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The Case of the Proposed World War II Memorial
by Judy Scott Feldman, Ph.D.
Unfortunately, there is good reason for the memorial's sponsor to keep the proposed design out of the public eye. The memory the memorial enshrines is a militaristic and institutional one, with no recognition of the individuals who served and supported the unified national effort. The memorial's iconography ignores the trend in recent memorials' to recognize the contribution of women, racial minorities, and others to the American national story. Far from preserving the historic character of the Mall, it proposes to replace its open and green spaces with granite and impede the kinds of public gatherings and demonstrations historically associated with the site. This proposed WWII Memorial is not yet a done deal. It still must gain final approval from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. In addition, it requires a construction permit from the Secretary of the Interior before groundbreaking can take place in November. The questions I will ask today are: How does this memorial remember WWII? Whose memories and interpretation of the war are shaping the memorial-making process and its exclusive view of that momentous time?
Planning for a National World War II memorial should be an opportunity for the American people to think about the meaning of that earth-shattering time in multi-faceted ways. World War II is very much on the minds of historians, scholars, politicians, and the public. New and sometimes controversial views on a variety of topics fill our bookshelves, movie screens, museums, and even courtrooms. However, the memorial-making process for the proposed WWII Memorial has taken little or no cue from this on-going public reassessment. Instead of being involved in the decisions about where and how we as a nation want to remember WWII, the public has been put in a position of simply reacting to what is being proposed by the sponsors and approved by the federal reviewing agencies. This should be of particular concern to women and any others whose contributions are being ignored. Congress authorized a memorial to WWII in 1993 and designated the American Battle Monuments Commission, a federal agency, to sponsor and build the memorial.1 In 1995, the American Battle Monuments Commission, working with the National Park Service, selected a memorial site at the east end of Constitution Gardens. The Commission of Fine Arts refused to approve that site, however.2 So a new 7.4-acre site, at the Rainbow Pool, the small oval-shaped pool at the eastern end of the Reflecting Pool and between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial was approved instead.3 But this new site on the main cross-axis of the Mall was controversial. Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska led a group of Senators and Representatives, architects, historians, and concerned citizens against that location. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many others editorialized that this was the wrong place for a war memorial. Nevertheless, the reviewing commissions reaffirmed their choice and refused to consider another site. Controversy also surrounded the memorial design. In 1997 both the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission rejected architect Friedrich St. Florian's competition-winning design, saying that it was too destructive of the Mall. In 1998 St. Florian submitted a new, scaled-back design and won approval and his revised design program also was approved in 1999. This summer - probably in July -- the final design concept will come up for approval before construction can begin in the fall. 4 In authorizing the memorial, Congress called for a memorial "to honor members of the Armed Forces who served in World War II and to commemorate the participation of the United States in that war." The ABMC is more specific. When the memorial is completed, their web site states, the memorial will "honor all military veterans of the war, the citizens on the 'home front,' the nation at large, and the high moral purpose and idealism that motivated the nation's call to arms." It is worth noting that while this is a war memorial - and not a "veterans memorial" like the Vietnam and Korean memorials -, nonetheless the emphasis by both Congress and ABMC is not on war or victory per se but on American ideals and on the united efforts of Americans under arms and on the homefront.
