Born in the U.S.A.: Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory

2. This House Holds Many Memories: Constructions of a Presidential Birthplace at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site

P 49 p 2P A particularly ironic facet of birthplace commemoration has been its tendency to enshrine sons more often than their mothers, our “problem without a name” as Patricia West puts it later in this volume. Certainly members of organizations like the Mount Vernon Ladies Association imagined themselves as figurative mothers of the nation’s republican heritage. But what if a “real” mom set out to commemorate the birth of her own son? Might motherhood figure differently in our memory of birth? Christine Arato explores this possibility in the fraught encounter between Rose Kennedy and the National Park Service at the Massachusetts birthplace of John F. Kennedy. Writing from the perspective of an agency insider, Arato uncovers a fascinating contest between Mrs. Kennedy, the NPS, and her son’s admirers wherein President Kennedy’s political legacy pivoted on competing performances of motherhood. The editing of an audio tour voiced by Mrs. Kennedy serves as a central metaphor for these negotiations while also demonstrating the practical challenges underlying collaborative practice at any historic site. At the same time, Arato’s careful analysis of the tour’s evolving script within its broader historical context demonstrates the power of multidisciplinary approaches to problems in public history. This House Holds Many Memories Constructions of a Presidential Birthplace at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site CHRISTINE ARATO In September 1960, in his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy acknowledged the need to tackle the “so-called religious issue,” which had until that moment overshadowed his presidential campaign. Kennedy’s brief speech drew 50 p CHRISTINE ARATO a clear line between Protestant America’s anxiety over his Catholicism and what he believed were the real issues dominating the American political landscape: the spread of Communism, rural poverty, and the nation’s reluctance to explore outer space. Kennedy elaborated upon this distinction between the secular and the sectarian, identifying himself not as “the Catholic candidate for President,” but rather as the “Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be Catholic.” He went on to describe his ideal America, “where the separation of church and state is absolute,” as a place where religious intolerance would someday end, and where there would be “no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no voting bloc of any kind.”1 Nine years later, as the tumultuous decade that Kennedy’s campaign inaugurated drew to a close, the late president’s mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, dedicated his restored birthplace in Brookline, Massachusetts, as a unit of the National Park System. Mrs. Kennedy related her understanding of the “historic value” of this three-story, eleven-room Colonial Revival style house at 83 Beals Street as both a “birthplace of a President of the United States” and as a window into “how people lived in 1917.”2 Members of Congress echoed her patriotic sentiment in the preparation and passage of legislation that established the birthplace as a national historic site, noting that it was “appropriate that the birthplace of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who had such a sense of history, should be preserved by our nation.”3 Speaking from the front porch to a crowd of nearly 800 visitors, Mrs. Kennedy expressed in her dedicatory remarks the hope that young Americans who visited John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site would develop a sense of history and literature and that the adults who visited would be “imbued with the optimism” that she and her husband , Joseph P. Kennedy, shared.4 Whereas Kennedy confronted public fears of political, social, and cultural turmoil, his mother invoked what historians of public memory have labeled “official” culture, a “restatement of reality” that harnesses the abstraction of timeless sacredness to assert teleological certainties.5 Consequently, a sense of nostalgia for a generalized past infused the birthplace restoration with a singular national narrative. Mrs. Kennedy’s voice, captured in an eighteen-minute audio-tour, continues to guide thousands of visitors through the museum each year. The editing of Mrs. Kennedy’s narrative—and, in fact, of the building itself—was the This House Holds Many Memories P 51 product of a complex exchange between her, the National Park Service, and the site’s multiple audiences. All of them drew upon what David Lubin describes as “endlessly replicated and infinitely elastic chains of images” from Kennedy’s life.6 At the Kennedy birthplace museum, these “elastic chains of images” bind...