It is not only the burial day, but the very creation of the American Unknown Soldier in 1920 that requires a reconsideration of the view of the Soldier as an instrument used by the state for its own purposes; for everyone who mattered in that state and everyone among its important interlocutors had stood in the way of its coming into being. The commander of the Army and Secretary of War were opposed to the idea;11 the president, Woodrow Wilson, was stroke-ridden and, therefore, silent; and those organizations that were seeking an Unknown Soldier were asking for one tailored to their geographical needs, a notion that defeats the defining singleness of such a Soldier. The ‘invention’ of the idea of a national American Unknown Soldier is attributed by the Army’s own historians to the pioneering woman journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney, editor of the mass-circulation woman’s magazine, The Delineator. And, by Meloney’s own admission, when she proposed the creation of the soldier in November 1920, she was speaking only for her readers, for there was no national ‘movement’ to create an Unknown Soldier other than the one she claimed they had asked her to spearhead.12
The look of Armistice Day, 1920, across the US helps explain her request. In 1920, the dead of the First World War and their surviving comrades were being commemorated primarily as members of military units, as neighbours, and as co-workers. No single centre, no national shrine, was seriously contemplated. Both the day itself, not yet a national holiday, and the following Sunday were officially designated days of commemoration, dividing and diffusing activities and meanings. Some cities preferred the mournful to the joyous, others, the jubilant to the funereal. In Chicago, it was ticker tape; for Philadelphia, bell-ringing at Independence Hall and city-wide singing of the national anthem; for Cleveland, a snake dance on its main thoroughfare. If here and there moments of silence were observed, even those were not simultaneous.13
Furthermore, death had played almost no role in the inspiring rhetoric, imagery, rites and spaces of wartime patriotism and of the jubilation of victory. The Doughboy had been the Christian, some thought Christ-like, crusader, and his death was certain to be worthy and rewarded. In the sense of community that many sought to forge, or, with means that were sometimes coercive and unconstitutional, to force on Americans, there had been a place for sacrifice, but not for prolonged suffering, at least not by Americans. In 1921, the reality of combat had not yet penetrated the thick wall interposed between the nature of warfare and civilians by propaganda and optimistic news reporting. Returning soldiers had left that carapace of silence and delusion intact.14
Inspired by the British, Meloney wrote to the army Chief of Staff, General Peyton C. March, arguing that
there is in this thing, the way England has done it, the essence of democracy, and the soul of a people. It is the kind of thing which should have found birth in America. . . . The monument. . . would have an intimate, and personal, and an arresting influence. . . . Nothing lures the mind so much as mystery. Nothing elates it so much as justice. … It is not sob-sister stuff.15
Meloney’s effort is worth contemplating. An upper-class Catholic, descended from the founders of the colony of Maryland, she was a barrier-breaking female journalist, the first to claim a seat in the Congressional press gallery. She was, admittedly, no ordinary American. During the war in Everybody’s Magazine, and in The Delineator afterwards, she had preached the militaristic ultrapatriotism of her friends, the former president, Theodore Roosevelt, and General Leonard Wood, to her readers. Echoes of that rhetoric can be heard in her letter. But, she had equally undertaken to create a bond between her readers and the victims of war, who raised money and found homes for Belgian and French war orphans and rebuilt devastated villages through their ‘Adopt a Town’ campaign. She was the leader of the American women’s campaign that successfully provided Marie Curie with the gram of radium needed to reopen her laboratory. Her activism was practical as well as editorial: while in Europe in May 1920, she took it upon herself to organize a special pilgrimage train for family members heading for the main American cemetery at Romagne. The three kinds of intervention – adoption during the war, activities of consolation and commemoration thereafter and, finally, the redirecting of her philanthropy to the renewal of life’s ordinary activities – constitute a trajectory that was typical of those who in every country created communities of empathy and bonds of ‘adoptive kinship’ with war victims and the bereaved.16 And like them, she was concerned by the evanescence of human remembering and its consequences for public support for the victims of war.
