Concealed Commemoration: American Immigrant Memorials to World War I

Abstract This paper explores the lesser-known World War I memorials across the United States, hidden in cemeteries and behind closed doors, which were built by and for immigrant communities during the interwar years. These memorials tell a story of the cataclysmic loss World War I brought to a generation of new Americans. Proclaiming some aspects of their history and concealing other aspects, immigrant communities brought a nuanced response to World War I, a war that destroyed four empires, empires from which many of them had only recently come. They strove to honor both their homelands and their new lives in the United States. But by being concealed far from the larger American public, these memorials also revealed a distrust in popular interpretations of the war and what it had meant, interpretations which excluded immigrants from the national narrative and revealed a shaky grasp on international affairs when they did attempt to include foreign nationals. These memorials represent a cautious but determined effort by immigrant communities to claim a place in the United States.