Anne Boyd
Anne Boyd is a current PhD student at Boston University in the American & New England Studies Program. She is interested in Civil War memory after World War II through the present day, particularly in states that were not part of the Confederacy. Her research explores how monuments, as blunt instruments within a larger cultural infrastructure, have played a critical role in shaping the ways in which people have understood what the Civil War was about, long after the first monument boom (1890-1920). Anne has worked closely with Kristin Hass (University of Michigan) and Nina Silber (Boston University) throughout her academic career. Her current projects examine Confederate monuments built after 9/11 and the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned a BA in Political Science and American Culture from the University of Michigan in 2020.
The National Mall of the West: Constructing Phoenix Through the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, 1960-2021
Introduction
On March 9, 1978, the Arizona State Legislature established the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza in honor of Governor Wesley Bolin, who had died a mere five days earlier. House Joint Resolution 2003, passed unanimously to establish the memorial plaza, included a full page of praise for the late governor of Arizona. According to the resolution, Bolin was “one of the most popular elected officials in the history of [Arizona] having been active in Arizona politics since the early 1930s.”[1] Before his brief stint as Governor of Arizona, he had been the state’s longest serving Secretary of State, having been consecutively elected to the position thirteen times. Like other complicated figures of his time, he was a “responsible public official, appointing women and Blacks to his professional staff before it became fashionable to do so,” but was also a member of the “Roosevelt Rough Riders” and other organizations that contradicted his apparent progressive attitude.[2] While the Arizona State Legislature clearly understood Bolin to be an outstanding member of Arizona’s political elite, two pieces of information within the Resolution stand out as a kind of metonym for Arizona’s complicated 20th century history: Bolin came to Arizona with his grandparents from Missouri at the age of seven, and he “achieved both state and national recognition from social and professional organizations including the Boy Scouts of America, the Boys Clubs of Phoenix and the State Bar of Arizona.”[3]
The history of Arizona can be told as a history of racial thinking, from territorial expansion and annexation, to Indian removal and Civil War outposts, to a post-World War II fantasy of a White[4] ideal, and finally, to Civil Rights and a strident reassertion of White racial superiority in the 1960s. These modes of racial thinking are inherently tied to the formation of various forms of cultural and political identities among both oppressors and victims, which can be mapped onto larger conversations about the kinds of values and ideals that particular people deem important, significant, and defensible. And, like other states in the West, Arizona’s racial history is a story of migration that dates back to pre-European colonial contact, but was particularly dramatic in the mid-20th century. Having become a separate territory in the midst of the Civil War in 1863 and a state in 1912, Arizona’s White population was hardly comparable to that of Indigenous- and Latin-American people until the post-World War II migration into the Sun Belt. At the turn of the 20th century, the White population “comprised less than half” of the total population, while “one third were ethnic Mexicans, both either in the Southwest or Mexico, and Indigenous Peoples “accounted for more than twenty percent of the population.”[5] By the middle of the 20th century, the vast majority of White residents in Arizona came from other states in the nation, bringing along with them their own experiences, belief systems, and values. Wesley Bolin’s personal experience with the State of Arizona embodies this history of migration and racial thinking, and his membership in multiple national organizations demonstrates the effort on the part of White Americans to bring Arizona into the national fold.
This paper functions as a kind of brainstorming, a jumping-off point for future work on this memorial space. If readers should take one thing from this paper, it is the kinds of approaches I have worked through to begin to understand this space, and the roles of speculation, categorization, and comparisons in material culture studies more generally. Given the number of monuments in this space and their extraordinary range of designs, a comprehensive history of each memorial is not possible in a paper of this length. While a detailed history of Arizona’s racial politics is an important project, it is outside the scope of this paper. Instead, I focus on the ways in which the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza has worked to establish a particular local and state identity, which is often contradictory and messy, yet overtly White, Christian, and chauvinistic. But, of course, the values and identities that this Memorial Plaza works to illustrate are hardly demonstrative of all Arizonians, both past and present. Memorials often serve as proxies for the values that the people who created them believe in, and while a multiplicity of memorials within a single, state-designated space have the potential to navigate complicated discourses about these values, these spaces almost always leaving some things out while including others.[6] Studies of memorial spaces in general are often driven by larger questions and themes such as: What kinds of values are emphasized through these monuments? Why are these particular political figures or events important enough to receive their own monuments? What kind of cultural, political, and social work do these monuments do?
