They envisioned “non-representational” figures. Race was “not at all” part of their vision; what they had in mind could not support that level of detail.64
The importance for the ABMC of a high level of detail in the figures was made clear in the spring of 1990 at a meeting held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington to choose the sculptor for the memorial. Three finalists had been selected: Frank Gaylord, Rolf Kirken, and Lawrence Ludtke. As architect Kent Cooper recounts, “Gaylord, a WWII combat veteran, made a riveting oral presentation and his emotion-packed, three-dimensional studies captured everyone’s attention. He was clearly the winner.”65 As Don Leon describes the meeting, Ludtke went first, and his realistic but casually rendered figures infuriated General Stilwell, the chair of the KWMAB. The open collars of their shirts, their lack of fitness, and their state of disarray enraged him. Ludtke told Stilwell, “With all due respect, Sir, I was in that army, I was on that march, and this is what it looked like.” Stilwell replied, “That may be what it looked like but that is not how we are going to remember it.” Leon describes this remarkably candid exchange about forging the nation with an invented past as the beginning of the end for his design.66 Not only was Stilwell clear that his invented past was the one to be remembered, but his vision required far more detail than the designers had ever wanted.
Even if they had envisioned realistically rendered figures, the problem of who to represent would likely have trumped the problem of how to represent the soldiers. A few months before the meeting at the Corcoran, architects from Cooper-Lecky, the architect of record for the VVM, were called in to oversee this memorial. They were soon making revisions for all the agencies. The initial revisions focused on “commemorative quotas”—service distribution and ethnic distribution. Four statues were designated as KATUSAs (Korean Augment to the U.S. Army, Korean soldiers who serve with the U.S. military). The remaining thirty-four statues were given racial and ethnic designations: nineteen Caucasians, six Hispanics, five African Americans, two American Indians, and two Asian Americans. This distribution, which was not easily reached, was problematic from the start. According to Barry Schwartz, “Designers noted that African Americans made up 10% of the troops, mainly in the ‘non-technical skills areas,’ which implies that their service was less valuable.”67 The number of Korean War veterans who were Puerto Rican, and therefore not seen as fully legitimate U.S. citizens by some of the parties involved, complicated the number of Hispanics to represent. A compromise reduced the number of Hispanics from six to five to avoid including more Hispanics than African Americans.68
Although the sterile language of “commemorative quotas” kept the focus on numbers, the problem was not just about figural specificity or numbers per race; it was a profound problem of refiguring the soldier in the United States. In the national context, representing soldiers who are not white has been tricky. The figures at the Vietnam Memorial, the first to do this on the Mall, are complicated figures. The Three Servicemen represents the Vietnam veteran as not always white, but it follows a familiar, well-worn racial hierarchy. The figure in the center is white and is the tallest. He is a half step ahead of the other figures and holds out his arms to protect them.69 Another figure is clearly African American. The third figure, the machine gunner, is an “ethnic mix.”70 Sculptor Frederick Hart used some Latino models because he wanted to include Latinos, but he also included “features that could also be Slavic, Eastern European, or Near Eastern.” Figures during the last period of interest in memorials, the post–Civil War memory boom, are almost entirely white, and they quite explicitly define soldiering in white terms. For the Korean War Veterans Memorial, this was a loaded problem with a complicated history.
Even as color guards started to be consistently multiracial and the composition of the military was more heavily nonwhite than the population at large, the problem of figuring the soldier as something other than white was difficult. Ralph Ellison’s famous insight that white paint requires a few drops of black to be truly white has been carefully complicated in the last ten years by work in the study of whiteness. The central tenet of this work is that whiteness in the United States has, from the nation’s inception, depended upon an Indian or African or Asian “other” with and against which whiteness could be constructed. The idea is that race is a social rather than biological fact, and this is true whether people are “raced” white or black or Indian. This premise, despite its limitations, is useful for thinking about the ways in which soldiers have been represented. Civil War memorials, with the possible complicated exception of Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial in Boston, have famously whitened the war and the soldiers who fought in it.71 In the nineteenth century, Custer’s blond curls glowed on barroom walls everywhere, rewriting his death at the hands of Indians as a triumph of white power.72 As David Blight, Cecilia O’Leary, Kirk Savage, and others have argued, the nation-building work accomplished by the memorial boom of the nineteenth century was highly racialized and produced a North-South reconciliation around the celebration of the white soldier. The lack of interest in war memorials for the last three quarters of the twentieth century allowed this problem to lie fallow, but because the commissions involved were determined to avoid the embarrassment of ignoring race in the memorial to the first desegregated war, these complicated questions of representation were raised.73 It is worth noting here that the question of representing women was only barely raised, and when it was, Stilwell was adamant that it was out of the question.74 A full 120,000 women served in a range of positions in the war, but no women are included in the final design—or in earlier iterations, for that matter.75
The problems of representing race and avoiding women were not the only issues inspiring redesigns. In the first set of significant suggested revisions, these questions inspired another dramatic set of changes. Stilwell was clearly not taken with the first design’s narrative of moving through war into peace. At the board’s request, the figures were redrawn to represent soldiers actively engaged in battle, as if they were under fire with a man down.76 Instead of marching steadily, the soldiers were shown “kneeling, some pulling pins out of grenades, some holding bazookas ready to fire.”77 Asked by a CFA commissioner to explain the line of the march in this new context, to clarify its “tactical function,” Cooper replied, “This is an undefined mission. . . . [T]hey are subject to hostile action. . . . [T]hey are alert . . . caught in a moment in time.”78 General Stilwell’s explanation was that the oversized soldiers simply marching on the Mall might be “boring” and that they had wanted to “introduce a narrative story of soldiers responding to unexpected unfriendly fire.”79 This was referred to as the “Delta Scheme.”
The pressure to add military specificity and ethnic and racial designations—if not women—to the design can be easily understood in the context of the steadily increasing expectation that war memorials remember soldiers as specifically as possible in the context of the evolving makeup of the military: remember bodies, remember sacrifice, remember names, remember the racial composition of the military, remember the women who served, and so on. These are complicated propositions, though the logic that requires them is fairly straightforward. But adding a narrative element—a real attack, frozen in time—is something else. The fear that the thirty-eight giants might be boring implies other expectations for the memorial and what it was supposed to accomplish. Introducing a narrative of soldiers responding to unfriendly fire allows the figures to enact a particular kind of heroism. The scale of the figures and the number of figures were not, in Stilwell’s estimation, enough to do what he wanted the memorial to do. As they struggled with the limitations of the symbolic vocabularies required of the memorial, Stilwell and the board turned to a more familiar visual vocabulary for representing war heroism and war heroes: the movies. Stilwell and the KWMAB imagined a war movie on the Mall.80 But translating filmic images into a memorial in stone is tricky at best. Responding to an attack requires raising weapons, which specifically memorializes violence in a way that memorials in the United States have long sought to avoid. For example, if an enormous soldier is to pull a pin from a grenade on the Mall, in what direction will he face to hurl the explosive? Toward Lincoln? Washington? The Vietnam Memorial? Across the Tidal Basin to Jefferson? Or toward Arlington
