Abstract
This article examines strategies employed in official state histories to avoid or “collectively forget” an unflattering past. The data comprise the textual histories presented on the websites of the US National Guard. Using content analysis and qualitative textual analysis, I find five different “strategies of avoidance” that these websites employ in their historiography: silence, thematic memory, displacement, invented tradition, and genre switching. These strategies serve to help obscure the occasionally repressive role that the National Guard has played in the history of social justice movements.
Introduction
As scholars have turned increasing attention to the role that collective memory plays in society, a new avenue of research has opened that addresses its inverse: collective forgetting (e.g. Connerton, 2009; Schwartz, 2009; Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger, 2010; Weinrich, 2004). Much of this work has focused on why forgetting occurs; so far, however, very little scholarship has been devoted to uncovering precisely how forgetting may be achieved. What are the mechanisms, or material strategies, of collective forgetting? How might textual history be constructed in such a way so as to facilitate this process? This article moves collective memory scholarship forward by uncovering five “strategies of avoidance” that may be employed in textual histories to obscure less savory aspects of the past.
Specifically, I look to histories provided by state units of the US National Guard to discover how various state military organizations discuss (or do not discuss) the class-based founding of the US National Guard, the use of the Guard to quell labor strikes, the repression of social movement activists during the 1960s and 1970s, and its deployment in controversial wars abroad, such as in Vietnam and Iraq. Using an inductive analysis, I explore how history is told by the National Guard and how these narrative forms relate to those particular problematic aspects of the past mentioned above. The analysis yields five strategies—silence, thematic memory, displacement, invented tradition, and genre switching—used by the state National Guard units to avoid their difficult histories.
It is especially important to note these strategies of avoidance in US National Guard websites because such texts comprise an officially sanctioned history as propagated by the state itself. Not all mnemonic communities are equal in their struggle to preserve or erase particular aspects of the past, and the government need not be merely the arbiter of memory contestation, as would suppose pluralist democratic theory. The state itself has an interest in the debate over dominant historical narratives, and often this interest reflects the state’s own legitimacy. Identifying the use of these mechanisms of forgetting by a government organ like the National Guard can help to indicate those slippery moments when the democratic state places a thumb on the scale of historical justice.
The achievement of forgetting
As scholars of memory have long known, history is more than a collection of facts about the past. It is also a narrative, crafted through particular processes and under certain social conditions, all of which shape the story being told. This distillation process results in gaps or “silences” in those media that shape our collective memory. Blank spaces in history may perpetuate themselves in the public consciousness, occluding particular past experiences. This process is called “collective forgetting” and has been of increasing importance for scholars of memory.
The literature on collective forgetting has generally focused upon the question: Why? Why is it that societies forget their past? One of the more important contributions in recent years to understanding the “why” of collective forgetting, published in the inaugural issue of this journal, is Paul Connerton’s (2008) “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Using historical examples, Connerton (2008) lays out a typology of the socio-cultural conditions and contexts that are likely to encourage or even command that a group forget its past. He identifies the different roles that forgetting may play in society and the values that forgetting may enhance. Connerton’s typology may be largely (although not uniformly) described as a functionalist approach to collective forgetting, with the social choice to remember or forget tied into other, larger societal needs related to identity, cohesion, or progress.
Others have approached collective forgetting from a social psychological perspective. In response to Connerton (2008), Wessel and Moulds (2008) suggest that it is our desire to conform to a coherent identity (either in the past, present, or future) that goads us toward forgetting. Also working from the social psychological perspective, Schwartz (2009) applies the Matthew effect to memory and forgetting. He argues that there is a “oneness” to memory, by which we select a singular occurrence or individual to receive historical credit for what was more widespread phenomenon. It is the need for a fixed, singular causal point that forces other aspects of the past to recede and become forgotten.
However, there is also a conflict perspective to collective forgetting. It is not solely through social psychological processes or by functionalist mutual consent that we forget. Collective memory scholars have shown repeatedly that there are often opposing factions and interests that would seek to elevate certain narratives about the past over others. Sometimes history accentuates social divides; such is particularly true of troubled pasts.
