Memorializing Pearl Harbor: Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance
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Memorializing Pearl Harbor: Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Memorializing Pearl Harbor
Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance
By Geoffrey White
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7443-5
CHAPTER 1
SURVIVOR VOICES
With the rise of tourism in Hawai'i and the construction of a visitor center to accommodate tourists, the memorial became an institution that not only honors the dead, but also elaborates on the history of the attack. The process of expanding the scope and reach of the memorial, begun in 1980, would only accelerate in the decades to come, with the redesign and expansion of the visitor center in the 2000s (see map 1.1). Despite the growth of these expanded facilities (discussed in chapter 4), the basic interpretive "tour" offered by the National Park Service is much the same today as it was when the first visitor center opened. Then, as today, the principal axis for a visit involves arriving at the center, viewing the twenty-three-minute documentary film, and then taking a boat operated by the U.S. Navy out to the memorial spanning the sunken battleship. Additional time may be spent in the museum or wandering the landscape with its wayside exhibits overlooking the harbor. This axis establishes a spatial opposition between the secular activities of the visitor center, onshore, and the "sacred" site of the memorial. It is this mix of sacred and secular, of commemoration and education, navigated in diverse ways by visitors from around the world, that has framed much of the work of memorialization (or "remembrance") at Pearl Harbor as multiple constituencies and stakeholders interact with the site.
The one major difference since 1980, and one that has had repercussions that are still being absorbed at the memorial, is the accelerating disappearance of Pearl Harbor survivors (primarily, but not entirely, military veteran survivors of the attack). Everyone visiting the USS Arizona Memorial in the 1990s and 2000s would have noticed the prominent presence of Pearl Harbor survivors. By 2010, when the new visitor center opened, that presence had diminished dramatically as the number of able-bodied veterans of the Second World War volunteering their time decreased to just a handful, with none on the premises much of the time. As noted earlier, the disappearance of veteran survivors at the memorial was happening at the very time that the visitor center was redesigned as a gateway to the gallery of museum and memorial sites around Pearl Harbor. The convergence of these factors meant a transition from a smaller space in which the presence of veterans loomed large to a more expansive, architecturally complex area in which veteran survivors are mostly encountered through audio and video presentations in the center's museum and audio tour. What are the implications of this transition, combined with the generational shift in visitors themselves, for the ways visitors come to understand and feel the past at the memorial? In considering this question, I begin with a close-up look at activities around the memorial visitor center in the 1990s, a period of heightened national interest in Pearl Harbor and memories of the Second World War. My account draws on conversations with veterans and observation of their presentations, as background for discussing the transition to an era of virtual witnessing.
The importance of veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack for the work of the Arizona memorial during its early decades exemplifies a more general phenomenon common at war memorial sites, where firsthand witnessing often figures centrally in the modalities through which the past is presented, understood, and experienced. In such places former combatants or survivors, civilian or military, participate in the narrative re-creation of historical events in the first-person, "I was there" voice of personal experience. In doing so, they describe events in terms that facilitate empathy and identification with historical actors. The extensive literature on witnessing at sites of violence suggests that the voices of survivors and veterans are uniquely effective in creating moral and emotional meaning for audiences interpreting historical events.
Scholarly discussion of the discourse of witnessing war and violence is most developed in relation to the Holocaust (Hoffman 2004; Wieviorka 2006; Young 2000a). Even though Holocaust victims and survivors have come to epitomize the suffering of civilians in the Second World War, the Holocaust literature shows that the ability to recall, narrate, or publicly perform memories of war is itself shaped by shifting social conditions that were not, and are not, always favorable to narratives of victimization. Here is Eva Hoffman on the shift in societal interest in Holocaust survivor stories and the multiplication of public spaces for their telling:
After years when social allusions to the Holocaust were greeted with embarrassed silence or sternly nipped in the bud, every dinner party for a while seems to revert to this somber subject, as if it were an irresistible, darkly compelling magnet. Survivors, so shunned in earlier decades, are sent to suburban high schools, interviewed, begged for their tales from hell. Their children, after having the most part succeeded in blending indistinguishably with their peer culture, become an object of respectful interest. We had been close to the real thing. Our parents had those kinds of stories. We had been touched by horror, by hardship, by history. (2004, 154)
In contrast to the turn toward memorializing civilian experience in the Second World War throughout much of Europe and Asia and the Pacific (Williams 2007; Winter and Sivan 1999), American memory of the war has remained steadfastly focused on the experience of military veterans. For most Americans, the Second World War was experienced through battles fought elsewhere. It was not a conflict that raged through U.S. cities and towns as it did in Europe and Asia and the Pacific. Hence Americans more often recall the war through the eyes and stories of the military veterans who fought overseas — veterans whose experience brought the war into the domestic spaces of American families. Pearl Harbor is importantly ambiguous in this respect. Even though Hawai'i was a U.S. colony ("Territory of Hawaii") and not a state at the time, the attack is always recalled as an attack on America, as if Hawai'i had already been a state. Whereas the attack killed forty-nine civilians and wounded many more, and led to four years of martial law that brought constant hardships to the civilian population, the raison d'être of the memorial and the primary focus of its memorial mission is the sacrifice and service of U.S. military servicemen and servicewomen. This veteran-focused logic was reinforced by the fact that the attack was planned and executed as a precision attack on military bases. In fact, it was so well executed that virtually all of the forty-nine civilian casualties were a result of "friendly fire."