In many ways mirroring the design of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Bolin Memorial Plaza puts the process of working through and creating a complex local and state identity, in relation to the nation, into material form. Although many of the monuments within the plaza initially stood near the State Capitol Building before 1978, since its dedication the space has grown to feature over forty monuments to various people, places, and events deemed critical to the history of Phoenix (and Arizona more generally). As a dynamic environment that has undergone consistent changes for over four decades, the Bolin Memorial Plaza has shaped and reshaped the state’s identity as part of a larger nation, such that nonwhite voices have become foils at best, and silences at worst. Understanding the Plaza’s relationship to Arizona’s long history as a place of conflict and of racial thinking provides insight into the state’s rocky history in the mid-to-late- 20th century. The space encapsulates the dynamics between vastly different groups of people in determining what, and who, should be remembered in public spaces and who should determine the outward values of Arizona.
The ideal historical archive for monument studies includes the minutes of meetings from organizations and commissions, dedication speeches, the physical characteristics of the monument(s) itself, controversies about its erection and/or placement, responses from the community and other relevant individuals/groups, and historical context.[7] Scholars engaged in any kind of archival-based work appreciate the amount of time required to build an archive of this size for just one memorial, much less over forty. Meanwhile, loose categorizations of the memorials in the Plaza based off my own limited work on the space thus far may prove useful for later iterations of this project. My decisions for each category were largely based on the names and visual cues of each memorial, rather than in-depth primary research exploring the histories of the monuments and the space more generally. Thus, in many cases, a memorial might well belong to more than one category, or extensive research of a particular monument might even reveal an entirely new category (or perhaps none at all might accurately fit a particularly unique memorial). I have also only selected a few memorials to illustrate my categorizations for the sake of clarity and to avoid a list-like paper that could become redundant. This paper is then a rough sketch, a preliminary road map subject to changes, extensions, and reversals of all sorts.
Arizona’s Founding
Like the rest of the United States, Arizona’s history is one of racial thinking and racial conflicts. In many ways, Arizona’s racial history is distinct from other states and regions in the country. For example, the eastern theater of the Civil War ¾ by many accounts the most important geographic area during the War ¾ was largely focused on issues related to Black and White relations, specifically chattel slavery, while the West included different characters and concerns: Indigenous Peoples and potential Westward expansion of both the United States and the Confederacy. While the Memorial Plaza seems to encapsulate much of this history, albeit from the stand point of White supremacy, some of the most interesting memorials tell the story of the State’s founding. Some of these memorials seek to remember particular individuals, such as Father Kino (a Jesuit missionary and geographer), whereas others remember important events and conflicts, such as the Confederate Troops Memorial (which was removed from the Plaza in 2020). Yet each of these monuments speak to a particular memory of how the State of Arizona came to be, and reflect the area’s struggle to create a useable past simultaneously lodged in a longer history and legible to contemporary visitors.
An initial inspection of the memorials in the Plaza suggests that there are five monuments that celebrate a particularly White supremacist vision of the State’s founding: the Father Kino Statue, the Arizona Pioneer Women Memorial, the Confederate Troops Memorial, the Bill of Rights Monument, and the 200th Anniversary of the U.S. Constitution Monument. The first three of these memorials suggest that only one perspective ¾ whitewashed and celebratory in nature ¾ of certain events relevant to the State’s founding is valued, and therefore commemorated, in public spaces within Phoenix. The other two memorials demonstrate how Arizona, and the American Southwest more generally, has used references to national historical events to compact its apparently unique struggle of becoming a state, and has tried to form a coherent political and cultural relationship with the larger nation. Working alongside each other, the memorials dedicated to the State’s founding reflect the efforts of White citizens to place Arizona within a longstanding White-centric history that is both unique to the region and a part of a unified nation.
The Father Kino Statue, a traditional equestrian monument, serves as one of the markers of the east entrance to the Memorial Plaza, placed only a few feet west of the Wesley Bolin Memorial Marker. Father Kino worked to establish a Catholic mission on the northern frontier of New Spain (what would eventually become Mexico) in the 15th century, attempting to Christianize Indigenous peoples in the region for multiple decades until he died in 1711. The statue memorializing the colonizer in Phoenix physically elevates his body, not only through his position on a horse but also his horse’s position on a pedestal. Eerily reminiscent of other famous equestrian statues, such as that of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, the memorial suggests that Father Kino and the values he represented ¾ the attempts to Christianize Indigenous Peoples by the Spanish crown and the long history of Indigenous enslavement in the soon-to-be American Southwest ¾ were legitimate, valiant, laudable, and central to the region’s history. Of course, what is missing in this memorial is just as telling as what is included. Indigenous perspectives on Father Kino, or on Spain’s colonization of the area are notably absent from the monument and from the larger memorial space, relegating Indigenous history to the outskirts of the memorial landscape.
