The official plan for the rites established the time frame of an extended funeral, one that began with an exhumation on 22 October and ended with entombment on 11 November, and for a lengthy journey between them, from France to Arlington. The funeral was divided into three phases – ‘selection’, the responsibility of the Quartermaster Corps; ‘transportation’, assigned to the US Navy, which conveyed the remains on the USS Olympia, a ship associated with victory in the Spanish-American War; and the ‘burial’ proper. The latter also consisted of three phases: the lying-in-state at the Capitol, the funeral procession on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the services at Arlington Amphitheater. Each of these was organized by the Army under the authority of the Secretary of War. But the event was far from the masterful design of any military inventor of traditions, for many of its major features were fashioned by many hands and for a variety of motives, some of them selfless, others highly personal, if not self-serving. Thus, the ultimate destination, Arlington National Cemetery, was the suggestion of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who suggested that the Unknown Soldier be ‘buried near his comrades’ so that his grave would be properly attended to ‘upon the recurring memorial days when the graves of other soldiers are decorated’. The gravesite on the terrace of the amphitheatre was the choice of Thomas Hastings, its architect. He claimed to have gotten wind of the project ‘by mere accident’ from his ‘friend’, Fish, but in fact had actively lobbied for the job. Hastings told Charles Moore, Chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, that he saw the event as an opportunity to provide the amphitheatre with the ‘important monument’ originally foreseen for that spot but excised from his design for reasons of economy. More importantly, he believed, it was ‘natural’, that the original architect ‘should take part in some way’.25 The uncertainty that these hybrid origins and conflicting motivations might have caused was resolved by bringing the process into the fold of army regulations. The funeral was given a sequence and structure which governed its sounds (minute guns and muffled drums), sights (uniforms, decorations, and arms worn), and the size, ranks, and arrangement of the military escort, body bearers, pallbearers, and official mourners, all past members of the armed forces. With the addition of elected and appointed members of the three branches of the government and representatives of civilian and civic organizations, the military funeral became what would now be called a state funeral.
Nonetheless, the activities of the organizers of the funeral showed both the executive branch and the army grappling with the unfamiliar ceremony – grappling, but not fully controlling it. The period of preparation for the burial of the Unknown Soldier was marked by visible discord between the branches of government and between individual politicians. As a result of second thoughts on the part of the Congress, the appropriation received by the army amounted to only one-third of the original request, throwing its plans into disarray and leaving it with little time for the forming of public opinion.26 President Harding’s disinclination to allow former President Wilson to participate in the procession became a matter of public knowledge and forced him to capitulate partially to his predecessor.27 The Congress was obliged to lobby the president in person to assure that Fish would be assigned a role in the rites.28 The religious portion of the ceremony also provoked dissension: the chaplains, who were chosen by the War Department in accordance with their rank and without consulting ‘the church or society’ to which they belonged, met with the refusal of participation by the Catholic Church and ‘pettiness in matters religious’ about the appropriateness of the choice of Jewish chaplain. Finally, the army found that the chosen route through Georgetown displeased the Commission governing the city of Washington, which called it ‘very unattractive and much congested’.29
The army was obliged to rely on the French for the organization of the ‘selection’ and part of the ‘transportation’ phase of the funeral. The Secretary of War’s watchword of simplicity was duly communicated to the French.30 The French military authorities, however, transformed the selection from a quasi-secret operation meant, above all, to prevent subsequent identification, into a public ceremony. They chose the city, Chalons-sur-Marne, which served as the site of the selection (over Paris, which the Americans had wanted), and provided the military escorts, the contingent of high ranking officers in Chalons and at the port of Le Havre, and the military bands. The design of the selection ceremony in Chalons was the work of the municipal authorities. It was they, working with the local civic societies and the merchants, who elaborately decorated the Town Hall and main street and erected a ‘chapel’ of white draperies and American flags for the lying-in-state. It is not clear who supplied the object with which the selection was made, a bunch of white roses that a bereaved father of two deceased French soldiers offered to the American soldier chosen to do the actual selection as he entered the city hall of Chalons. But it was the populations of both Chalons and the port of Le Havre who assured that a mood of collective mourning did prevail and that the day was an opportunity for civic affirmation and for the recognition of the civilian war experience.31 One of the American officers there, later remembered that at Chalons ‘the public square. . . teemed with citizens of Chalons and the surrounding country. … No festal air prevailed, rather one of solemn dignity. The voices were low-pitched and often broke with sobs.’32
The choice of a city near the front for the process of selection; the use of flowers to distinguish the body of the Unknown from those who would return to the ranks of the unidentified dead; and the association of a grieving father with the selection procedure all replicated the selection of the French Unknown and were aspects of the ‘selection’ that the American army had not anticipated. They were widely covered by the American press and prepared Americans for the funeral some three weeks later.33 Furthermore, physical traces of the ‘selection’ carried over to the US, as the unplanned-for roses were pinned on the American flag covering the casket and became an important symbolic element in the funeral.34
The funeral also came to incorporate many additional models, of which the structure and composition of the military funeral was but one. Lincoln’s funeral was the ultimate ancestor of the lying-in-state in the Capitol, and the British and French entombments the inspiration for the choice of Armistice Day over Memorial Day, for which Fish, seeking to sustain the remembering of the Civil War, had lobbied.35 Since Pennsylvania Avenue had recently been the route for other public funerals, including the transportation of the body of President McKinley and the burial of the anonymous victims of the sinking of the USS Maine in 1912, the final product also relied on living memory.36 Each of these settings brought to bear on the funeral those individual histories of which Sullivan spoke which potentially enlarge, enhance, or equally, diffuse the connotations sought by its organizers. As in the funeral of President Kennedy, older practices, new usages, multiple settings, and reshuffled actors made for a loosely jointed and episodic ritual that hardly fits with the notion of a single-minded creation crafted by the coherent aesthetic of a consciously manipulative state. Moreover, such a view would be oversimplified and reductionist, for, as Adrien Gregory has suggested for Britain, it fails to take into account that in a plural society many possible meanings can exist, and those of the public and the designers of ceremonies, both invented and authentic, can be far from identical.37 And this was all the more likely to be the case in the diverse society of the US, and especially likely in the case of funeral rites which vary from religion to religion, region to region, and across classes.