As memory scholars have shown, memorialization becomes particularly problematic in the case of a difficult history. Authoritarian regimes may stamp out competing narratives of the past—an example of Connerton’s (2008) “repressive erasure.” In democratic regimes, forgetting may be the result of certain mnemonic communities or entrepreneurs gaining the upper hand in a pluralist contest over memory, for example, the changing meaning of Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day in the United States (Kubal, 2008). Alternately, the democratic state may officially memorialize a troubled past without giving any particular narrative supreme legitimacy, such as was shown in Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’s (1991) study of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, or Israel’s multivocal memorials of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2002). In the case of a problematic past, the state may foster forgetting by memorializing without actually addressing the underlying issue, creating a kind of silence within speech (Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger, 2010). The motivation to forget, in many instances, involves conflict and the social unease that lies beneath.
While the above studies have focused on why we forget, less explored in the literature is the question: How? How is it that collective forgetting may be achieved? Collective forgetting is an accomplishment, and there are certain processes, which scholarship can help identify, that work to further this end.
Connerton (2009) answers this question in broad brushstrokes, showing that the present historical era, often called modernity, has an amnesiac quality. Since memory is often inscribed in space and time, often through mnemonic techniques such as monuments and rituals, the process of modernity can work against collective memory as it disrupts traditional place-based orientation and cyclical time.
A more concrete and processual approach to the “how” of forgetting can be found in Trouillot’s (1995) book Silencing the Past. For Trouillot, there are four steps in the production of historiography that may also serve as moments of erasure: (1) the making of source material, because not everything from the past is recorded; (2) the making of archives, because not everything recorded is also preserved; (3) the making of narrative, because not all archived materials are selected in the telling; and (4) the making of history, because not all historiography becomes part of the accepted historical canon. A similar argument is made by Singer and Conway (2008) in their claim that “forgetting” may be no more than the relative accessibility of historical/mnemonic information.
Given the importance of access to historical information in the production of forgetting, it is a task before memory scholars to uncover those mechanisms by which history may be veiled from public view. While progress is being made toward understanding of the “how” of collective forgetting, still unexplored are the textual techniques that “write out” certain events from a conflicted past. The foundation for such work may be found in the field of discourse studies, particularly its robust work in the art of the public apology.
The literature on public apology is too extensive to review here, but several key works can exemplify a mode of analysis that could be brought to bear on historiographic texts. Just as mnemonic entrepreneurs may wish to evade a problematic past, so too might those individuals making public apologies seek to minimize the threat such an act poses to their reputation. A number of linguists have uncovered discursive tactics to evade responsibility for wrongdoing while still apologizing publicly. One such tactic involves shifting the verb from the active “apologize” to a more general “sorry” (Lakoff, 2000, 2001). One can also mitigate responsibility by describing the offense in a passive voice (Bavelas, 2004). Kampf (2009) analyzes the text of public apologies to find four categories of speech strategy to sidestep responsibility, including discursive means to blur the identities of the offended and offender. Similarly, Hargie et al. (2010) find similar strategies for “non-apology” among the CEOs of large investment banks in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. CEOs would discursively avoid responsibility for their part of the crisis while aligning themselves with the victims of the economic downturn. These examples show the creative use of language and discourse to avoid responsibility in the present; but might not similar strategies be employed to sidestep the telling of a problematic past?
Focusing on Trouillot’s third type of historical silence—the making of narrative—this study will bring insights from discourse studies to historiographic texts. In examining online historiography, I indicate the textual mechanisms that help occlude problematic pasts and further the achievement of collective forgetting.
Data and methods
To identify the mechanisms that foster forgetting, I examine textual histories of the US National Guard as presented by the Guard itself. These self-represented histories may be found on official National Guard websites. Ours is a Digital Age, and the individual quest for knowledge about the past increasingly takes place in the virtual plane. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 80% of American adults use the Internet, and of Internet users, 92% report using the Internet to access information: more than any other use category (Pew Research Center, 2012b). Since Internet use is highest among the Millennial Generation (age 18–29 years) at 94%, the turn to the Internet as a primary source of information is unlikely to wane in the near future (Pew Research Center, 2012a). Although the Internet can provide a plethora of mnemonic media, text still remains “the backbone of the Internet” (Van House and Churchill, 2008: 299). For that reason, I turn to textual history, told by the National Guard itself, as presented on each Guard’s individual website.
The evidentiary base consists of content coded categories and qualitative textual analysis from all available websites of the 50 state National Guard units, as well as the State or Territorial Guard websites for the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. I found the official state National Guard sites by an Internet search, using “National Guard” and the state name as search terms. Once the websites were located, I searched the URL for any proffered historiography. I examined buttons and tabs that read “History” or “About Us,” and generally followed any digital path that might lead to historiography. On those websites that offered a site search function, I would search for “History.” In some cases, the state website included a link to the state military museum or a National Guard association. In these cases, information from these websites was included as data, although memos noted that it was not on the official state-sponsored web page.
