But, the Sunday event excepted, by the night of 11 November Harding’s campaign platform of a ‘Return to Normalcy’ had been reasserted in the form of the Republican version of the League of Nations, the Conference on
Limitation of Armaments, set to open the next day. It, too, manifested itself spatially. Against the backdrop of a city coloured red, white and blue by a million yards of bunting, the ‘most elaborate’ illuminations ever held in the city had been arranged. A row of jewelled arches was constructed near the White House, an artificial aurora borealis hovered over Capitol Hill, and arcs of searchlights defined the official buildings and monuments in the cityscape. During the illuminations, the arcs of light drew the Tomb into the central precinct, now once again the focal point. The floodlights highlighted the site of the grave, which was tellingly described as a ‘symbol[s] of peace’ as well as a ‘contribution in honor of the "unknown" dead’.53 Two of the sites of that morning’s ceremony – the Capitol and Pennsylvania Avenue – recovered their other identities and on Pennsylvania Avenue, the sacred gave way to the secular, and even to the slightly profane, of carousing crowds.
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11.7 Jewelled Arch, day view. Arch erected for the World Disarmament Conference, Washington, DC, 11 November 1921. Stereograph view, Keystone View Company, 1921 |
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11.8 Jewelled Arch, illuminated view. Arch erected for the World Disarmament Conference, Washington, DC, 11 November 1921 |
The illuminations and their ephemeral architecture, as well as the accompanying festivities, can also be seen as part of the funeral, and even as its logical conclusion. Understood in terms of the anthropology of death and secondary burial, these festivities reinforced the archetypal nature of this funeral, for they corresponded to the ‘great feast’ of secondary burials, when, after decomposition, the bones of the dead are reburied in tripartite rites
whose three phases are identical to those established by the armies of Britain and the US – selection, transportation and burial. According to anthropologists, these ‘costly ceremonies’ take the form of ‘a theatre of renewal’ which permits the ‘group that has been disturbed by death’ to be ‘revitalized’.54 Wilson’s ‘feeble frame’, it was said, was ‘infuse[d] . . . with life’ by the demonstration, as the people of Washington, and the city space, were by the illuminations. In other cities it was also said that those attending reunion banquets of military units and other festivities felt that the ‘sadness’ of the Unknown Soldier’s death was ‘obliterated’.55