To judge from the design, however, the architect and sponsor have a somewhat different vision from that of Congress, one that harkens back to the WWI-era of war memorials. The design concept envisions a granite plaza sunken 6 or 7 feet below grade and stretching more than 400' across the central panel of the Mall from tree line to tree line (illustrations are available on the following web sites: www.savethemall.org, www.committeeof100.net , and www.abmc.gov). At the center of the plaza is a new and smaller Rainbow Pool.5 The plaza is framed at the north and south by two 41-foot high triumphal arches. It is ringed with 56 17-foot-tall stone pillars, each one hung with bronze wreaths. At the western end and abutting the Reflecting Pool is a niche -- what the sponsor calls the "sacred precinct" - which contains a sloped plane (wall of upheaval) and an eternal flame. Positioned in front of the niche is a large stone "cenotaph" in the shape of a coffin. Two waterfalls flank the niche and two more are set into the walls below the triumphal arches. Whereas Congress and ABMC laid out a memorial program that centered on the commemoration of veterans and others who served, St. Florian interprets a triumphalist and institutional vision of military pedigree. Contrast his design with the Vietnam and Korean memorials, in which military veterans are named or pictured - the Vietnam memorial's names on its black walls, and the statues of the Three Soldiers and the Women's Memorial (the Nurses) added in later years; the Korean memorial's 19 marching soldiers and the portraits etched into its wall.6 St. Florian, however, has resorted to a WWI-era military cemetery theme - in the tradition of the Tomb of the Unknown --, emphasizing the anonymity of the fallen soldier but making no reference to any of the individuals who served. 7 The arches are simply labeled "Atlantic" and "Pacific", for the theaters of battle.8 As for honoring the "citizens on the 'home front'", architect St. Florian's idea is only to inscribe the 56 pillars with the names of the states and territories. He envisions citizens in terms of a corporate identity - the states of the union -- not as individuals in all their diversity.9 Once again, as with the tomb, his concepts of institutional and corporate abstraction and anonymity is more characteristic of Beaux-Arts war memorials from the turn of the 20th century. The third theme -- the high moral purpose and idealism that motivated the nation's call to arms - is difficult to decipher amidst the proposed memorial's amalgam of military, religious, and funerary imagery.10 Idealism and moral purpose already are represented on the Mall's cross-axis, in the lofty temples that enshrine Lincoln and Jefferson and the open green expanses that symbolize freedom. It may be that the inscriptions St. Florian says he will add to the memorial's walls will provide some moral content. But they will have to compete with triumphal arches, wreath-hung pillars, coffin, and flame that speak more of conquest, military valor, sacrifice, and death, hardly American values traditionally celebrated on the Mall.11
Recent scholarship on memorials has demonstrated that in the twentieth century, and especially after WWII, war memorials in America increasingly shifted in theme away from the WWI-era cult of the fallen soldier towards a celebration of veterans, women, racial minorities.12 As John Gillis points out in his book Commemorations, "The Vietnam Memorial, with its wall of names, is generally agreed to represent a turning point in the history of public memory, a decisive departure from the anonymity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a growing acknowledgement that everyone now deserves equal recognition at all times in wholly accessible places."13 Contrasting Arlington National Cemetery with recent war memorials on the Mall, Gillis notes that they represent "two different eras in the history of commemoration, the national and the post-national."14 Whatever one thinks of the diorama-like multi-acre mixing of walls and figures at the Vietnam and Korean, they pose new vocabulary for war memorial in our day, a democratic and pluralistic vision, embracing a view of society that includes racial and gender consciousness.15 Memorials that commemorate the victories of World War II also embrace this notion of the heroic everyman -- the Iwo Jima Memorial from 1958; also the FDR Memorial, completed in 1998, which tells the story of the war years in a room with broken walls and waterfall presided over by President Roosevelt and his dog Falla. The sentiment expressed about war is provided in Roosevelt's words inscribed above the waterfall, "I Have Seen War" and "I Hate War", a dramatic contrast to the triumphalism that is proposed for the WWII Memorial on the National Mall. The American manner of celebrating WWII also embraces a new attitude towards war. When in 1954 Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day, in order to include the WWII victory, that national holiday took on the new spirit. We celebrate Veterans Day today not as the WWI generation did with visits to the cemetery but more likely with parades and celebrations of victory.16 Women have been freed of their WWI-era role as simply mothers of the dead. Heroism, which in earlier times was represented in terms of the feats of a general or president, came to be seen more in the acts and courage of ordinary people. A quick review of some recent WWII literature and movies - for example, Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, Stephen Spielberg's blockbuster Saving Private Ryan, and now James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers about his father's role at Iwo Jima- shows that increasingly we "remember" the war as the extraordinary triumph of "ordinary" Americans, including "citizen soldiers", women, black Americans, and others, coming together in a unified effort as never before and never since. If the WWII memorial is built as planned, the notion that we are in a new era of war memorial building will no longer be true. Furthermore, and because visitors will not see themselves in the WWII Memorial as they have come to expect in recent memorials, we can be assured that this design will be altered repeatedly. Congress will have to respond to public demand and soon it will acquire additions - women, blacks, Rosie the Riveter, German-Americans, Japanese-Americans who fought against family -- the possibilities are endless in a memorial that studiously avoids speaking to the memories Americans have of that crucial era in American history. So how is it that at the turn of the 21st century, and 50 years after the end of the war - and the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany -- the United States is about to memorialize a triumphalist and military vision of the fallen soldier, an obsolete and some would say inappropriate remembrance of that era in the nation's and world's history?