Once the data were collected, I used ATLAS.ti to code the texts thematically, noting how they addressed particular, pre-selected “problematic” historical moments: the Guard’s founding, its use to quell labor strikes and social movements, and its deployment in controversial wars abroad. In analyzing the data, I employed an inductive analysis (Merriam, 2002), which finds patterns and themes derived from the data themselves, seeking emergent trends in how such histories were told. The coding scheme also represented the stylistic and representational elements of the historiographies.
The troubled history of the US National Guard
The National Guard has a checkered history. Like most social institutions, it provides an important service and fulfills a needed function; but, also like most social institutions, its influence has not been solely positive for all people, at all times and places. Indeed, in certain circumstances, the National Guard has played a necessarily one-sided role in multi-sided conflicts that have tested the very seams of the American nation. Yet the National Guard is not merely one interest group among many, offering a competing narrative, as the pluralist model of contested memory might suggest. Quite the contrary: the US National Guard is an outfit of the US government. Therefore, the story it tells becomes the single state-sanctioned history. The extent to which dissenting voices are written into or out of this history carries the weight of official narrative. In this case, the state is a political actor in its own right, not merely the arbiter of multiple mnemonic entrepreneurs, and therefore, the history presented by the Guard websites is also a political play on the part of the state.
Prior to the analysis, I identified three potentially problematic or difficult aspects in the National Guard’s history and examined how these were addressed in the official histories on National Guard websites. The first difficult history centers on the founding of a unified National Guard, with a presence in each state, but ultimately under federal authority. The path leading to the passage of the Militia Act of 1903—that funded and regimented official state military defense organizations on the condition that they could be drawn upon for federal use—was an uncertain and quite contentious one (e.g. Cooper, 1997; Reinders, 1977; Skowronek, 1982). Eventually public militias in each state were integrated into the federal institutional apparatus. However, which militia groups were chosen to become, first, state public militias and, then, part of the National Guard—receiving federal funding, training, and equipment—was very much a political struggle. Not infrequently, the precursors to the official National Guard were private militias that had been formed and funded by Gilded Age captains of industry (see Isaac, 2002; Kaufman, 2001). These organizations had served as elite social clubs as well as martial force for use against unemployed and striking workers in industrial cities (Isaac, 2002, 2010). In other states, the formation of the Guard was drawn from militia that had formed to fight Native Americans on the frontier, as White settlers sought to replace indigenous peoples, often through lethal means (White, 1991).
The elite, class-based and race-based founding of the National Guard correlates another problematic aspect of the National Guard, and that is in its use against social movements by US citizens demanding their rights or attempting to influence change. The National Guard played an extremely negative role in attempts at unionization across the country prior to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 that legalized unionization, and the National Guard continued to be deployed occasionally against striking workers still after this landmark legislation was passed. In conflicts between the working class and the ownership class, the National Guard generally played a one-sided role in defense of the propertied elite.
In the social movements that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s, the National Guard played a more ambivalent role. The National Guard was an asset to many African American activists when it was federalized to protect families participating in the desegregation of schools from segregationist violence. But its role changed as movements grew and became more vocal with time. Fear of social instability saw the Guard deployed repeatedly throughout the period, often preemptively, as the threat of racial rioting increased. Similarly, the Guard would be deployed to college campuses, where students were protesting the US wars in Southeast Asia. Use of the Guard in these circumstances seemed to many movement sympathizers to be a form of elite intimidation and an attempt to prevent the exercise of free speech and assembly. These views came to a head when members of the National Guard actually fired upon and killed unarmed students at a protest on the Kent State University campus on 4 May 1970.
Finally, the National Guard has been increasingly federalized and deployed in unpopular wars abroad. Some Guard units served in Vietnam, the most unpopular of all US wars, tainted by the My Lai massacre, chemical warfare, and the secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos. In more recent years, the War on Terror and subsequent War in Iraq have been fought extensively by National Guard units, many of whom saw multiple deployments in these theaters of war. The Iraq war was and continues to be controversial, with the majority of Americans considering the invasion a mistake (Jones, 2008). In addition to the general loss of American blood and treasure, the war also bears the stigma of the Abu Graib prisoner abuse scandal, among others. Moreover, the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which provided the pretext for the invasion, continues to raise the specter that the American public was intentionally misled into the conflict by war-hungry politicians (see, for example, Lewis and Reading-Smith, 2008).