This focus, although shifting with the creation of the bigger World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, was always made real through the embodied presence of Pearl Harbor survivors at the memorial visitor center. For battlefield tourism, particularly the battlefields of America's Second World War, veterans have played a central role in shaping national memory. American (and Allied) commemorations of the war's fiftieth anniversaries, in the 1990s, witnessed the emergence of talk of the "greatest generation" — a discourse that refers to combat veterans as the heroes of history, veritable rock stars in the spotlight of public interest and excitement. This phenomenon, evident especially during Pearl Harbor anniversaries described in chapter 2, was on display daily in the visitor center during the 1990s and 2000s as veteran volunteers, easily visible in their green shirts and veteran caps, became magnets for curious visitors interested to interact, pose for photographs, and collect autographs. That same degree of heightened interest, repeated daily in excited clusters of visitors gathered around the day's volunteers, also emerged in education programs and just about any context that offered opportunities for meeting the war's survivors.
For visitors, the embodied presence of veterans, and the experience of being present with them, often captured in photos, could make connections between their lives and larger imagined communities. Their presence in memorial space brought a personal reality to collective history (White 2002). How then do we account for the emotive aura associated with America's veterans of the Second World War, and Pearl Harbor survivors in particular, during this period? Even asking the question may seem odd, given that the war was, with the First World War, the pivotal event of the twentieth century and remains a focal point for postwar generations reflecting on their own place in history. Aging veterans — parents and grandparents to many in the United States — provided a living, personal linkage between the ordinary lives of individual families and the grand sweep of something larger, of national and world history. Whether relevant in their own families or not, anyone coming through the reception areas of the Arizona memorial visitor center might well see the Pearl Harbor survivors as that same kind of living linkage with history. Indeed, many interactions with them took the form of joking and familiarity characteristic of more intimate relations.
To understand why these encounters became memorable moments for many travelers, we might, in an almost literal way, apply the cognitive psychologist's idea of "flashbulb memory" (Brown and Kulik 1982; Neisser and Harsch 1992). As is the case for the entire experience of "being there" on a battleground or burial ground, encounters with veterans constituted a moment in which a traveler's personal biography intersects with the narratives of national history. According to the theory of flashbulb memories (normally applied to big events such as the Pearl Harbor attack itself, or the assassination of JFK), such moments tend to be readily and vividly recalled in all their contextual details, much as people can report on the circumstances in which they first heard the news about the September 11 attacks (or, for the war generation, the Pearl Harbor attack). Thus, when American travelers engaged Pearl Harbor survivors in conversation, many would tell the survivor about their own family's involvement in the war or in the military. As an example, here is a woman talking to Richard Fiske, a Marine bugler and survivor from the USS West Virginia, who was a constant presence at the visitor center in the 1990s: "My dad was a lieutenant commander on a submarine. And that's why we're here. We're leaving tomorrow morning and my Dad asked me to come by and pick him up a tie tack. I came all the way out here" (audio recording, May 26, 1997).
Embodying History in Pearl Harbor's Memoryscapes
Like most museums located on the historic sites they represent, the memorial's exhibits, artifacts, and volunteers are emplaced in history by virtue of their location in the very landscape that is itself the object of representation. At the same time, just as the visible and tactile presence of the harbor authenticates historical representation, so the exhibits give historical significance to today's military base. Until recently, the most distinctive element among this array of historical icons has been the veteran volunteer as a living link to the Second World War. Given the requirement of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association that members have been on active military duty on the island of Oahu on December 7, 1941, the great majority of survivors in the 1990s were aging, white, male veterans. Whiteness in this context went unmarked, as it did in the segregated military of the Second World War. Servicemen of color in the memorial context are often held up as emblems of diversity, such as the black mess mate, Doris Miller, decorated for heroic action on the USS West Virginia, sent on recruiting tours in wartime America, and subsequently included as an image in nearly every film made about the attack (see chapter 3). Nonetheless, within these constraints, the presence of veteran survivors allowed visitors to interact with history and forge their own connections with the subject of Pearl Harbor.