The architect and sponsor have conceived of the WWII Memorial as in effect a military cemetery. ABMC was founded by Congress in 1923 to establish and maintain battlefield monuments and military cemeteries overseas. Their earliest cemetery projects, like those built by England and other European nations after WWI, typically included classicizing elements, uniform cross-shaped headstones, and a collective Tomb of the Unknown.17 These cemeteries and monuments were meant, as Piehler observes, "to symbolize a vision of uniform nationalism."18 Throughout the twentieth century, while war memorials became increasingly democratic and pluralistic in spirit, military cemeteries changed little and still employ the conservative vocabulary of the earliest WWI types. This is a key to the failure of the WWII Memorial design. After his original competition-winning design was rejected by both the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission in 1997, architect St. Florian decided to seek inspiration (he told me this in a conversation after that hearing) by visiting the D-Day battlefields and cemeteries of Normandy. Already in 1998, then, he was thinking in terms of a typical ABMC battle monument, and in 1999 he added funerary and triumphal imagery - arches, pillars with wreaths, a coffin -- that further borrowed from the iconography of military cemeteries overseas. (Examples of ABMC monuments can be found on the web site: www.abmc.gov.) Certainly a design based on funerary themes of death and triumphalism is contrary to the Congressional mandate and to the way we commemorate WWII today, as well as contrary to the American symbols on the Mall. That alone is reason to reject it. But there are additional associations that speak against the use of triumphal imagery, and in particular triumphal arches and the like. As historians we should raise these concerns to the sponsor and the American people in order that we not succumb to historical amnesia and its unfortunate and sometimes disastrous consequences. First, triumphal arches employed to sometimes moving effect in military cemeteries, are not typical American forms of war remembrance, particularly outside a military cemetery setting. Temporary triumphal arches were erected in Washington and elsewhere to welcome back General John Pershing and the American troops at the end of WWI. When, however, designs were prepared for permanent arches - as in the case of the WWI "Arch of Victory" proposed for New York City in the years immediately following that war -- the plans eventually were dropped or changed when the triumphalism of the arch lost favor. Instead, there was a trend toward living memorials, memorial parks, recreation centers, and cultural centers.19 In Washington one such example near the Rainbow Pool on the Mall is the Memorial to the District of Columbia's war dead from WWI, which serves both as memorial and as a bandstand. If triumphal arches lost favor in public monuments after World War I, they appear to be mostly absent from commemorations of World War II. In England even the traditionalists of the War Graves Commission resisted Sir Edwin Lutyens push for monumental commemorations such as he had designed after WWI and preferred the living memorial model of parks or gardens. The sentiment was, as Mosse observes, that "memorials should commemorate the individual rather than the collectivity and should contain a warning against all war."20 Certainly in our time of global interconnectedness, unprecedented freedom throughout the world, and strong relationships with countries that were enemies 60 years ago, the triumphalism of the proposed WWII Memorial looks anachronistic, oddly defensive, and curiously belligerent in spirit. 21 Second, in the post-WWII era triumphal arches and other classical imperial symbols have lost favor also because they are tainted by association with the fascist architecture of Mussolini and the imperial schemes Albert Speer designed for Nazi Germany. The similarities were noted by citizens testifying before the federal reviewing agencies and by The New York Times in 1997 and most recently by The Wall Street Journal in September of last year. ."22 The issue is not one about the appropriateness of neoclassicism per se (the traditional style of Washington) or even the stripped classicism so characteristic of 1920s and 30s European and American architecture. It is about the iconography of imperial authority that goes back to the ancient Romans and beyond, and which is the architecture of choice for authoritarian regimes through history. Under Mussolini and Hitler - and one might add Stalin in the Soviet Union, as well -- public plazas were remade into centers of the cult of the dead, replete with great paved plazas, coffins of the heroic dead, eternal flames, and grandiose settings for military pageantry.23 Hitler's plans to rebuild Berlin, unveiled in 1925, included a new grand avenue marked with a gigantic triumphal arch symbolizing the rise of the new Germany. This is not to say the sponsor or architect intended any such association. As I said earlier, I think the inspiration is from conservative military cemeteries. Evidently, the ABMC's traditional