Dimly Remembered, Largely Forgotten: The Mitchell Hall Tablet as a Mirror to American Great War Memory

Abstract

War thrusts men and women, communities and nations into unfamiliar and otherwiseunlikely situations and associations. And it is war in general, and twentieth-century warfare in particular, that has engendered widespread commemoration and remembrance of its combatants and victims. This thesis recounts the story of ten men who share at least three things in common: they all attended the Milwaukee Normal School sometime during the early years of the twentieth century; they all perished in the service of the United States Armed Forces during the First World War; and they are all commemorated on a simple and somewhat forlorn bronze tablet in Mitchell Hall, now the administrative center of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. This thesis has a primary and a secondary purpose. The primary goal is a simple exercise in research. A person or persons felt the need to commemorate these men in a material and public way. The tablet was commissioned, paid for, and erected. And what of those commemorated? Who were they? What did they do? What happened to them? Does anyone remember them now? Answering these questions comprises the bulk of this document. iii The secondary goal of the thesis is a brief consideration of the tablet in its historical context, both as a historical artefact in its own right, and in its subsequent history, a testimony to the resilience (or otherwise) of American Great War historical memory.