The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya (review)

This study follows the transformation of an antebellum plantation that employed slave labor and was occupied by Union forces early in the Civil War into the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery—a burial ground for those who served on both sides during the Civil War. Through all the U.S. wars that have followed, including the War on Terror, the cemetery provided a shrine that was largely for white men but gradually grew to include women and men of color who also gave that last full measure of devotion.

Micki McElya traces Arlington's evolution from its early struggles with sectionalism and the ongoing resistance to religious, racial, and gendered inclusivity to its gradual post–Civil War development into the "affective embodiment" of the nation (p. 2). Drawing on the metaphor that President Warren G. Harding used in his speech at the burial of World War I's Unknown Soldier in 1921, McElya writes that this "memorial landscape" has offered Americans "'a tomb in the heart of the Nation sorrowing for its noble dead'" (p. 3). This affective landscape, she writes, serves to join the nation together as "one body" through its mourning (p. 3).

McElya takes readers through "mismanagement and a dysfunctional institutional culture at the cemetery," in which officials were "privileging appearances and big symbolic acts" over recognizing individual loss and regular maintenance (pp. 307, 308). She argues that this mismanagement broke the "'heart of the republic'" (p. 307). Active-duty servicemen and servicewomen, veterans and their families and friends, and a "horrified public" came to know that some 6,600 graves and remains, including those of soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been "mismarked, lost, or discarded" (p. 308). McElya shows that the Arlington Gravesite Accountability Task Force, which was created in 2011, as well as Senate hearings exposed bureaucratic failure, "neglect, incompetence," and "corruption" at the cemetery and revealed the possibility that today's veterans will not find eternal honor at Arlington (p. 309). Instead, she opines, veterans have found themselves "[c]ompelled to ponder their identities and actions erased and transformed" and "entertain the possibility of being made unknown and unknowable through the neglect, incompetence, or corruption of the bureaucratic state" (p. 309).

McElya addresses the complexities of burying and mourning American war dead across two centuries of change in the composition and use of the U.S. military abroad. She offers a richly conceived analysis of how Arlington has been made a place of ongoing divisiveness and attempted reunion that replicates our national division. She discusses the political battles wherein Americans laid claim to national recognition through burial at Arlington, and how, over time, citizens have internalized the carnage of war and honored the sacrifices of those who served. As the number of those buried at Arlington has increased, so has the demand for burial among those who did not serve in the military, which raises questions as to what criteria will govern burials there in the future.

This well-crafted and deeply researched book discusses the politics regarding past criteria for burial in Arlington, an issue of growing importance as plots become ever scarcer. More broadly, McElya asks readers to consider how inclusion in the national cemetery has reflected American views on military valor and honor in service. Most important, however, the politics of Arlington National Cemetery have reflected and helped define the meaning of American citizenship.