A century has passed since Armistice Day, and there are no more living World War I veterans. But for The Doughboy Foundation and World War I Centennial Commission, now seemed like as good a time as ever to commemorate “the war to end all wars” in Washington, D.C.
The new National World War I Memorial by Joe Weishaar, Sabin Howard, GWWO Architects, and DAVID RUBIN Land Collective finally opens this week not far from the White House. Its classical design (which some have called a “glorification of battle”) was thanks to a campaign by the National Civic Art Society’s Justin Shubow, the steadfast ideologue of Donald Trump’s Executive Order that ideated a preference for classical and traditional architecture.
The milieu is located in Pershing Park, a 1.76-acre space completed in 1981 by M. Paul Friedberg and Oehme, van Sweden, at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. It was first authorized by the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act under Barack Obama. Then, a competition was announced to design the memorial shortly after. Joe Weishaar, who was 25 years old at the time, opted to enter the competition together with Sabin Howard. They won in 2016.
GWWO Architects, a Baltimore office, eventually stepped in as architect of record, and helped refurbish Pershing Park. Construction broke ground in 2017. Now, three years later, the National World War I Memorial opens to the public at a ribbon cutting ceremony on September 13.
“A Direct Affront to the Times”
The National World War I Memorial has multiple components. Its “conceptual center” is what architects call the Belvedere, a series of exhibition panels which explain U.S. involvement in World War I. It also features a 58-foot-long sculptural wall made of bronze by Howard, a classical figurative artist. Howard’s contribution, titled A Soldiers’ Journey, was inspired by Auguste Rodin and the Sistine Chapel, he recently told The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, a conservative free market think tank.
“The problem is that World War I changed the way the world is, and it’s still apparent today,” Howard said. “It’s the line in the sand where modern man begins with the idea of there is no God: how could 22 million people die if there is a divine order, how could this have happened and then move into the idea of alienation, nihilism and existentialism. That is the pervasive view that has continued to this moment. The concept of community, unity and pride for one’s country has been destroyed by an act of war that happened 104 years ago.”
Upon closer inspection of Howard’s artistic statement, it becomes apparent his aesthetic goal was to ruffle the feathers of modernists, and make up for this supposed fall from grace a la Jean Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir. “Through evoking artistic styles jettisoned by modernists, A Soldier’s Journey is a direct affront to the times,” The Yankee Institute’s Andrew Fowler said of the sculpture.
Howard’s sculpture in Washington, D.C. strays from the minimalist approach Maya Lin took in 1982 with her Vietnam War Memorial, an edifice which in recent years has caught flack from both the left and right. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vietnamese-American author of The Sympathizer, asked in his latest memoir, The Man With Two Faces: Why doesn’t Lin’s design have the names of Vietnamese and Hmong people who died?
The War to End All Wars
The country’s largest, and first, National World War I Memorial is located in Kansas City. For decades, Washington, D.C. has had national memorials for World War II and the Vietnam War, why not World War I?
In a 2021 interview with Fox, World War I Centennial Commission vice chair Edwin Fountain was asked his opinion about this absence in the nation’s capital. He replied: “World War I doesn’t fit neatly within our national mythology. It’s our coming of age story as a nation. But it doesn’t have that clear moral arc in the way that those other wars do.”
The idea of building monuments for “The Great War” was actually quite unpopular circa 1918. Unsurprisingly, the catastrophe turned millions of people riddled with PTSD into pacifists. There were in fact several instances around the world where soldiers actively stopped war memorials from happening, as recently described by David Gissen in The Architecture of Disability.
In 1918, for instance, more than 150,000 Austrian soldiers returning from war asked for housing, jobs, and food instead of sculptures that recalled the worst days of their lives. These same soldiers actively stymied memorials from being built for the very war they partook in; the same anti-war disillusionment Howard so passionately railed against in his artist statement.
A Glorification of War?
Howard and Weishaar’s design, and its seemingly celebratory nature, came under fire in 2018. That year, Toni Griffin, a member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and Harvard GSD professor, said Howard’s depiction was inaccurate and revisionist. Howard’s bas-relief renders white, Black, and Latino soldiers fighting alongside one another; but in fact, U.S. regiments during World War I were racially segregated. Griffin, an African American, suggested “the sculpture should depict the authentic experience” of veterans of color.
“There are stories that have been marginalized that could have been celebrated and sobering stories of the reality of the war experience that could more effectively honor sacrifice,” said Phoebe Lickwar, a landscape architect who participated in the project in its nascent phase. “Instead, we’re presented with a trite narrative and a glorification of battle.”
The project went through numerous revisions, and Howard eventually made minor modifications to his ensemble. In 2021, the Biden administration finally greenlit the project’s last phase and got things going.
For three years, a tarp with a 1:1 scale drawing of Howard’s bas relief has stood in situ of A Soldier’s Journey. A fountain has now been installed inscribed with words from The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak poet Archibald MacLeish, and Howard’s sculpture lays in its final resting place.
Is it a macabre celebration of bloodshed? A public display of chauvinism and war mongering? Or a way of filling in a historical gap in the country’s collective memory? Who is to say? For World War I Centennial Commission executive director Dan Dayton, the new National World War I Memorial “will stand as a testament to how we remember those who have served their country.”