Strategies of avoidance and forgetting
Because of histories and events such as those presented above, there is reason to suspect that the National Guard might wish to collectively forget aspects of its past and instead inscribe in its official memory only those identity-affirming instances of heroism and triumph. This analysis of the textual histories portrayed on official state National Guard websites uncovered five strategies by which these websites structured Guard historiography in ways that obscured, minimized, or distanced their official memory from the more problematic aspects of its past. These five strategies are silence, thematic memory, displacement, invented tradition, and genre switching. Below, I present and discuss each of these strategies in turn.
Silence
Perhaps the easiest means to erase a troubled past is simply not to talk about it. A total of 12 state National Guard websites, and the website for the District of Columbia Guard, offered no history whatsoever. As a strategy of collective forgetting, full historical silence can be extremely useful. 1 Without a proffered history available to the public, no particularly problematic issue need be addressed.
It may be argued that the choice not to tell the past does not necessarily imply that the past is being sidestepped. Perhaps there is nothing particularly troubling about these National Guard units that would need avoiding. However, some of the most contentious moments in National Guard history can be found in states who do not report their history to the public. West Virginia, for example, has no online history of its National Guard, and yet this coal-mining state has a dark and troubling history of labor unrest put down by the National Guard. Indeed, the West Virginia Guard was federalized and actively fought against domestic strikers on numerous occasions, including the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912, which was among the bloodiest conflicts in US labor history (Boal, 1994; Corbin, 1978; Fishback, 1995). West Virginia is simply silent on its past and collectively forgets its complicity in violent union-busting conflicts.
However, total historical silence has the unintended consequence of ignoring positive or unproblematic histories as well. While groups may wish to avoid their difficult past, the use of positive histories in collective identity formation may counter the desirability of silence as a strategy. While 12 states and the District of Columbia offered no history, these comprised the minority. Most states did not employ total silence as a strategy of avoidance.
But it is worth noting that silence need not be total. Silence can be achieved within the context of a textual history. Such a silence, or gap, is most prominent in the Ohio National Guard’s website discussing the shooting of students during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University on 4 May 1970. The excerpt below is quoted exactly as it was taken from the online history provided on the official state Guard website:
It was subsequent to this latter event that the Ohio Guard was involved in one of the most unfortunate events in its long history, the Kent State shootings of May 1970. Called to that campus to help restore order after massive unrest and destructive anti-war protests.
At this point, the narrative abruptly ends. (Indeed, the second sentence is not even complete.) The text moves on to a new paragraph on Guard activities after the Vietnam War. A reader would know that a shooting took place at Kent State, but the narrative falls silent without expressing who did the shooting or the consequences. It is never mentioned that members of the Ohio National Guard fired live rounds at unarmed protesters on the Kent State campus, killing four students and injuring seven, leaving one paralyzed for life. Neither is it mentioned that some of those killed or injured were merely bystanders to the conflict—they were not even among the demonstrators the Guard had been called upon to quell. The fragment provided above underscores the vacuous silence that stands in place of an official textual recounting of one of the most violent episodes in the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Thematic memory
Another common strategy for avoiding problematic aspects of the National Guard history involved what I call thematic memory. Thematic memory may be considered a type of silence because the troubled history is still not told; but unlike full historical silence, as described above, thematic memory is silence by design. Thematic memory provides a means to render problematic histories structurally unfit for the narrative.
According to this strategy, histories can be broken down into thematic sections, and all that does not fit into those pre-selected categories falls by the wayside. For state National Guard websites, many chose to thematically relate their history according to instances of federal military conflict. The past would be broken down into categories, such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Mexican War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and the War on Terror.
The importance of thematizing memory in the practice of collective forgetting becomes apparent when we consider the choice of themes. With such a thematic framework, we hear the history of the Civil War, the Mexican War, and then World War I, without any mention of the role of the National Guard in quelling scores of domestic labor strikes during the Gilded Age, or throughout the twentieth century. When these military themes jump from World War II to Korea to Vietnam, they miss the critical role of the National Guard during the Civil Rights Movement, both policing and protecting African Americans who sought to desegregate the South. By confining the Guard’s history to military engagement, the domestic use of the National Guard against peace activists during the Vietnam War is obscured as well. These particular thematic selections, in effect, turn one’s attention outward, focusing on conflicts against external enemies and threats. The unspoken residue is that of a presumed domestic harmony.