Her interest in the Soldier was not shared, however, by General March, for whom the very idea constituted an affront to the American Grave Service’s proven ability to identify the unknown dead (‘our system has been so complete that even now from day to day identifications of the few remaining dead are being made’) and resembled the kind of argument that he was hearing from sects, of which his example was the Jews. Coming close to contradicting himself, he argued both that the system could not guarantee that an unknown body was Jewish and, at the same time, that ‘it is entirely within the bounds of probability, not possibility, but probability, that a body picked out for the purpose desired by these sects might be identified. . . from the records’. For March, in any case, the burden of commemoration of the known dead was to be borne by ‘former acquaintances and relatives’, and not by the nation, which, in any case, lacked a suitable symbolic place, a ‘national arch’ like the Arc de Triomphe, or burying place, like Westminster Abbey.17 Since many of his assertations contravened publicly known facts, his statement demonstrated just how unsettling and foreign the idea of an Unknown Soldier was for March personally and, since similar arguments were made in public statements, for the Army. The number of unidentified bodies was not few and the technology of this particular war made it especially certain that many would be beyond identification. While there is no record of any Jewish organization requesting a body for its own use, it is certain that the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York had requested one.18 The claim that the US lacked a national burial place was equally untenable, for March himself had very recently participated in the inauguration of the new National Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery, complete with an ‘Arch’ and Westminster-like crypt, and had accepted that cemetery as the appropriate resting place for the bodies of soldiers like his own son, who had died while training in the US.19
Meloney and March appear to have been speaking across an unbridgeable gap. In March’s world, reburial with military honours in a military cemetery rendered sufficient deference to the dead, known and unknown alike. Nor was March someone who might put stock in the ‘mystery’ of the Unknown Soldier that the Catholic Meloney mentioned in her letter, or see the value of symbols that would perpetuate the war as a distinctive time and space. He, after all, had ordered that the disembarking officers of the American Expeditionary Force immediately surrender the across-the-shoulder Sam Browne belt, the cherished symbol of commissioned rank and the item of apparel that distinguished those who had seen combat from those like March who had fought from the home front. Complaining about yet ‘another insult from March’, the soldiers held mock funerals at sea for Sam Browne.20 Meloney’s desire for a collective symbol honouring all soldiers was opposed by March’s belief in an individualized expression of grief and his supposedly inexorable near-certainty of the identification of all bodies.
The matter would have died there, had not Hamilton Fish, Jr, a veteran of the AEF and newly elected freshman member of the House of Representatives, stepped into the commemorative breach, using his ‘maiden speech’ to propose legislation creating an Unknown Soldier. Fish was a member of the New York State landed elite of the Hudson Valley, much like his neighbour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the scion of a family that had served the Republican Party since Reconstruction, when it was strongly committed to the abolition of slavery, and whose congressional seat had been passed from father to son. He was also the former white officer of an African – American unit formed by elite New Yorkers for that city and from that city, the only such unit in the segregated army to escape from the menial roles assigned to them and to do battle in France – because, in fact, of the response of Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to Fish’s urgent request. Fish was, like Meloney, far from being an ordinary American.21 But like her, he did initially act in the capacity of an individual American, for at that point the major veteran’s group, the American Legion, had chosen not to militate for an Unknown Soldier – not, at least, until rid of the much-disliked Secretary of War, Newton Baker and March, his Chief of Staff.22 Fish also drew on his war experience, during which he had made good on his conviction that the ordinary soldiers in his unit (and thus African-American soldiers) were deserving of commemorative rituals.23 He was alone, as well, in his understanding of the symbolic necessity of a single Unknown Soldier, and dramatically so in declaring that in principle an Unknown Soldier could be of any race. The committee hearings make abundantly clear that the members of the Congress who supported the passage of the bill were seeking a multiplicity of Unknown Soldiers, for they spoke of the possibility of one Soldier for each branch, for each state, and even one for certain engagements, and overrode Fish’s intent that multiple Soldiers be prohibited by law.24 It was against this political backdrop of the incomprehension of the concept of a single Unknown Soldier and emphasis on particular commemorative interests that the funeral rites took place.