What may be the last battle of World War II will soon get under way in the federal courts here. The conflict is over whether a long-overdue memorial honoring the 15 million American men and women who served during World War II should, at long last, be built on the capital’s National Mall.
After 13 years of struggle, 18 public hearings, and the deaths of more than three-fourths of the war’s veterans, the project cleared its final hurdle last month. Groundbreaking is set for Nov. 11, Veterans Day, and it promises to be an emotional occasion. The average age of the survivors is 80. It’s likely that few present will be able to hold back tears–as was true of the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial.
But a torrent of opposition has erupted against the approved site for the project, which abuts the foot of the Lincoln Memorial’s famous elongated Reflecting Pool. Most has come from a coalition of Washington public interest and historic preservation groups. Heavy criticism also has come from some of the nation’s major newspapers and magazines. The New Yorker magazine attacked it as “an aesthetic disaster” and “watered-down Albert Speer,” a Hitler-era architect.
Calling it “a monumental mistake,” the memorial’s opponents filed suit last week, asking the courts to block its and begin the site selection all over again.
Groundbreaking ceremonies likely will proceed as scheduled, with President Clinton, Washington dignitaries and thousands of veterans attending. But, depending on the courts, the actual memorial might not be built for months or years–if at all–on that spot.
The current site has powerful supporters. Clinton, Bob Dole and virtually every member of Congress have championed the memorial enthusiastically. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg of “Saving Private Ryan” have led a national crusade on its behalf. And the majority of the nation’s surviving World War II veterans want it desperately. They have raised a substantial portion of its $140 million cost.
The memorial has been approved by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal Fine Arts Commission, the federal American Battlefield Monument Commission, and the 2.8 million-member American Legion, which denounced opponents as “profoundly ungrateful to the World War II generation.”
The opponents include the hitherto-little-known National Coalition to Save Our Mall; a smaller group of vets called World War II Veterans to Save the Mall, a citizens watchdog group called the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, and the D.C. Preservation League.
They have the support of the District of Columbia’s non-voting member of Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton; architects involved with the nearby Vietnam and Korean War Memorials; and the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which recently issued a report condemning the project as an intrusion.
The “why” of their crusade is more complicated.
Their lawsuit contends that the federal authorizing agencies violated as least three federal laws in advancing the memorial. It charges that Carter Brown, who heads the federal Fine Arts Commission, switched the site to the foot of the Reflecting Pool from another location in a wooded area 125 feet north of the current site without any public consultation, and that Babbitt and the National Park Service approved the project without an environmental-impact statement or public comment.
More significantly, the suit charges that the memorial trespasses on the official grounds of the Lincoln Memorial–in violation of federal law.
But the opponents have more passionate reasons for their action. One is that they hate the design. It’s the creation of architect Frederich St. Florian, a former dean of the Rhode Island School of Design who is now affiliated with Brown University.
St. Florian’s original concept was immense, rivaling the Lincoln Memorial at the other end of the Reflecting Pool in scale and visually representing, in some fashion, virtually every aspect of the war. It even included a museum. Critics complained that it resembled the Nazi monuments by Hitler architect Speer.
The design was scaled back and toned down. Gone now are the museum and a ring of towering columns. In their place is a circle of 56 upended stone slabs with two triumphal arches at either end. The final design still calls for the 7.4-acre memorial to sprawl from one edge of the Mall lawn to the other, and to abut one end of the Reflecting Pool. A downsized Rainbow Pool with fountain would be the centerpiece.
“I think it is more fitting for the site and more deferential to the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument,” St. Florian said in an interview.
But art and architecture historian Judy Scott Feldman, co-chairman of the opposing coalition, disagrees. Decrying the lack of any inspirational human figures in the work and deploring the funereal aspect of its upended granite slabs, she described the planned memorial as “a sunken tomb that conveys tragedy and sorrow.”
Still, the opponents have made clear they would accept even St. Florian’s design–if only the memorial were put some place other than in the middle of the Mall at the foot of the Reflecting Pool.
Stand at the site now and their point becomes clear. The view from there across the Rainbow Pool and along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial is sweeping, unimpeded, majestic, and inspiring. Turn around, and you have a similar spacious, grassy expanse leading east up a rise on which stands the towering Washington Monument.
St. Florian’s two victory arches are five stories high, and the 56 stone slabs are each 17 feet tall. The design may no longer be the Brandenburg Gate it once was, but it impedes the view, and cuts across the Mall lawn with a swath of granite.
As opponents point out, the establishment of such a memorial in that key location would profoundly change the Mall’s character.
In a sense, the Mall is the country’s village green, the nation’s principal gathering place. It is where Americans come, sometimes by the hundreds of thousands, to speak to the entire nation–as was so powerfully the case when Marian Anderson sang there in the 1930s after being denied a concert stage elsewhere, and when Rev. Martin Luther King made his unforgettable “I have a dream” speech in 1963.
“American notions of freedom, democracy and equality are associated with Washington and Lincoln as the founders,” delegate Norton said. “… Their monuments face each other and look out onto a unique open vista. … Placing a large, multifaceted war memorial in the virtual lap of Lincoln crowds overwhelms the universality of the American ideals associated with the Lincoln Memorial.”
Responding to critics, St. Florian said the new design will have human figures in the form of bas-relief panels at the memorial’s entrance. He contends, as does Carter Brown, that there is nothing in the statute books declaring that the Rainbow and Reflecting Pools are part of the Lincoln Memorial.
“We also looked extremely carefully at the photographs of the Marian Anderson concert and Martin Luther King’s speech,” St. Florian said. “The crowds only went back about half the length of the Reflecting Pool.”
And if Brown suggested the Reflecting Pool site without public consultation, it still had to be approved by the full Fine Arts Commission and other federal agencies, St. Florian said, and they did so after full public hearings.
The coalition of opponents argues that they did so, however, despite public opposition: More than 90 witnesses testified against it at the last of the hearings.
Alternative sites were considered. One was at the foot of Capitol Hill. Another was across from the Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum, and another along the Tidal Basin near the paddle boat concession. Also suggested were a site near the sprawling Franklin Roosevelt Memorial and another on the city’s Freedom Plaza, which sits in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The original site selected by the sponsoring Battlefield Monuments Commission is 125 feet north of the location now in dispute. Until Carter Brown suggested the change, the memorial was to have gone in a long wooded grove called Constitution Gardens that runs along the northern edge of the Mall. It is there that the opponents want it to go now.
The Vietnam Memorial is at the other end of this grove. The Korean War Memorial is located in a similar grove on the southern side of the Mall.
Dole has been neutral on the site of the memorial, as long as it was built–and built soon. Most veterans concurred. But now that the Mall site has been approved, they want the Reflecting Pool. Badly.
“This is the appropriate site,” said St. Florian. “The site is sacred now and dedicated to the memorial, if for no other reason than that, in 1995, soil from all the American military cemeteries was sprinkled over the site and that site is now sanctified. Nobody can take it away from them.”
Except the courts.
The real question, taking into account the arguments of both sides, is whether the nation still regards World War II as the epochal, transcendent event that those who were alive during it remember it to be. Or whether, in the minds of more recent generations, it has become just another chapter of history, deserving its own place in the trees, but not the perpetual focal point of national attention.
No judge will find the answer to that one in the law.
