By Any Name, A Day For Remembering—and Building
Celebrations are well and good, but how about some worthy memorials?
Happy Victory Day for World War II, for those who join President Trump in the new style. Or, if you prefer, Happy VE-Day. The “V” in VE-Day does, after all, stand for “Victory.”
Since it’s Trump, it comes with controversy. In that May 1 missive, the 47th president also said that he would rename Veterans Day, November 11, as “World War I Victory Day.” But after critics pointed out that this renaming would deprive veterans of other conflicts of recognition, the White House backtracked; so Veterans Day will stay, to be joined by a new victory proclamation.
Other critics pointed out that the May 8 designation elides the fact that World War II in the Pacific—in which 111,000 GIs died—didn’t officially end until September 2, 1945, when Japan surrendered. Almost certainly, Trump will address this concern, too.
Still, Trump was on to something important when he wrote, “We never celebrate anything—That’s because we don’t have leaders any more, that know how to do so. We’re going to start celebrating our victories again.”
To start the new golden age of celebrations, Trump plans a big parade this June for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. It’s a cinch, too, that we’ll see plenty more patriotic displays in the coming semiquincentennial of the U.S. itself.
Yet here we can pause to say that while proclamations, parades and pageants are great, even greater are permanent memorials. For instance, only a tiny fraction of the Americans who fought at Iwo Jima in 1945 are still alive, and yet their valor—and the valor of all Marines, in all wars and battles—is grandly recalled at the Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954. The word “iconic” is overused, and yet the tableau of the six Marines (three of whom were killed on the island, along with nearly 7,000 other servicemen) is, for sure, among the most electric and reverential images in American history.
A war memorial ought to serve two purposes: First, it should commemorate the sacrifices of war—not just of those who died, but also of those who survived and came home. Second, it should inspire new generations to emulate the commitment and bravery of their predecessors.
To those two ends, war memorials were once deliberately made impressive. Indianapolis is the site of one standout structure from the 1920s; it’s an acropolis for Hoosier heroes.
Yet in the last few decades, heroism fell out of fashion with the taste-dictating elites. The hinge was the Vietnam War, which provoked a left-wing counterculture that congealed into a new liberal establishment.
So the Big Chill generation, following its own New Rules, took control of public spaces in many places. For instance, in Washington, DC, any commemoration of the Vietnam War would have to abide by the enlightened verdict that the war was, at best, a tragic mistake. This judgment guided the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, completed in 1982.
The Vietnam memorial is barely a half-mile from the Marine memorial, just across the Potomac, and yet the gulf between the two is chasmic. Whereas Iwo Jima is proudly vertical—men raising a flag into the sky—Vietnam is horizontal. The latter is, literally, below the surface. It’s a mournful grave, not a civic rallying point.
The Vietnam memorial was, of course, intended to be a tombstone (more precisely, a cenotaph). Here’s how its architect, Maya Lin, described her design back in 1981:
Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth, a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial’s walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers. (Emphasis added.)
The defeatism of the memorial was so obvious that actual Vietnam veterans insisted on the addition of three bronze soldiers, standing upright. In response, Lin was furious, calling the statues a “coup” against her creation; in her outrage, she was joined, of course, by much of the “arts community.”
Fortunately, President Ronald Reagan was leading the federal government back then. On November 11, 1984, fresh from his landslide 49-state reelection—even though he won only 13.7 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia—Reagan dedicated the additional, vertical, statues.
One needn’t think the Vietnam War was a noble cause to nevertheless believe that the GIs who fought there deserve something more uplifting than a “rift in the earth… receding into the earth.”
Without a doubt, the Vietnam memorial is somberly beautiful in its ebon bleakness. And it’s popular, a place where families come to touch the gilded name of an ancestor, and perhaps make a rubbing. Yet that’s what cemeteries are for; they fulfill a different function than martial monuments.
The Vietnam memorial set the tone for other shrines of that era. For instance, in the early ’80s, friends of the U.S. Navy had the idea of putting a triumphal arch over Pennsylvania Avenue. Instantly, the elites pounced, barely hiding their anti-military sentiments behind the mask of sophisticated aesthetics. (Never mind that triumphal arches don’t seem to have hurt Paris much.)
From their Deep State-y positions of privileged power—including the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission—the proto-woke prevailed. When the U.S. Navy Memorial was finally dedicated in 1987, it was a big flat disappointment, its one lone figure notwithstanding. Despite its prime location on Pennsylvania Avenue, its mission as a memorial is virtually unnoticed; it’s more known to skateboarders than future sailors.
A similar ambush befell the Second World War memorial at the turn of the century. The original design was too vertical, said the snobs. “Watered down Albert Speer,” snapped the New Yorker. Once again, the arts-ocracy shrank a military memorial so it wasn’t quite so “fascist.”
To be sure, other edifices, built outside the District of Columbia, have had better luck. The U.S. Air Force Memorial, dedicated in 2006, rises 270 feet over Arlington, Virginia, visible even from a rift in the District.
So now Trump is the commander-in-chief of DC. He can issue statements, and maybe even change names on a calendar, but can he change the way memorials are conceived and constructed? Will he be the impetus behind expressions of patriotism?
From a hundred circling camps, heroic shades are watching.
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