It is important to note, however, that, of the strategies explored here, thematic memory is the most slippery. Texts are often organized around themes, and this is not in and of itself problematic. Indeed, many of the states that grouped history according to themes did touch on at least one of the “problematic” aspects that had been identified a priori. However, there were some who stuck almost exclusively to these large, federal conflicts, such as Alaska, Delaware, Louisiana, and Missouri where any use of the National Guard to quell social protest domestically could quietly slip through the cracks.
One key determining factor that separated those states that used thematic memory and still managed to discuss problematic pasts from those who did not was the flexibility of the theming periods. New York State, for example, used thematic memory, but the themes were not simply a list of conflicts, and some of the themes were purely local disputes. The Postal Service strike was given its own theme. Rhode Island was able to include a discussion of the National Guard’s role in labor disputes precisely because it included a theme called “Between the Wars.” Had Rhode Island followed the path of other states and only discussed military conflicts, the important domestic struggles during the Great Depression would remain unacknowledged and officially “forgotten.”
Displacement
A second strategy for alienating an institution from a problematic past is displacement. Only a minority of state Guard websites were utterly silent on their own history. Most did offer readers a history of the National Guard, but neither was this history wholly owned nor acknowledged. Displacement allowed states to distance themselves in some way from ownership of the past. There were three means by which the states in this study displaced their histories: museums, National Guard associations, and quotations. Through these particular modes of displacement, state National Guard websites could both acknowledge history and avoid actually telling it.
Museums
A total of 12 states referred their visitors to the state military museum to learn the history of the state’s National Guard. This referral did not preclude the state Guard website from offering a brief history of its own, but in most cases the link or referral was the only acknowledgement of history that was offered on the state Guard website itself. When the state Guard did provide its own history in addition to the referral, such as in Washington and Kentucky, that history was generally bereft of substance, comprising no more than three brief paragraphs. 2 History, in these circumstances, was given a tip of the hat, but still kept at arm’s length.
As is customary with network-based knowledge in the digital age, state National Guard websites would often provide a digital link to the state military museum; following links is not a taxing activity, and to an extent it can be argued that linking away from the state Guard’s domain does not signify collective forgetting since the information is just a mouse-click away. However, the data suggest the opposite. First, in at least one case, the reference to the state military museum did not even include a link: Oklahoma provided only the name and phone number of their state historian, but provided no general account of the state’s military engagements. Second, there was no guarantee that the information conveyed on the museum link would actually be a narrative past of the state Guard. Of the 12 states that referred their visitors to the state museum, only three of the museum websites provided a rich, detailed historiography—Arkansas, California, and New York. More often, the museum link was geared toward attracting tourists to visit the establishment, but provided little or no historical information online. These websites would show how the Guard uniform changed over time, but neglected any discussion of the conflicts that made up the substance of the Guard’s history. Alternately, the information provided from the museum could be so extensive as to preclude the casual reader from acquainting oneself with it. For example, Washington had a brief (three paragraph) history available on its website, but it also linked to the state military museum. The museum website offered digital access to a seven-volume history of the Washington State National Guard. Such a tome may be useful to the specialist, but the layman or casual reader is likely to remain as alienated from the history of the National Guard as those that offered no history at all. History is not necessarily denied, but it is displaced away from the history offered to the general reader.
Associations
While employed much less often than the state museums, National Guard Associations could also be used to displace history away from the official organ and toward another entity. In such circumstances, it is not the official mouthpiece of the National Guard that conveys to the public its history; instead, it falls to organized participants to seek out and share their own history. Most state National Guards also have their own National Guard Associations. These websites were not intentionally included in the sample; however, there is evidence in the data that National Guard Associations were also used to displace collective memory away from the official public face of the National Guard. History searches sometimes led to National Guard Association pages.
The most important example of displacement onto a state National Guard association was the state of Michigan. The official website for the state Guard offered no history. Neither did it have a search feature that might have pulled up a history section. It did not link to a state military museum. However, there was a link to the Michigan National Guard Association. This page included a site search feature that revealed a lengthy and thorough telling of the state’s Guard history, including the bitter labor conflicts that characterized a particular period in America’s industrial history. In the case of Michigan, the history was available, but only after leaving the domain of the state Guard page. Without any indication that the Association link would yield a history, the Michigan Guard effectively obscures its problematic history on its official public page. The story of the battles between industrial labor and the US National Guard is told at the initiative of the Association. The state avoids ownership of these conflicts in its official narrative by displacing its past onto the Michigan National Guard Association web page, available to the diligent searcher but veiled for the average browser.