The chronology of the Plaza’s “founding” history jumps about 100 years from the Father Kino Statue to the Bill of Rights Monument and the 200th Anniversary of the U.S. Constitution Monument. Although the 200th Anniversary Monument technically marks the year 1987, the document that it is actually commemorating was written in 1787. The Bill of Rights was not adopted into the Constitution until 1791, after four years of debates between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Yet at the time that each document was written (and eventually ratified), Arizona was not yet a state nor a U.S. territory. That land was controlled in part by New Spain and in part by various Indigenous communities, especially the Comanches. But of course, the monuments themselves were designed and dedicated during the late 20th century after Arizona had been a state for multiple decades. These two monuments do important work connecting Arizona (which became the 47th state in 1912) to the larger nation by explicitly including some of the nation’s most well-known founding documents into a more regional and local history. In other words, the monuments put into tangible form a declaration of belongingness to the larger nation. As these two monuments make clear, Arizona, despite becoming a state long after the American Revolution, cherishes (or at least claims to cherish) the same documents as the rest of the country. This political positioning of the state seems even more salient when considering that the post-World War II population boom in the American Southwest consisted mostly of White Americans moving west (and south), transplanting their own ideologies and conceptions of American history into the young state.
The final two monuments to Arizona’s founding commemorate the area’s early history as an American territory. The Confederate Troops Memorial, erected outside the State Capitol building in 1961 and officially dedicated in 1962, demonstrates the resurgence of the Lost Cause and pro-Confederate propaganda during the 1960s. As the Civil War Centennial and the Civil Rights Movement were both in full swing, White supremacists ¾ across the country but particularly in states that were never part of the Confederacy ¾ worked to reinstate white racial power through monuments to the Lost Cause. The United Daughters of the Confederacy led this charge, and soon inscribed the Lost Cause vision into Arizona’s public memory and values.[8] The Pioneer Women Memorial, not as overtly imbued with the racially-coded messages of the Lost Cause, similarly remembers the state’s early relationship with White Americans as one of bravery on the part of White colonists, and absence on the part of Indigenous communities. The inscription on the memorial, which features a woman (presumably White) holding a baby, reads:
Before 1875 hundreds of heroic women came to Arizona from the East and South. From this group came Arizona’s first schoolteachers and the publisher of the first newspaper.
In 1876, a group of pioneer women and their families came from the north, ferried their covered wagons across the Colorado River. With indomitable bravery and strength they helped make the desert blossom into a green oasis. Their descendants pioneered in many settlements throughout Arizona. They displayed great courage and self-denial which is the rich heritage of their posterity.
Squaw Peak Camp ¾ Phoenix, Arizona.
Here, the Arizona desert is empty lacking, and only with the help of White pioneer women can the region become populated and lush. This inscription erases the history of Indigenous communities in the area and flattens region’s the rich environmental history, making White women out to be the heroes of early American settlement.
These five monuments then, establish an early history of Arizona within the confines of celebratory White racial thinking. White colonists are the heroes of the story, from Father Kino’s Christian missions to the establishment of the Constitution and Bill of Rights (two documents which, until Reconstruction, almost exclusively protected White men from the so-called evils of government) to the early White American settlers who may or may not have fought to preserve and expand the grip of chattel slavery. Nowhere in these memorials are Black Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Mexicans/Mexican-Americans, or other underrepresented groups commemorated in a way that tells a fuller history of the state. This pattern of commemoration endures in other categories of monuments, especially those designed to memorialize America’s 20th century wars.[9]
20th Century War Memorials
The erection and dedication of the vast majority of the monuments in the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza aligns with the Second Monument Boom which began in the early 1980s and has continued into the present day. As Kristin Hass notes, this boom in the number of public memorials reflects the nation’s struggle to grapple with the wars of the 20th century, beginning particularly with Vietnam.[10] Much like the National Mall in Washington D.C., the Bolin Memorial Plaza features numerous memorials dedicated to specific 20th century wars and often to specific people, places, or events that were important to those wars for various reasons. The monuments in this Plaza I consider to be dedicated to 20th century military conflicts and wars are: the Navajo Code Talkers Memorial, the Bushmasters Memorial, the 4th Marine Division Memorial, the World War I Veterans Memorial, the Jewish War Veterans Memorial, the Desert Storm Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the USS Arizona Mast Memorial, the USS Arizona Anchor, the Battle of the Bulge/Ardennes Veterans Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Arizona War Heroes Memorial, and the World War II ~ Salute the Fallen Wall/Battleship Guns. These not only memorials demonstrate Arizona’s need to assert their place in the nation’s histories of wars and conflicts, but also the need to make these larger national memories into a usable local one. In other words, the memorials do two kinds of work at once: on the one hand, they place Arizona’s particular history in a larger, national history, emphasizing the state’s belonging in the United States. On the other hands, they stress the state’s apparently unique role by memorializing pieces of each conflict that were apparently Arizona-specific. In both cases, the memorials structure the memory of each conflict through the lens of White supremacy, as they erase issues of race, gender, class, or ethnic inequality.
