Memorials and the Cult of Apology examines how contemporary memorials have come to embody more than memory. It begins with a simple observation of the growing demand for apologies across the globe and the related proliferation of memorials that aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation. In the broadest terms, my research is an intervention into the cultural history of the built environment. As the first scholarly work to address memorials as apologies, my dissertation builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, of their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects built apologies produce. It uses five representative case studies located in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco, to develop this argument. Since memorialization is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, my work incorporates methods, readings, and theories from a vast array of humanistic disciplines, particularly postcolonial theory, Holocaust and human rights scholarship, and debates about justice, recognition, reparation, and morality. My archival and field research combines methods drawn from architectural history and the humanities ¬–close reading, literary interpretation, and storytelling–, which I apply to the formal analysis of built memorials and their urban contexts. This formal analysis is complemented with ethnographic interviews with designers, experts and site visitors, as well as participant observation of both commemorative events and what has been called ‘apology activism.’

This dissertation addresses the ways that gender, politics, and social factors were exploited and expressed in the controversy surrounding the April 1953 House Beautiful editorial, "The Threat to the Next America." House Beautiful's editor, Elizabeth Gordon, wrote and published this editorial as a response to ongoing institutional promotion of experimental modern residential architecture, which fell under the umbrella of the International Style, a term that came from a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Gordon warned her readers that the practitioners of the International Style, which she deplored as "barren," were designing and promoting unlivable housing. She specifically condemned German immigrant architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as French architect Le Corbusier. "The Threat to the Next America" was laden with terms and phrasing that exploited American fears of communism, which in that year were at a fever pitch due to the well-publicized "witch hunts" conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Gordon's editorial provoked strong responses from architects, designers, and others. Some cheered her for standing up to institutions that many felt had deliberately excluded alternate threads of modern architecture and design from public promotions. Others damned her for endangering the careers of European immigrant designers by obliquely associating them with communism as McCarthyism swept the country. Many of the negative responses also revealed a high level of discomfort with the fact that a woman had inserted herself so vociferously into what had primarily been an internal debate in the heavily male-dominated field of architecture. Others were upset that a magazine so associated with mass consumption of household goods should speak out against architects who had carefully avoided the appearance of commercialization. Those who had roles in the controversy surrounding the editorial were some of the best known figures in American modern design at mid-twentieth century. They included Frank Lloyd Wright, Douglas Haskell, Lewis Mumford, Jean and Harwell Hamilton Harris, William Wurster, and many others. By framing the controversy and the roles of these individuals in applicable historic and cultural contexts, it is possible to better understand how "The Threat to the Next America" affected Elizabeth Gordon's legacy, House Beautiful's ongoing interpretation and presentation of modern design, and public acceptance and non-acceptance of modern housing in the United States.

In 1937, the U.S. Congress passed the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, authorizing federal funds for the development of public housing. Twelve years later, Congress reauthorized this legislation with the American Housing Act of 1949. In the process,Congress converted a federal housing program into a redevelopment program that only sometimes funded housing.

Key to understanding this change is the rise of a planning concept called “blight.” In the first half of the 20th century, planners, public officials, scholars, and intellectuals struggled to reshape the word “blight” into a description of urban conditions, with little resulting consensus. Despite this, Congress included no legislative definition for “blight,” allowing local leaders great discretion about where and what parts of the city were suitable for clearance and replacement. While previous legislation had restricted federally funded intervention to addressing “slum” conditions, “blight” freed cities from this requirement.

This dissertation has two components. First, at the national scale, it examines struggles to define “blight,” how this term came to be excluded from the Housing Act of 1937, and how pressure from the real estate industry placed it into the Housing Act of 1949. Second, it examines two case studies from the U.S. West Coast: Oakland, California’s efforts to map “blight” citywide from 1949-1951, and Portland, Oregon’s first attempt to create an urban redevelopment program from 1950-1953. Both show how cities without “slum” conditions attempted to leverage the logic of “blight”--seemingly empirical, but actually political--to achieve goals that had little or nothing to do with public housing.

This, then, is the twin story told in this dissertation—first, of how the term “blight” appeared to have empirical meaning without in fact having empirical dimensions, and second how the real estate industry made use of the slipperiness of “blight” to justify projects that largely supplanted public housing.