TABLE 1 ABMC Chart
The figures have rough, exaggerated facial features; it is tricky to identify any particular racial type. This is problematic because of the expectations that people bring to memorials. Because nearly all war memorials in the United States have represented soldiers as white, it is possible that these figures all become white by default. Kent Cooper claims that the figures are brushed with “traces of race.” He says this quite plainly, as if it was a category of representation or experience of race that would make sense to people in the United States and be commonly understood. But “traces of race,” in the history of race and racialization, has often meant whiteness. Just enough race heightens the masculinity of the figures in this logic, while too much race would make them too specifically not-white. Cooper was trying to say that race did not disappear in the memorial process, but his language tripped him up, and he ended up speaking a perhaps unintentional truth. The impressionistic stylistics return the memorial to its original white-by-default iteration—a rough, exaggerated, familiarly borrowing whiteness. Which is not to say that the figures are intended to be seen as white, but rather that incorporating “traces of race” avoids representing the heroic armed soldiers as absolutely African American, Mexican American, Asian American, or Indian. Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has written, partly as a push back against whiteness studies, “Either race is an essence or there is no such thing as race.” He claims that “our actual racial practice can be understood only as the expression of our commitment to the idea that race is not a social construction.”91 Traces of race in the figures express this tension; they give the figures the luxury of racial mobility that the soldiers themselves did not have. This approach avoids the problem of either too much or too little race on the Mall, but even this avoidance was not easy to achieve.
The fight over the details of these representations was so intense that both the ABMC and the CFA were involved in a level of review that sculptor Frank Gaylord thought extremely unusual.92 In 1992, new constraints were established: “The troopers are to be treated as a unit, on an undefined mission, caught in a moment in time; all figures are wearing ponchos which are blown from behind with increasing velocity at the apex; the figures are alert, wary, and are in various kinds of communication with each other. . . . [A]ny articulation of the figures for purposes of portraying communication should not interfere with the general forward movement of the unit; the figures will be treated as a single composition.”93
As the figures developed, the CFA, the ABMC, and Cooper-Lecky kept close watch. In 1994, an ad hoc committee they had formed made regular reviews. In July and November, members of the committee went to see the figures in progress in Gaylord’s Vermont studio. A November 15, 1994, Lecky memo on one of these visits conveys the level of involvement with the design details. A statement of the committee specifies, “The ad hoc design committee has always described these statues as young gallant warriors having embarked on a successful mission. Emphasis on young, gallant, and successful . . . [G]enerally speaking the committee felt that the faces were older than our directions. If mention is made in the remarks below, about mouth adjustments, it means that the mouth should be either, a) closed, or b) open, but doing something—talking, breathing heavily, in any case determined and focused, as opposed to being open and unfocused.”94
This statement is followed by a list of changes for the statues. The first change for the lead statue, #1, reads, “Bridge of nose too broad.” Gaylord reacts strongly to this, calling #1 the “runt of the litter” and saying, “He is Caucasian, his nose is not too broad.”95 But this was not the only concern about #1. Cooper wrote, “It was agreed to modify the facial expression to be less soulful and ‘more intensely searching.’ ” Less soulful? Why would the lead soldier need to be less soulful? And since when are soulful and searching at odds? This is baffling. Another item on the list reads, “Left arm and hand too limp.” Lecky wrote, “The bent wrist holding the rifle on many figures seems contrived and more appropriate to a ballet than a military situation.”96 Ballet? Since when are bent wrists part of the line of a dancer? Gaylord called this concern ridiculous and added that he didn’t do limp wrists. The comments on figure #3 include, “Face looks too sweet, adjust mouth/lips.” Figure #5 is “too tired, dead in the water, totally panicked, ok to be stressed out but show more determination.” Figure #6 is “not acceptable, looks like he is sleeping, also looks like has he has a disdainful expression.” Figure #12 is “too pregnant.” Too pregnant?
Brown generated his own list in response to the visit. His list of required changes included the following: “The fatness of the lips to be reduced”; “the eyes often seem unfocused, drugged”; “the number of open mouths needs to be drastically reduced”; and perhaps most striking, “there is an excess of novelty in the faces.” In this context, what exactly is an excess of novelty? He also complained that #1’s lips were “too pouty.” Kent Cooper summarized the responses: “There was a lack of alertness and purpose in most of the faces. There was a minimum sense of being in a place of potential danger.”97 Noses too broad? Lips too fat? Wrists too limp? Too pregnant? The figuring of the soldier here is remarkable. It seems impossible not to conclude that standards of masculinity, heroism, and whiteness were being articulated—indeed, mandated.98 The wrists of the figures as they stand on the Mall are not limp, but the noses are broad and the lips remain fat on nearly all the figures. They are fascinatingly racially indistinct and racialized at the same time, which must be what Cooper means by “traces of race.”
Frank Gaylord still bristles at this language. More than ten years after the memorial was completed, his frustration with the committees’ involvement in shaping the figures is still palpable. Gaylord saw the figures as elements in a single composition. He understood each figure as part of something else, moving together in complicated unison. He sought to render expressive figures that reflected his own experience of war; he wanted something real. But the fussing of the committee, for whom what the individuals looked like was paramount, thwarted this vision.99
For the committee, getting the racing and gendering of the figures right trumped Gaylord’s composition and his desire to express something particular about the war. Pregnant, limp-wristed soldiers on the Mall would apparently not inspire the kind of future sacrifice they wanted. Further, this gendering of the soldiers seems linked to bigger questions about the Cold War. Historian Robert Dean has written about an “imperial brotherhood” of Cold War political elites powerfully shaped by a “ideology of masculinity.”100 He claims, in fact, that the wagers of the Cold War were blinded by the demands of the masculinist ideologies of their moment. He contends that waging and losing the Cold War conflicts, which simple logic and elite educations might have kept these empirically minded people out of, were linked to ideas about masculinity that have not been adequately explored. The criticisms of these figures are certainly suggestive in this context. They suggest that the anxieties about masculinity that propelled the war also shaped the memorial.
The impressionistic stylistics do something significant to the figures that the ad hoc committee did not address: it blinds them, in a sense. The soldiers have enormous eyes—enormous but hollow eyes. The impression of a pupil is created by just that, an impression. Thus the soldiers, to be honored, to be finally remembered, have no capacity to look. In thinking about the visual and visuality, the idea of the gaze, the power to look and see is central. Representation of the gaze is connected to giving and wielding power. The most powerless in the realm of visual representation are those without the gaze. Gaylord clearly did not intend the