architecture has aroused similar sentiments by others, as Piehler notes: "To many critics....cemeteries and monuments built by ABMC symbolized all that should be avoided in memorial art....massiveness, uniformity, and stiffness...too much like the commemorative structures of fascist Germany and Italy."24 In the post-WWII era, and especially in a memorial that remembers that time and interprets it, it is too appalling to find the American people embracing the triumphalist spirit, cult of death, and symbols that characterize the grandiose pretensions and schemes of the very forces America fought against. To see these elements combined into a formal ceremonial plaza that will pave over the historic open and green character of the Mall between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial is all the more shocking. As one wag noted, "this is the memorial they (the Nazis) would have built." So how is it that we are about to build this kind of WWII memorial on the National Mall? Does the Memorial represent a purposeful program by the sponsors and federal reviewing agencies? Does the disconcerting choice of themes suggest historical amnesia? Nostalgia for a by-gone era? A new Nationalism?
I will answer this by focussing on my second point, the role of historic preservation in the memorial-building process so far. The preservation of the historic character of the Mall should be at least as important as the development of a WWII Memorial program. Such was the case for the Vietnam memorial, which the architect set into the earth and acknowledged the preeminence of Lincoln and Washington by pointing the walls towards those memorials. However, the record shows that in the case of the WWII Memorial, federal and local oversight has been less than vigorous at every stage of development. The Rainbow Pool site is listed in the National Register of Historic Places in three separate designations.25 In carrying out the Environmental Assessment of the historic site in 1998 the National Park Service made the official finding that the proposed memorial would have an "adverse impact" on the historic site. Here I quote: "NPS has determined that the memorial would have an adverse effect on the existing setting, including the Rainbow Pool, which was completed in the 1920s as an element of and complement to the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial." Additionally, a new road cut through here for bus and taxi drop-off would constitute an adverse impact. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation concurred in 1998, as did the Historic Preservation Review Board in 1998 and 1999.26 It is also worth noting that those findings date to 1998 before the 56 pillars were added to the design and grass panels in the Memorial's pavement were totally eliminated for a field of solid granite. One of the most significant changes to the Mall is one that the review commissions do not mention and that is not evident in the illustrations of the memorial design: The memorial is closed at the western end next to the Reflecting Pool. The 6-foot high walls at the "sacred precinct" are flanked by waterfalls that will block passage through here, so pedestrians will not be able to enter or exit the memorial at the Reflecting Pool end. The architect and sponsor state that this enclosure is necessary to preserve the "sacred" character of the memorial space. The National Park Service justifies it with a novel explanation - closing off this end of the memorial is necessary to prevent pedestrians from walking along the coping of the Reflecting Pool - a kind of WWII Memorial as Jersey barrier. 27 Historic Preservation law and principles have been subverted at every turn. Even though the federal reviewing agencies at first were troubled by the stone and the design's sense of enclosure, and they recommended more of a "landscape solution" in keeping with the park-like setting of the Mall, by 1999 they abandoned these suggestions. In 1998, Chairman Carter Brown suggested the arches could be better rendered more transparent and "gardenesque" but in 1999 he enthusiastically approved the design, which not only increased the stone mass of the arches but also added the 56 pillars. As for the multiple findings of "adverse impact", the local and federal agencies that made the findings have still not drawn up the required Memorandum of Agreement explaining how the negative effects on the Mall can be mitigated. In summary, instead of using preservation law to effect substantive change to the project before a final design is approved, the federal and state preservation agencies are doing just the opposite. They are waiting to see the final design, after which they will draw up an agreement that, in effect, states that there are no adverse effects after all and, therefore, that construction can begin. This turning of preservation law on its head by the very agencies charged with upholding it is what motivated the Committee of 100 to nominate this part of the Mall to the "11 Most Endangered Historic Places" list of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A decision will be made in June. In conclusion, the Mall and what it represents in American public life and