Golden/greenish

          o The three soldiers face the wall.

          o “weapons hang uselessly from two of the soldiers lowered arms and rest across the other soldier’s back” (399).

          o This is not a particularly heroic statue. You must confront the soldiers are eye level; the statue is not elevated.

     • Jan Scruggs said, “The Memorial says exactly what we wanted to say about Vietnam—absolutely nothing”. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reactions:

     • The New York Times said the memorial “seems to capture all the feelings of ambiguity and anguish that the Vietnam War evoked and conveys the only point about the war on which people may agree: that those who died should be remembered” (New York Times, May 18, 1981).

     • Some veterans were extremely critical of the design. One veteran and member of the Memorial fund said that sinking of the monument into the earth was an admission that the United States committed crimes in Vietnam. Others described it as “an open urinal”.

          o “a wailing wall for anti-draft demonstrators”

     • The original design suggests that the names of the dead be “scattered” and in no specific order (this would make it difficult or impossible for families of the deceased to find their relatives name).

     • Is the Memorial feminine as compared to the very masculine surrounding monuments and memorials?

          o “In a world of phallic memorials that rise upward it certainly does. I didn’t set out to conquer the earth or overpower it the way Western man usually does. I don’t think I’ve made a passive piece, but neither is it a memorial to the idea of war.” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 397).

          o Lin distinguishes her design from the ‘masculine’ memorials by referring to its horizontal positioning and its refusal to dominate the landscape.

          o This is not at all a weak, passive, or submissive design. Instead, it is meant to redefine strength.

          o “It is an opening in nature. It is womblike in its embrace of the visitor” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 397).

     • “The detractors, on the other hand, made frequent comparison between Lin’s design and traditional war monuments, highlighting the confrontation between two commemorative styles—a heroic style traditionally associated with noble causes fought for and won, and what could be called an aheroic style, newly conceived for the tasteful recognition of those who had died for a useless and less-than-noble cause” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 394).

     • Addition of the statue and the flag

          o A decision was made to ‘erect’ a statue that would serve as a counterpoint to the ‘establishment’ of the wall. This shows the power of language.

          o The designer of the statue, Frederick Hart, presented both himself and his design as balancing opposition to Maya Ying Lin and her design.

          o Hart emphasized the differences between himself and Lin. He suggested the he knew and understood the Veterans, because he had studied them for three years before designing the addition to the memorial.

          o “In this connection, he put one of our society’s masculine traditions to the service of his craft: ‘I became close friends with many vets, drank with them in bars’” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 398).

          o It was suggested that Lin created her piece in a vacuum with no real knowledge of the subject. Hart, in his statements, implied that Lin couldn’t understand the Veteran experience and therefore could not creative anything sensitive to that experience.

          o In Time’s review of the statue, we are told that the three soldiers, “suggest the wordless fellowship that is forged only in combat”.

          o “The statue was conceived as a reactive assertion of pride, heroism, and masculinity, but, through the particular form it took, it emerged as a tempering of all these things” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 399).

          o “The flag seems to be unconditionally assertive because it is the only part of the memorial site that draws our eyes upward, but we notive in the peculiar dedication inscribed on its base a kind of backing off: ‘This flag affirms the principals of freedom for which [the Vietnam veterans] fought and their pride in having served under difficult circumstances” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 399).

          o “While the addition of the flag and statue made the Vietnam Memorial look more like a traditional war monument, it also amplified the tensions and ambivalence that induced the original departure from a traditional war monument design” (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 400).

     • It was designed to be apolitical, but still continues to be a point of debate and a prime example of the difficulties of memorialization in America.