From the early moments of the opening of the first visitor center in 1980, the park service managers recognized that the military survivors were a special constituency and made efforts to recruit a number of them to work as Volunteers in the Park, a park service designation for individuals from the community given positions to assist with park operations. A small population of survivors living in Honolulu and available in retirement were recruited to be present one or more days a week to meet visitors, tell stories, and assist with various tasks running the center. They were, after all, the living counterpart of the servicemen who died in the attack and whose memory is the memorial's mandated purpose.
Just a few years after the climactic events of the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration in 1991, park service efforts to encourage local veterans to volunteer their time were in full effect. While not all of the veteran volunteers were survivors of the bombing attack, a changing group of a dozen or so survivors resident in Honolulu (and members of the Aloha chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association) volunteered to talk about their experiences and help out in other ways. Visitors arriving at the reception desk of the previous, smaller visitor center would be greeted by a park ranger in the NPS green and grey uniform, recognizable in national parks throughout the country. Through the 1990s and first decade of the new millennium, they were also likely to see one or more veterans at the reception desk or nearby on the grounds.
The presence of each day's crew of veteran volunteers was prominently displayed on an announcement board just inside the front door, with photos and full-page bios of the individuals volunteering at that moment. On any given day, two or three survivors could be found at the center helping out, giving talks, answering questions, posing for photos, and so on. As volunteers, they would wear the green volunteer shirt issued by the park service. More important, their status as a veteran, Pearl Harbor survivor, or both was most visible from their caps, the distinctive veterans' cap characteristic of American veterans organizations with embroidered designation of their service unit and, in most cases, a host of pins, badges, and insignia indicative of individual careers. For members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, the words Pearl Harbor Survivor were stitched on the side. Each volunteer developed ways to present his own story and otherwise engage with visitors. Richard Fiske, the Marine bugler, used to walk the grounds of the visitor center with a blue binder full of photos and clippings about his war experiences and postwar friendships with Japanese veterans. He, like most, was willing to talk with anyone who would listen. The binder mediated his interaction with people who wanted to talk and pose for photos, just as books, pamphlets, and flyers do for other survivors up to the present.
During the time of the smaller visitor center (1980–2008) and its greater emphasis on in-person interactions, the veteran survivors were a presence larger than their numbers. If visitors themselves didn't realize who they were, park service rangers and guides would often point out this special feature of the memorial's history. Here is a ranger speaking on the boat bringing visitors back from the memorial: "In addition, I would like to mention that we are one of the few parks in the National Park Service to actually have participants of past battles with us. Today we have three Pearl Harbor survivors with us and they'll be wearing bright green park service shirts. If you would like to get some information regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor or if you would like to talk to someone who has actually been there, feel free to drop by the museum area and there will be one or two Pearl Harbor survivors available" (audio recording, January 27, 1994).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Memorializing Pearl Harbor by Geoffrey White. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. Memorializing History 1
1. Survivor Voices 35
2. Cultures of Commemoration 77
3. Memorial Film: Envisioning Race and Nation 129
4. Theming America at War 161
5. Making a New Museum 201
6. Pedagogy, Patriotism, and Paranoia 245
Conclusion. History's Future 265
Appendix 1. Pearl Harbor Bombing Statistics (December 7, 1941) 285
Appendix 2. Chronology of Hawaiian Political History, Postcontact 287
Appendix 3. Chronology of Internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Residents 289
Appendix 4. Very Brief Filmography of Pearl Harbor Official and Feature Films 291
Notes 293
References 307
Index 319
What People are Saying About This
"As an ethnographer and historian, Geoffrey M. White is both a participant in the changing memory practices at Pearl Harbor and a keen analyst of them. Here he brings together his long involvement with the site, a deep reading of the theoretical issues related to war and memorialization, and lucid prose to produce a compelling book that reveals how the site at Pearl Harbor involves an ongoing and dynamic process of memory making."
"With engaging prose, theoretical sophistication, and rich observation, Geoffrey M. White advances a new understanding of public commemoration as deeply affective work for those whose voices are remembered, forgotten, or excluded. Memorializing Pearl Harbor fills a huge lacuna in the study of contemporary American memory and breaks new ground in its ethnographic depth and historical breadth by bringing a range of sites of memory production into one comprehensive account. It is a tour de force."