Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall. Kristin Ann Hass

than the population at large, the problem of figuring the soldier as something other than white was difficult. Ralph Ellison’s famous insight that white paint requires a few drops of black to be truly white has been carefully complicated in the last ten years by work in the study of whiteness. The central tenet of this work is that whiteness in the United States has, from the nation’s inception, depended upon an Indian or African or Asian “other” with and against which whiteness could be constructed. The idea is that race is a social rather than biological fact, and this is true whether people are “raced” white or black or Indian. This premise, despite its limitations, is useful for thinking about the ways in which soldiers have been represented. Civil War memorials, with the possible complicated exception of Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial in Boston, have famously whitened the war and the soldiers who fought in it.⁷¹ In the nineteenth century, Custer’s blond curls glowed on barroom walls everywhere, rewriting his death at the hands of Indians as a triumph of white power.⁷² As David Blight, Cecilia O’Leary, Kirk Savage, and others have argued, the nation-building work accomplished by the memorial boom of the nineteenth century was highly racialized and produced a North-South reconciliation around the celebration of the white soldier. The lack of interest in war memorials for the last three quarters of the twentieth century allowed this problem to lie fallow, but because the commissions involved were determined to avoid the embarrassment of ignoring race in the memorial to the first desegregated war, these complicated questions of representation were raised.⁷³ It is worth noting here that the question of representing women was only barely raised, and when it was, Stilwell was adamant that it was out of the question.⁷⁴ A full 120,000 women served in a range of positions in the war, but no women are included in the final design—or in earlier iterations, for that matter.⁷⁵

      

      The problems of representing race and avoiding women were not the only issues inspiring redesigns. In the first set of significant suggested revisions, these questions inspired another dramatic set of changes. Stilwell was clearly not taken with the first design’s narrative of moving through war into peace. At the board’s request, the figures were redrawn to represent soldiers actively engaged in battle, as if they were under fire with a man down.⁷⁶ Instead of marching steadily, the soldiers were shown “kneeling, some pulling pins out of grenades, some holding bazookas ready to fire.”⁷⁷ Asked by a CFA commissioner to explain the line of the march in this new context, to clarify its “tactical function,” Cooper replied, “This is an undefined mission. . . . [T]hey are subject to hostile action. . . . [T]hey are alert . . . caught in a moment in time.”⁷⁸ General Stilwell’s explanation was that the oversized soldiers simply marching on the Mall might be “boring” and that they had wanted to “introduce a narrative story of soldiers responding to unexpected unfriendly fire.”⁷⁹ This was referred to as the “Delta Scheme.”

      The pressure to add military specificity and ethnic and racial designations—if not women—to the design can be easily understood in the context of the steadily increasing expectation that war memorials remember soldiers as specifically as possible in the context of the evolving makeup of the military: remember bodies, remember sacrifice, remember names, remember the racial composition of the military, remember the women who served, and so on. These are complicated propositions, though the logic that requires them is fairly straightforward. But adding a narrative element—a real attack, frozen in time—is something else. The fear that the thirty-eight giants might be boring implies other expectations for the memorial and what it was supposed to accomplish. Introducing a narrative of soldiers responding to unfriendly fire allows the figures to enact a particular kind of heroism. The scale of the figures and the number of figures were not, in Stilwell’s estimation, enough to do what he wanted the memorial to do. As they struggled with the limitations of the symbolic vocabularies required of the memorial, Stilwell and the board turned to a more familiar visual vocabulary for representing war heroism and war heroes: the movies. Stilwell and the KWMAB imagined a war movie on the Mall.⁸⁰ But translating filmic images into a memorial in stone is tricky at best. Responding to an attack requires raising weapons, which specifically memorializes violence in a way that memorials in the United States have long sought to avoid. For example, if an enormous soldier is to pull a pin from a grenade on the Mall, in what direction will he face to hurl the explosive? Toward Lincoln? Washington? The Vietnam Memorial? Across the Tidal Basin to Jefferson? Or toward Arlington National Cemetery? There was a problem of containing the violence that the Stilwell narrative would have brought to the Mall.

      This was all too much for the original design team. They described the revisions as turning their fluidly marching figures into a “GI Joe battle scene.”⁸¹ They claimed that the revisions “decapitated” the memorial concept and transformed their process of moving through war to peace and reflection to “make the scene convey battle and victory.”⁸² Frustrated and shut out of the Cooper-Lecky revisions, Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas hired a lawyer and sued for the right to control the fate of their design. They went to court but were never able to convince a federal judge that they had any rights to the design after having collected the prize money.

      THE FINAL DESIGN

      In January 1991, after another set of extensive revisions, the Commission of Fine Arts had a change of heart. After having granted provisional approval to the second KWVM design, the CFA withdrew its support and sent Cooper-Lecky back to the drawing board. Praising the Vietnam Memorial, J. Carter Brown reminded the designers that there was value in simplicity: “One reason it is so effective is that it doesn’t wave its hand at you.”⁸³ Certainly, a 350-foot oversized stainless steel live action battle scene on the Mall might constitute hand-waving. As Brown described it, the memorial as designed was “overbearing to the point of bombast.”

      At this point, the United States was engaged in the first Iraq War and, as they describe it, the war changed the commissioners’ thinking about how to remember the Korean War. Robert Peck of the CFA told the New York Times, “Given what is happening in the Middle East, I think about this in a different context.” He saw more war memorials coming and was concerned about precedent. Peck was worried about the fussiness of the murals, the narrative, all the information. “Our memorials are turning into outdoor museums,” he complained. In this light, the original design was more appealing because it “had at least a bold single idea.”⁸⁴

      Six months later, Brown and the CFA had had it. They recommended that the figures and the drama they were to enact be eliminated entirely. This inspired a furious response from the KWVMA and the ABMC. For these agencies, the figures were the reason to build the memorial, and there would be no memorial without them. Letters poured in from Korean War veterans across the country. In August 1991, the ABMC sent Brown an angry letter offering a “last compromise.” Nineteen freestanding seven-foot-tall statues reflected in a mural wall to make thirty-eight slightly smaller figures on the Mall. (Why cling to thirty-eight with such tenacity?) This letter referred to the VVM design process and the addition of the statue as a compromise that saved the memorial.⁸⁵ In the end, the CFA agreed to the modifications, and the compromise held.

      FIGURE 5. American Battle Monuments Commission Korean War Veterans Memorial figures chart. (Courtesy of the American Battle Monuments Commission.)

      However, stylistic concerns had yet to be addressed. William Lecky told interviewers, “There is no question that there was a healthy conflict between what the client wanted, which was something very realistic and militarily accurate and what the reviewing commissions—the artistic side if you will—preferred, which was something more abstract. . . . [T]he final solution was what we like to call ‘impressionistic styling,’ which makes it very clear what is being portrayed, but diminishes the sense of an actual collection of ground troops moving across the Mall.”⁸⁶ This is a polite way of saying that what they did stylistically was to fudge it. This impressionistic styling allowed the designers to avoid a whole series of problems. In the memorial as it stands, the military details are roughed in at best. The ponchos were added to cover weaponry and obscure uniforms, making the figures less threatening and more generic.⁸⁷ Although the racial designations