After much discussion of type, the LMA decided to erect “a monument plus a building, not for utilitarian purposes, but to house trophies of war.” A fundraising drive, begun in October 1919, netted more than $2 million in just 10 days, with over 83,000 people-in a city of 325,000-contributing. By December 1918, the Liberty Memorial Association (LMA), led by real estate developer J.C. The idea gained traction, meetings were held, and names were floated. Calls for a memorial to them came even before the war’s end. Of the nearly nine million soldiers who died in World War I, 441 hailed from Kansas City. Courtesy of the Missouri Valley Special Collections. These framings offer telling views of the city’s history, its greatest monument, and the changing nature of memory. In each case and in different ways, residents framed the war and its remembrance as a means to future gains. Locally, these two eras correspond with Kansas City’s emergence as a modern metropolis, and with its most ambitious program of urban redevelopment thus far. It was restored amidst a second such period, beginning in the 1980s and continuing to this day. The Liberty Memorial arose during a period of widespread monument-building, one that ran from roughly 1880 to 1930. When it reopened in 2006 it had changed, but then so too had its audience. In 1994, after years of neglect, the structure was declared unsound and closed to the public. The memorial’s story over the next seven decades is one of steady decline punctuated by well-intentioned revival efforts. But time passes and even the most seemingly durable objects decay. During the late 1920s, it was praised as among the best. Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial stood at its dedication in 1926 as one of the country’s largest and most lavish monuments.
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