Most of the memorials dedicated to 20th century wars are designed and entitled to encompass all or most of the conflict as a whole. For example, the World War I Veterans Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Desert Storm Memorial do not work to memorialize particular people or events in the same way that some of the other monuments, such as the Navajo Code Talkers Memorial does. My initial read of these memorials, which involves little- to no primary sources outside of the physical characteristics of the monuments themselves, suggests that they reflect an effort on the part of the monuments’ sponsors to bring Arizona into the national discourses about the conflicts. The inscription on the World War I Veterans Memorial, a simple grey granite monolith with a bronze plaque, illustrates this point most clearly:
ERECTED BY THE
VETERANS OF WORLD WAR I OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA INC.
DEPARTMENT OF ARIZONA
IN MEMORY OF
AND TO THE HONOR OF
ALL VETERANS OF WORLD WAR I
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
As the inscription indicates, this memorial was not intended to preserve the memory of only the World War I veterans who lived in or came from the State of Arizona, but was rather designed with the larger national demographic of veterans. Dedicated in 1969, the World War I Veterans Memorial is also one of only a handful of monuments erected near the State Capitol building before the second monument boom and before the construction and dedication of the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza (which can be explained, at least partially, by the fact that the vast majority of WWI veterans would have passed away by the early 1980s). The memorial’s relatively early dedication ¾ 43 years after the erection of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri and 46 years before the National Defense Authorization Act gave the World War I Centennial Commission the authority to build a national WWI memorial in Pershing Park ¾ places it in a longer history of the complicated relationship between the states and the nation, especially with regard to military conflicts. The monument asks residents and visitors alike to reflect not only on the sacrifices made by Arizonians, but by members of the United States more generally in one of the most consequential wars of the century. Yet the meanings associated with this memorial seem to differ from other war memorials that work to explicitly center the role of Arizona’s residents within a national framework.
A reading of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (dedicated in 1985) and the Desert Storm Memorial (dedicated in 1993) alongside their national counterparts in Washington D.C. is a particularly useful exercise to determine the potential meanings that are imbued within them. The monuments in Phoenix both list the names of residents from the state who were involved in the conflicts, suggesting that their intent is to illustrate the significance and dedication of citizens in the state to larger national goals within the context of global conflicts. In contrast, the memorials on the Nation Mall were explicitly designed to create national memories of the conflicts, implicitly incorporating a wider subset of the U.S. population. Yet this dichotomy (a state-centered memory versus a nationwide memory) oversimplifies the meanings of each set of memorials. Both Vietnam Veterans memorials, for instance, pair a listing of the names of the fallen (or missing) with some kind of figural sculpture, suggesting that the monument in Arizona was designed with the national monument in mind. In fact, the memorial on the National Mall predates the monument in Arizona by at least three years. This comparison suggests that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Phoenix advances either the message of the state’s importance to the nation ¾ given the readily apparent sacrifices that its citizens made in the war ¾ or the national war’s importance to the state ¾ as illustrated by the devastation it wrought on the state’s populace ¾ or perhaps both. The Desert Storm memorials seem to be more complicated; the memorial in Phoenix predates the national memorial, which is yet to be constructed but will likely be unveiled in 2023, by thirty years. And, unlike the Vietnam Veterans memorials, which resemble each other in design, these two memorials could not be more different. Most importantly, the Desert Storm memorial in Phoenix lists the names of each Arizona resident involved in the event, whereas the soon-to-be memorial in D.C. will not list any names of the fallen.