national identity is at stake and yet a lack of attention, oversight, and serious involvement of the public, historians, and people knowledgeable about World War II has characterized the process to date. The most fundamental change the WWII Memorial proposes is in effect a new definition of the Mall's place in our national consciousness. Visitors to the National Mall will not longer be able to walk continuously along the long open stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument but will have to walk around the Memorial by passing off into the trees on the sides. The connection between the Washington and Lincoln monuments will be severed. Even more significant, the National Park Service has stated that due to the solemn character of the memorial, this part of the Mall would be closed to the kinds of public celebrations, marches, and demonstrations that traditionally have occurred here. The July 4th fireworks will have to be moved. Demonstrations and marches such as the March on Washington in 1963 and Hands Across America in 1986, as well as the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s and 70s will no longer be able to happen here. Finally, one historic and under-appreciated connection of this part of the Mall will be lost - that is its association with the Civil Rights Movement. These include: the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on Memorial Day, 1922, at which the main address was given by the black president of Tuskegee Institute, Dr. Robert Moton; Marian Anderson's concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939, and the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech, among other events. Scott Sandage has documented another dimension of the site's significance in his 1993 article entitled "A Marble House Divided.28 Black Americans have used the Lincoln Memorial site, he argues, both to reaffirm but also to challenge Lincoln's role and the promise his memorial celebrates. "By transforming the memorial from a symbol of consensus into ... 'the protest palace', black activists claimed it as their own, very powerful, memory site."29 The change proposed by the WWII Memorial to this historic civil rights connection is all the more poignant now that the proposed memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr., has been given a site not in this area but across Independence Avenue in a grove of trees alongside the Tidal Basin. 30 A colleague at this conference put the issue very simply: we don't put monuments on top of monuments. But that is precisely what we are about to do with the WWII Memorial. We will be erasing one monument and the memories it holds and replacing it with a monument with an inadequate and undemocratic vision of our nationhood. 31 It is a vision that overturns a whole body of recent literature that sees the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a decisive turning point in the way American remember war. Its corporate character and its placement between the two most potent symbols of American government on the Mall represents no less than a major reinterpretation of the American national story as we enter the 21st century. 32 For the past year I have been leading an effort on behalf of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, of which I am a trustee, and the Campaign to Save the Mall to improve the design and preserve this sylvan part of the historic Mall. To that end we have attempted to alert the public to what is being planned by developing two web sites (www.savethemall.org and www.committeeof100.net). We are hoping that in June our nomination of the West End of the Mall will make the National Trust's list of the "Most Endangered Historic Places of 2000. Last month the College Art Association and the DC Preservation League joined us in asking the sponsor to erect a full-scale mockup of the proposed design - in wood or metal - at the Rainbow Pool site so that the sponsor, Congress, reviewing commissions, and the American people can see what is being planned for the Mall before construction begins. It is hoped that if we can start a serious public dialogue now, we can assure that whatever eventually is built will be, as best as possible, a true reflection of the complex ways in which the American people remember World War II and its far-reaching impact in the nation's history.
Commemorations. The Politics of National Identity. Edited by John R. Gillis (Princeton, 1994) Charles L. Griswold, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography," Critical Inquiry, Summer 1986, pp. 688-719 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford University Press: New York, Oxford, 1990) Philosophy and Geography II. The Production of Public Space. Edited by Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford, 1998) G. Kurt Piehler, "The War Dead and the Gold Star," in Commemorations, 168-183 _________, Remembering Wars the American Way (Smithsonian I. Press: Washington and New York, 1995) Scott A. Sandage, "A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939-1963," The Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 1 (June., 1993), 135-167 |
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