Blogs > Cliopatria > The World War II Memorial

Jun 1, 2004

The World War II Memorial




I just got back from a weekend in Washington, my old home for a couple of years from 2000 to 2002 and still my home away from home. This past weekend being Memorial Day, and with the opening of the World War II Memorial, the District was even more overrun than usual. Even today, a post-holiday Tuesday, was swamped. I went in before coming back to Charlottesville to take a walk around the new memorial and to get a feel for it. I had been once before, about three weeks or a month ago, before it was open but when it was visible through the fencing on 17th Street that had been blocked off in the two or so years that the monument was in the planning and building phase.

The first impression I think most anyone has of the newest addition to the National Mall is its immensity. The size and scope, the “footprint,” as the architects would say, is enormous. Depending on one’s perspective, this is the monument’s source of its strength or of its weakness, and perhaps both simultaneously. The World War II monument is much like an ’80s Hair Metal Band, or, if you prefer, a Wagner opera. It is bombastic and outsized and showy and overdone and overwrought. It is not especially subtle. It is obtrusive. And it is very busy – there are columns and pools and towers and steps and walls ascending and descending and stars to commemorate the dead and quotations and bass relief sculptures and my God, just lots of stuff. It is almost as if MC Escher’s less clever and whimsical little brother headed the Dollywood design team and was asked to do the set for “World War II: The Musical Tribute!” And yet . . .

And yet, while it is big and bombastic and overwrought and too, too, too, well, too much, it is also something quite spectacular. And keep in mind that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial was almost universally loathed when it first opened, and now it might be the most popular, or at least is arguably the most effective, of all of the monuments on the Mall. The World War II Memorial has been the source of much overheated critical prose in the past few years and months and weeks and days. And yet while maybe in the end it could have been smaller, or more understated, or more coherent, it is still profoundly effective.

When I was there today, everywhere one turned there was another veteran and his (or her) family. It was obvious how important this monument is to these older folks who helped save democracy and protect freedom and who are dying at a rate of 1100 per day, nearly 8000 per week. Next to, on, or beneath each pillar representing each the 48 states and the territories that made up the United States during the war, family members, friends and colleagues have erected small shrines, or left pictures or mementoes or cards or flowers or some combination. Veterans were taking pictures next to the pillars of their states, beneath the monument anchoring the theatre in which they fought – the Atlantic providing ballast to the south side, the Pacific to the North – or next to quotations that meant something to them. There were lots of tears, lots of smiles, and lots of reunions with friends living and dead.

Children and parents and middle-aged couples and black folks and white folks and Asians and handicapped and people attractive and not so attractive and guys like me wandered in awe and wonder and in puzzlement as we tried to take it all in. The giant bubbling pool, almost an extension of the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, stands at the center, with its fountains blasting water that will tease and soothe on hot, sweaty Washington days. This middle area was perhaps of most concern to me over the past few years. As I’d spend evenings on the Mall playing in the softball leagues that take over the Mall after the workday throughout the spring and summer I’d glance at the construction site with a worried glance and furrowed brow wondering what it would do to one of my favorite vistas on earth, that connecting the Lincoln and Washington Memorials and the Capitol Building to the east. Although the memorial is fully finished, this question remains to be answered. Yes, one can still see each of the monuments of two of our greatest presidents from the other. And in time, the World War II Memorial will feel like it belongs. But as of now it is still like a new son-in-law, trying to fit in, warily watched by the brothers, open, welcoming, but reserved, not fully willing to commit to the new interloper.

It was clear that World War II needed a monument, and that such a monument would be of greater scope and scale and importance than most others in our nation’s capital. While the “Greatest Generation” has become an over-sold, and maybe even overstated commodity, there is no doubt that World War II and the men who fought in it and the women who served it and the home front that struggled and sacrificed and supported it warrants our utmost attention and respect. World War II helped define the century, change the world, and to push America not only to achieve its promise on the battlefield, but also to address its perfections off of it in the decades that followed. Guys like me, cynics, critics, pundits, might have our qualms with the newest addition to the Mall. But the World War II Memorial is now part of Washington, and thus in an important way is a part of who we are as a country and as a people. It is not perfect, far from it. But as I heard many a veteran say over this past weekend, to himself, to compatriots, or to wives, “It’s about time.”



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Stephen Keith Tootle - 6/3/2004

The FDR memorial made him out to be a pacifist, environmentalist cripple. If I were to rank his contributions to the 20th century, those traits would not be at the top of the list. FDR deserves better.


Oscar Chamberlain - 6/2/2004

How is the FDR memorial a joke? I saw it right after it opened. It needed more trees (and a day at least ten degrees cooler), but before heat stroke threatened, i found it intriguing, at any rate.

I have not yet seen the World War II Memorial. What I have seen in the media strikes me as bombastic (though perhaps bombast to me is the aesthetic of the generation that fought).

More to the point, I did not believe the area in which the people of the 1963 March on Washington listened to King's speech should be changed. If the Greatest Generation helped saved the life of a supposedly free nation, the Civil Rights Movement saved its soul by taking it a giant step toward being truly free.


Stephen Keith Tootle - 6/2/2004

The other reason we needed a WWII memorial is because the FDR memorial is such a joke.