Historicizing the Recent Past: the Lack of Sources

On the low wall at the back of the monument, between the expression of gratitude and the JFK quote, are the engraved crests of all thirty-nine municipalities throughout Rhode Island from which servicepeople hailed.¹ Under each is the number of people who served from that municipality. Providence has the highest number: 34,115 people, nearly 36% of all people sent overseas from Rhode Island, based on the 96,000 number also supplied by the memorial.

Finally, when viewers emerge from the stone space and go to the higher ground surrounding it, they can see stone tablets on either side, one of which thanks the donors who paid for the memorial (including Brown University), and the other of which thanks the committee behind its creation. Behind each of these, encircling the colonnade from higher ground, are more stone benches. They face the bushes or outward toward the rest of Memorial Park, also inscribed with the names of donors. These engravings have even more moss growing within them than do the names of the war dead.

The primary struggle in attempting to understand such a memorial is its newness. Only in existence for fifteen years, it has yet to be historicized in any scholarship. In the entirety of the Ocean State Libraries collections, I found nearly nothing on Providence memorials dated beyond 1990, let alone any that dealt with the WWII Memorial. When I contacted them, the Rhode Island Historical Society and Providence Preservation Society responded that neither possessed any resources regarding the memorial. The Providence Public Library found two pages written on it in one book: Monumental Providence: Legends of History in Sculpture, Statuary, Monuments and Memorials, which I cited earlier in the essay. However, these sources did assist me in building an understanding of the site this memorial eventually inhabited before 2007, complicating why this memorial came to exist when it did.

Providence: A Citywide Survey of Historic Resources, provided to me by the Providence Preservation Society, gives a history of South Main Street, the location of the WWII Monument and Memorial Park. “The Recent Past” portion of the report is defined as 1945-1985: well before 2007.² But the construction boom, primarily of commercial buildings and modern homes, resulting in modern-day Providence, occurred in the wake of World War II. Brown expanded extensively in the early 1950s, overtaking much of the surrounding residential area—nearly one hundred houses were “moved or demolished to make way for the construction of two residential quadrangles.”³ In the 1970s, South Main Street grew increasingly commercialized. In 1976, a federal tax incentive for renovating commercial spaces listed on the National Register of Historic Places spurred over 122 projects in the City of Providence, especially downtown. From 1976 to 1984, the “total investment in such projects was $89 million.”⁴

Why, when so much money went toward historical endeavors in the wake of World War II, did a WWII Memorial not exist until sixty-two years after the fact? Why, when the substantially larger World War I Monument was dedicated only eleven years following WWI and, thus, first conceived directly after the war itself, was this same immediacy not granted to WWII?

There is no explicitly stated reason for the gap nor the emergent urge to create this memorial manifesting after over sixty years. Yet anecdotal evidence seems to identify one overarching motivation: by the early 2000s, much of the WWII veteran population and others who witnessed it were beginning to pass from old age if they had not already. The impetus for the monument’s creation began with Joseph Corrente, a World War II and Korean War veteran from Cranston, Rhode Island.⁵ Corrente served with the Army in Europe during WWII before returning to active duty in 1950 with the 1343^rd Engineering Combat Battalion in the Korean War. Corrente served as co-chairman for the building of the Korean War Monument dedicated in 1998 and for the Memorial Walkway in Providence, which lines the Providence River. He then chaired the committee that resulted in the construction of the WWII Memorial.⁶ Paul Cavanaugh provided the “[p]rofessional services,” as the only sources available describe them.⁷