Eliana Chavkin researches America’s World War I Memorials
Eliana Chavkin completed her PhD in History in Spring 2005, working with Professor Saje Mathieu. For 2025-2026, she was awarded Brown University's prestigious Pembroke Center Research Fellowship. Below she discusses the theme of her dissertation entitled “‘The Monument Does Not Remember’: America's World War I Memorials and the Struggle to Create History from Memory.”
On Chicago’s South Side, the state of Illinois sponsored a monument featuring a stern Black warrior, standing guard over his community and staring down the Jim Crow South. In Lawrence, Kansas, the University of Kansas and Haskell Residential School built two wildly different football stadiums: one to honor the sons of Kansas and the other, the first lighted stadium west of the Mississippi, to honor Indigenous resilience in the face of the residential school system. At Harvard, loyalty to the symbol of the Harvard Man led to a plaque written in Latin, acknowledging German students at Harvard who fought for their homeland against America’s future allies. In Nashville, San Francisco, and other cities, state and local governments built vast auditoriums to offer their citizens a place to hear operas and symphonies. In rural Washington state, a lone millionaire constructed a full-scale replica of the ancient English ruins of Stonehenge that stands alone on the Columbia River bluffs.
How could such an array of memorials result from the same basic question? What do they tell us about how Americans understood their experience in World War I?
My dissertation research focused on these and hundreds more war memorials, wildly varied and often experimental, built in the years between World War I and World War II. They took countless forms: stadiums, trees, parks, sculptures, bells, churches, plaques, courthouses, opera houses, and historical archives. Each offered not only a gathering site for mourners, but a historical interpretation of the significance of the war that brought the United States fully onto the world stage.
World War I was a confusing experience for many Americans. It raised core questions that continue to plague us today: Who belongs in the American project? What does an American citizen owe to their country? How does an individual American community fit into the national fabric? What should be remembered in the public sphere, and what should be forgotten? How do communities decide what stories should be told?
When a community comes together to dedicate something in memory of a historic event or person, they make a series of detailed choices about who and what they wish to remember, how they wish to communicate a historical narrative, and what they wish to leave out or excise from their memories. Building a World War memorial raised a long list of logistical questions, seemingly straightforward, but nearly always deceptively complicated:
When did the war take place for Americans?
- The years the war ran for Europe (1914-1918)?
- The years the U.S. formally participated (1917-1918)?
- The years nations were legally involved in some kind of conflict (1914-1921)?
Who should you honor on a World War memorial?
- Only the dead and the wounded, or everyone who fought or volunteered?
- Only those who served in the American army, or Americans who fought with Canada or overseas armies?
- Was it possible to honor someone who fought for Germany, or another enemy nation, and how?
What exactly did a memorial to the “War to End All Wars” look like?
- Where would you put it?
- How would the public know that it was a memorial – how could you make them notice it?
- How could you build something both unique and part of a larger, national whole?
The answers Americans gave to each of these questions revealed a great deal about their local communities. In the South, World War memorials were routinely segregated by race. In Oak Park, Illinois, the community decided to honor everyone who had volunteered in the war even if they had survived – so that they could include their famous hometown author, Ernest Hemingway, on their memorial. In North Dakota, counties took advantage of funding emerging from the New Deal and built World War Memorial courthouses, civic centers, and auditoriums, bringing a civic infrastructure to a state that desperately needed it. Yet though American responses were wildly different on the surface, together they tell us something about how the American people understood their own past in the 1920s and 1930s, and how they represented it through acts of creation.
My dissertation tells all of these stories, but it also points to the commonalities that drew Americans together across local and regional divides. In my research I uncover a nation in dialogue, rather than one defined by difference. Throughout the interwar decades, Americans used their memorials to communicate with each other about the war and what it had meant, both to their local communities and to their country as a whole. College alumni worked across the country to raise funds for their alma maters’ memorials; college presidents traded ideas about how best to raise money for their efforts. State commissions eyed the achievements of other states jealously, and tried to outdo each other in building the most grand monument of all. More than one in every four memorials took inspiration from the new “living memorial” movement, abandoning stone sculptures for buildings, highways, hospitals, and parks that could honor the dead by providing a service to the living. My research identifies these commonalities to point to the ways that Americans used memorials to engage in a national conversation about what the war had meant and about what an American citizen owes to their country.
The core questions that World War I raised remain with us today, and they have taken on increasing urgency in the twenty-first century as Americans grow bitterly divided over our history and what it means. In my research I look to the past as a source of hope for our future: a record of dignity in difference, and of bridges across the many varied communities that compose the United States.
