The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

5. “How did they pick John Doe?”: Memory, Memorial, and the African American Great War

5 “How did they pick John Doe?” Memory, Memorial, and the African American Great War Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthebody of an American whowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforce in Europe who lost his life during the worldwarandwhoseidentityhasnotbeenestablished for burial inthememorialampitheatreofthenationalcemetaryatarlingtonvirginia In the tarpaper morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of enie menie minie moe plenty other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe? Make sure he ain’t a dinge, boys. make sure he ain’t a guinea or a kike, how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees? John Dos Passos, 1919 John Dos Passos’ famous closing section of 1919 (1932), the middle volume of U.S.A., dealing with the remains that were to fill the coffin of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery is an obvious place to start in considering the racial politics of mourning in the United States in response to the Great War. Perhaps more than any other piece of writing, Dos Passos’ bitter satire is based on the discrepancy between what remains and what reminds—that is, the difference between the sorry, decayed, and incomplete “scraped up” physical remains of the Unknown Soldier and the reminder of a “hundredpercent” Americanism of patriotic sacrifice. Moreover, the incommensurability between the decaying corporeal matter of what remains of the body and the morally hyperventilated notions of sacrifice, duty, and nation is exacerbated by Dos Passos’ two questions—How did they pick John Doe? And how can you tell a guy’s a hundred percent?—questions which gesture toward the ideological choices that take place in the act and, therefore, the aesthetics of memorialization. Yet those ideological choices illustrate the vexed and always fractured way that the memorialization of the Great War The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro 192 in America often attempted to conflate an exclusive racial identity of AngloSaxon with national identity and national iconography. The act of memorialization often involves a drive toward unification and homogenization that entails as much forgetting as remembering; consequently, memorials to the Great War were very contested and fractious sites for those with a perilous toehold in the category of “American,” such as African Americans. Time and again, African American artists and writers in the 1920s and 1930s asserted both their right and their need to mourn the fatalities of the Great War, and these interventions frequently meditated on how acts of mourning crystallized their relation to national inclusion and national identification. The racially conditioned nature of sites of mourning, or memorials, was most obvious in the form of mourning pioneered by the Great War, namely the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Thought up by the British War Graves Commission, the idea of burying one soldier whose remains could not be identified as a way of commemorating all soldiers who suffered this fate caught on rapidly across all the nations that had participated in the conflict. The British and French Unknown Soldiers were buried on Armistice Day 1920, and the United States followed a year later (Gilbert 528). In his influential study of nationalism entitled Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson begins by considering the phenomena of tombs of the Unknown Soldier as the “most arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism,” arresting because “void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings ” (9). Such remarks are certainly apposite to the elaborate ceremony that surrounded the interment of the American Unknown Soldier from the Great War. The bodies of four unidentified soldiers had been exhumed at four American cemeteries in France on Memorial Day 1921, and one had been selected for interment at Arlington on Armistice Day 1921. President Harding presided at a service attended by ex-president Wilson, General Pershing, Vice President Coolidge, Chief Justice Taft, former British Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour, Premier Briand and Marshal Foch of France, and delegations from around the world. Yet this internationalist presence only served to accentuate the “national imaginings” that underwrote the occasion , imaginings that indeed “saturate” the Associated Press report that...