Quoting
The final means of displacement that was uncovered in the data was to quote from other sources and thereby protect oneself from owning that particular historical narrative. To return to Michigan as an example, the history on the Michigan National Guard Association website recites a lengthy narrative in direct prose about the role of the Guard in events such as the Spanish-American war, the Korean conflict, and Desert Storm. Of the entire narrative, there is one section that stands out as a different and distinct narrative form: that of the Copper Strike. While every other story was told directly, the history of the Guard in the Copper Strike reads thus:
The following account of the most extensive state duty ever performed by the Michigan National Guard is taken from Adjutant General Roy C. Vandercook’s (Colonel Vandercook later served at [sic] the first director of the Michigan State Police) Biennial Report of 1913–14.
The text then proceeds to quote Vandercook’s report for the remainder of the account. No other original text is written to accompany the report. There is no direct language that seeks to incorporate the event into a larger tale of the role of the Guard in American or even Michigan society. It is likely that members of the association do not hold uniform views on the subject of strike-breaking, but neither is that acknowledged nor discussed. Instead, the Michigan National Guard Association displaces the history of the strike and its dispersal onto the shoulders of this long-dead official and leaves it there.
All three forms of displacement described above use different means to achieve the same end—they all signal moments where the state Guard does not claim its past. Instead, the past is shunted on to some other entity, which may or may not take up the mantle of historical responsibility.
Invented tradition
The concept of the “invented tradition” is most associated with the work of historian Eric Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992 [1983]). In a now classic compilation of essays, Hobsbawm and his colleagues showed that many rituals, customs, and practices, which claim to date back to an earlier era, are, in fact, artifacts of the present, often devised to grant a veneer of legitimacy to contemporary power and status relations. This recognition has opened a fecund stream of research into the political use and abuse of history (e.g. Armstrong and Crage, 2006; Zerubavel, 1995). However, less acknowledged in this literature is how inventing a tradition can also be used to obscure a real history—and thus result in the collective forgetting of a problematic past. In the historiography of the National Guard, individual state websites would often draw upon an “invented tradition” of local militia that not only may have added greater weight and legitimacy to the contemporary National Guard but also rendered any discussion of the formation of the modern National Guard moot.
Several states obscure their own histories by drawing their heritage not from their own state guard, but instead from the colonial militia of the British settlements. These are derived from the Massachusetts Colonial Militia established in December 1636. One such example is the Indiana National Guard, whose website states that “The United States National Guard traces its unbroken history and lineage back to 1636, older than the nation itself.” Kentucky follows suit, beginning its own history by explaining, “The fundamental concept of a state or local Military organization has existed since 1636, when the Colony of Massachusetts formed a regiment of ‘Trained Bands’.” This origin myth would come as a surprise to the state of Florida, which claims its National Guard was founded in the year 1565. Virginia goes so far as to suggest that the National Guard can trace its heritage to England’s own local defense forces, giving as an example the fight against the Spanish Armada in 1588. Curiously, the National Guard history as presented by the states did not even require its origin myth to show itself as necessarily responsive to the government of the United States. As mentioned above, Virginia and Florida attributed their guard’s founding to the military practices of its colonial masters, Britain and Spain, respectively. Similarly, the Guam National Guard also claims to have originated in the 1770s under Spanish rule.
The problem with inventing tradition is not simply one of historical accuracy. In some cases, the founding myth that stretches into the ancient past displaces the political battles and social inequalities that shaped the rise of the new regime. In the case of the National Guard, state defense was not a simple progression from the colonial militia to the present. For many states, the direct forbearers of the official National Guard were private armies lead by industrial magnates for the purpose of defending against militant labor (Cooper, 1997; Isaac, 2002, 2010; Kaufman, 2001). In the Western territories, settlers formed private militias to fight the indigenous Native Americans (White, 1991). Neither of these historical origins fits easily into a positive identity for the National Guard, and so many states rely on the colonial militia that fought the Revolutionary War, and were intimately connected to the nation’s founding, for a more heroic narrative. The invented tradition of Revolutionary origin effectively obscures the rocky path of institutional development, the power struggles and the inequalities that accompanied the state-by-state formation of the National Guard.
