Models of Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter describes new idealizations of soldiering in the period from the 1880s to the eve of American intervention in World War I. With the encouragement of veterans and their allies, memorials increasingly honored all local soldiers who had served the Union or the Confederacy rather than focusing on those who had died. Memorial halls became facilities for veterans rather than educational buildings. Soldier statues focused on new prototypes: bearers of the US flag, active combatants, and marching campaigners. These warriors embodied enthusiasm for physical culture and ideas about ethnicity and race in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century United States. Reconceptualization of military service as a form of education paralleled the expansion of college athletics and development of the Reserve Officers Training Corps. The Shaw Memorial in Boston, an important artistic depiction of African Americans, was an outstanding exception to this militarism. Monuments that commemorated women tended to narrow their participation in the Civil War into a celebration of motherhood as the ideal social role of women.