Reading all of these memorials together, then, suggests that Phoenix’s Vietnam Veterans memorial and Desert Storm memorial work to assert a kind of state-centered grief and pride that would be legible to the vast majority of U.S. citizens. Arizona, then, becomes an important state in the national fold whose history is simultaneously different from other states but is predicated on the same values, particularly sacrificing oneself for the national good. Further, these monuments largely ignore the role of nonwhite people in these conflicts, save from the listing of individuals who may or may not identify with a minority group. Yet, in at least one of the memorials in this Plaza, Indigenous people are explicitly remembered, albeit in through a particularly one-sided lens.
One of the most notable war memorials within the Bolin Memorial Plaza is the Navajo Code Talkers Memorial, dedicated in 2008. The monument features a bronze helmeted soldier crouching down and holding a radio, presumably to represent the Navajo individuals who communicated using their native language during World War II as a kind of “code” for the United States. Unlike the other war memorials on the Plaza that work to memorialize all soldiers (either from the nation or from the state) involved in a particular conflict, this monument explicitly centers the roughly 400 Navajo individuals who participated in WWII because of their apparently unique and “indecipherable” language. This is the only memorial within the Plaza that attempts to represent Indigenous people in some form, despite the undeniably critical role Indigenous people have played in the state’s history. In other words, what this memorial does not say reveals as much about the supposed values of the State of Arizona as what it does say. This memorial does not memorialize the Indigenous people who died as a result of the nation’s (or state’s) attempt to rid the West of Indigenous communities, or those who suffered during the Navajo Long Walk, or those who endured forced assimilation policies, or those who protested against the United States’ long history of racial thinking and white supremacy. Instead, this monument remembers a select few individuals who worked on behalf of the national government during a time of crisis. Indigenous people seem to be important to public memory only up to a point, specifically as foils to illustrate the state’s willingness to make sacrifices for national conflicts. The monument, and the Memorial Plaza more generally, are not intended to be a space to generate critical thinking of the state’s history, and are instead blunt instruments to reassert white supremacy in a coded form not always easily apparent to a public audience. The Plaza’s politician-specific memorials seem to only reinforce this effort to create a space that asserts a state identity predicated on long-established national values that subjugate millions of Americans.
Politicians
The Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza features over half a dozen monuments to specific Arizona politicians, somewhat similar to the National Mall’s assortment of memorials dedicated to famous government officials and politicians (such as the Lincoln Memorial, for one). These memorials are the clearest examples of the state’s effort to celebrate its history, albeit through a whitewashed lens. In theory, the Memorial Plaza could have explicitly mirrored the National Mall by including monuments to nationally famous figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These monuments would have put forth a message of national belonging, specifically with regard to solidarity with the nation’s supposed values and ideals, as illustrated through the famous political figures who have been deemed worthy of memorializing. But, of course, the political figures memorialized in the Plaza are much less famous than Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt; Wesley Bolin, Ernest W. McFarland, Andy Nichols, and Carl Hayden (to name only a few of the figures who have monuments in the Plaza) have yet to become national symbols.
Although the memorialization of local Arizona political figures certainly demonstrates an effort to center the state’s particular history in public memory, each person’s record, and the ways in which their respective monument may or may not reflect that record, testifies to the specific kind(s) of history at work. To understand the values both explicitly and implicitly imbued within these monuments, then, scholars must work to understand the rich and complicated histories of the figures they represent. These individuals histories must extend further than voting records, political speeches, or election histories ¾ they must also consider issues that are relatively unique (at least during certain time periods) to Arizona such as migration, Indigenous histories, and urban development in a desert environment (etc.). The Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza functions as rich, visual source to explore the central themes and issues that have defined Arizona’s history for multiple generations.
End Notes
[1] H.J.R 2003, 33rd Cong. (1978).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Throughout this essay, I capitalize the terms “White” and “Black,” except for when they appear in direct quotes uncapitalized.
[5] James Gregory, “Arizona Migration History 1860-2017,” America’s Great Migrations Project. Retrieved 5 July 2022 from https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/Arizona.shtml
[6] For other examples of this complicated process see: Kristin Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2013); Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2009); Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2015).
[7] Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (2013).
[8] For more information about the history of this particular monument and the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s efforts to inject and reinforce the Lost Cause throughout the country at this time, see: Anne Boyd, “Jim Crow’s Confederate Monuments: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Fought the Civil Rights Movement with Confederate Monuments,” Undergraduate Honors Thesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2020).
[9] For a visual guide to the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza and its development over time, see: https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/statepubs/id/20622/
[10] Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (2013).