Genre switching
The final strategy of avoidance and forgetting that emerged from the data on the National Guard was an abrupt shift in the historiographic method employed. The voice or style used to convey information about the past to the public would suddenly change in such a fashion that a problematic history could be obscured. I refer to this strategy as genre switching. The most common switch made in these data was a shift in style from narrative to fact-based reporting. In such instances, the majority of the text would be written in narrative style: it would have a plot, characters, and, most importantly, it would have some moral or meaning already built into the storyline.
For example, when Alabama discusses the role of its militia in the Civil War, the history is remarkable for its narrative format and value-laden language:
On the morning of July 21, 1861, the Union Army under the command of Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell, in an effort to cripple the newly assembled Confederate Army at Manassas, Virginia, fired the opening shots of the first major battle of the Civil War … For over an hour, the Fourth Alabama held it’s [sic] position and repulsed several Union regiments. The gallant stand of the Fourth Alabama stalled the Union advance and gave the Confederate forces more time to regroup. The regiment played a prominent part in the fighting all day and contributed to the Confederate victory.
Alabama brings the history to life by focusing on one particular battle on a particular day. Neither does this narrative shrink from assigning meaning and motivation to its characters. The Union general was not merely fighting, but was out to “cripple” the Confederate volunteers. The Alabama regiment, in contrast, made a “gallant stand” which then led to “victory” for the Confederacy.
Such narrative historiography contrasts decidedly with the same state’s discussion of the Vietnam War. As other scholars have noted, the Vietnam War remains a contested event in American memory (Beamish et al., 1995; Lembcke, 2000; Sturken, 1997). When the Alabama National Guard website discusses Vietnam, the narrative changes dramatically:
From 1968-69, 12,000 Army Guardsmen and 10,511 Air Guardsmen were called to serve their country. Over 9,500 Guardsmen were sent to Vietnam. Once again, the National Guard demonstrated combat-ready professionalism, earning over 4,000 decorations during the conflict.
The style changes suddenly from a dramatization of the conflict to mere reportage, stating the number of Guardsmen who served and the number of decorations received.
Perhaps the most utterly unabashed case of genre switching occurred in Maine’s historiography. In this case, the genre switching was so severe that the history would lose narration entirely and revert to a mere list of events. To show the suddenness of this genre switch, I will quote extensively from the Maine National Guard website. First, let us consider their telling of the Civil War below:
Again in 1861 Maine answered the Nation’s call by sending the First and Second Regiments of Infantry to battle in the Civil War … Maine soldiers were known for strength, bravery and ability during the battles in which they fought, however the battle that would exemplify the Maine determination would be that of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. A small hill to the far right of the Union line, Little Round Top, have [sic] been utilized as a signal station, manned by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. Had they succumbed to the attempts to capture the hill by the Confederate forces, the Union soldiers would have been overcome by fire that they would not have been able to hand combat with bayonets fixed. General Chamberlain’s “daring heroism and great tenacity” was recognized in 1893 with the presentation of the Medal of Honor.
Each section discussing Maine’s military history from the state’s founding through the present bears the banner headline “Our Proud History,” and descriptive narratives such as provided above seem to validate such a sentiment. They proudly proclaim their “strength, bravery and ability” in the Civil War. And again, as we saw above with Alabama, a particular battle is selected to portray and embody the steadfast soldiers of the Civil War.
When it came to the War on Terror, though, Maine’s historiography switched genre, this time to an inventory of points, as can be seen below:
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and now Operation New Dawn, Maine Army National Guard units have served throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Since our first deployment in February 2003 where 135 National Guardsmen served as a part of the 112th Medical Company, Maine has deployed 1,992 soldiers. In support of OIF Maine has sent 1,450 men and women with the following units and task forces: 112th Medical Company—135 personnel, February 2003 1136th Transportation Company—145 personnel, April 2003 152nd Field Artillery Forward—124 personnel, February 2004 … OSACOM—6 personnel, October 2008
The same website that had lauded the accomplishments of its Civil War volunteers with stories, characters, and value-laden language now abandoned the narrative form utterly, reverting to a mere list of personnel involved.
It could be argued that the genre switch has more to do with proximity to the historical event than avoidance of a difficult history, and that is likely part of the story. However, Maine’s historiography belies such a simple explanation. After making a genre switch from narrative to list for the War on Terror, the historiography returns to the narrative format to describe the response to Hurricane Katrina.
[The year] 2005 marked the largest deployment ever of National Guard troops in response to a natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina devastated broad swaths of Mississippi and Louisiana, and the damage was compounded by the failure of levees in New Orleans. Hurricane Rita followed shortly thereafter and did great damage to Louisiana and Texas. At peak, over 50,000 Army and Air Guard members responded to these hurricanes, while nearly 80,000 were simultaneously serving on active duty elsewhere in the world. Over 17,000 civilians were saved from imminent danger, primarily by Army Guard helicopters, with hundreds more rescued in small boats.
Once again, instead of a mere list of those involved, we return to a narrative, replete with emotional language, telling of how the hurricane “devastated broad swaths” of the country and yet the National Guard was there to protect civilians who were “saved from imminent danger.” After switching genre from narrative to list, the genre switches back again to narrative, not because of the proximity of the history, but because of its problematic subject matter.
While the War on Terror remains tainted by Abu Graib, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, and the heated political battles that accompanied these events, the actions of the National Guard in response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina could be claimed and extolled. The public may find fault with the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Emergency Management Agency as the source of the disaster, but that problematic history does not sit on the shoulders of the National Guard in the same way as does the War on Terror. By switching genre in its historiography, Maine successfully sidesteps problematic aspects in the history of the National Guard.
Discussion and conclusion
The five strategies of avoidance described can be usefully employed in a wide range of texts—official and otherwise—to inform memory scholarship. Attention to strategies of avoidance can tell us not only about the processes of memory but also about social values and what is or is not considered problematic among certain mnemonic communities. In a critical consideration of historiography, future scholars may look to these and other tactics to indicate what is and is not considered problematic for particular groups at particular times. The American Civil War, for example, was avoided neither by Southern nor by Northern states. Although the Civil War represents one of the most traumatic events in American history, the conflict has been sufficiently reconciled in the public mind that National Guard units did not actively seek to avoid a discussion of its involvement. 3 What has not been reconciled, as evidenced by the strategies of avoidance documented here, are the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, whose significance remains disputed in the public mind. Attention to the use of avoidance strategies can signal which events continue to serve as a source of underlying social conflict.
It is important to note that these strategies may not necessarily be intentionally employed. We cannot presume that nefarious historians deliberately select from among these strategies when it comes to addressing problematic aspects of the past. More likely these strategies are used without direct intent toward obfuscation. Following from Connerton (2008) and Wessel and Moulds (2008), it is just as likely that the desire to form a coherent identity of patriotic service produces these historic blinders. However, intentionality in use does not alter the outcome of employing strategies of avoidance: histories are still hidden and injustices still ignored.
These strategies give the option of obscuring history, but they do not inherently do so. For example, some states that used thematic memory as a historiographic strategy still managed to include labor strikes and social unrest. This quality may also provide a source for these strategies’ power. Quoting from primary sources often enhances the legitimacy and informative quality of history, so we may not always see when quoting is used to displace ownership of the past. It is likely, then, that the general ubiquity of these strategies in historiography is precisely what renders them useful in collective forgetting.
An important limitation of this study can be found in the question of authorship. Online histories are generally produced without a byline. The process that governed the construction of the texts presented here remains opaque. 4 Future scholarship must address the question of authorship and agency in the production of historiographic texts, particularly those texts that employ strategies of avoidance to collectively forget an unsavory past. The active production of collective forgetting is an important complement to knowing the textual means to achieve it.
In conclusion, this study has brought the methods employed in the study of public apology to uncover the discursive means to collectively forget in historiography. In doing so, it has expanded our knowledge of collective forgetting beyond its causes and consequences, addressing the material means by which forgetting can be achieved. This article identifies five mechanisms that can help to avoid or distance a troubled past. These strategies were identified by analyzing textual histories from a branch the American military.
Effectively, the data show that the state itself may act to obscure aspects of the past that could call into question the legitimacy of its sovereignty. The democratic state is the arena where interest groups contest memory politics, but the state also has a stake in memory disputes. It carries the weight of official discourse, and this makes it more than one player out of many in memory contests. The use of the National Guard against minorities, organized labor, and peace activists, coupled with its use in controversial wars of choice abroad, raises issues of legitimacy. These potential pitfalls can be sidestepped in official historiography by means of the strategies of avoidance uncovered here. When used by the state itself, these mechanisms of forgetting can occlude those instances that might undermine the image of the state as a neutral arbiter and protector of the public good.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Larry Isaac and anonymous reviewers for comments on previous drafts.