would have brought to the Mall.
This was all too much for the original design team. They described the revisions as turning their fluidly marching figures into a “GI Joe battle scene.”81 They claimed that the revisions “decapitated” the memorial concept and transformed their process of moving through war to peace and reflection to “make the scene convey battle and victory.”82 Frustrated and shut out of the Cooper-Lecky revisions, Burns Lucas, Leon, Lucas hired a lawyer and sued for the right to control the fate of their design. They went to court but were never able to convince a federal judge that they had any rights to the design after having collected the prize money.
THE FINAL DESIGN
In January 1991, after another set of extensive revisions, the Commission of Fine Arts had a change of heart. After having granted provisional approval to the second KWVM design, the CFA withdrew its support and sent Cooper-Lecky back to the drawing board. Praising the Vietnam Memorial, J. Carter Brown reminded the designers that there was value in simplicity: “One reason it is so effective is that it doesn’t wave its hand at you.”83 Certainly, a 350-foot oversized stainless steel live action battle scene on the Mall might constitute hand-waving. As Brown described it, the memorial as designed was “overbearing to the point of bombast.”
At this point, the United States was engaged in the first Iraq War and, as they describe it, the war changed the commissioners’ thinking about how to remember the Korean War. Robert Peck of the CFA told the New York Times, “Given what is happening in the Middle East, I think about this in a different context.” He saw more war memorials coming and was concerned about precedent. Peck was worried about the fussiness of the murals, the narrative, all the information. “Our memorials are turning into outdoor museums,” he complained. In this light, the original design was more appealing because it “had at least a bold single idea.”84
Six months later, Brown and the CFA had had it. They recommended that the figures and the drama they were to enact be eliminated entirely. This inspired a furious response from the KWVMA and the ABMC. For these agencies, the figures were the reason to build the memorial, and there would be no memorial without them. Letters poured in from Korean War veterans across the country. In August 1991, the ABMC sent Brown an angry letter offering a “last compromise.” Nineteen freestanding seven-foot-tall statues reflected in a mural wall to make thirty-eight slightly smaller figures on the Mall. (Why cling to thirty-eight with such tenacity?) This letter referred to the VVM design process and the addition of the statue as a compromise that saved the memorial.85 In the end, the CFA agreed to the modifications, and the compromise held.
FIGURE 5. American Battle Monuments Commission Korean War Veterans Memorial figures chart. (Courtesy of the American Battle Monuments Commission.)
However, stylistic concerns had yet to be addressed. William Lecky told interviewers, “There is no question that there was a healthy conflict between what the client wanted, which was something very realistic and militarily accurate and what the reviewing commissions—the artistic side if you will—preferred, which was something more abstract. . . . [T]he final solution was what we like to call ‘impressionistic styling,’ which makes it very clear what is being portrayed, but diminishes the sense of an actual collection of ground troops moving across the Mall.”86 This is a polite way of saying that what they did stylistically was to fudge it. This impressionistic styling allowed the designers to avoid a whole series of problems. In the memorial as it stands, the military details are roughed in at best. The ponchos were added to cover weaponry and obscure uniforms, making the figures less threatening and more generic.87 Although the racial designations were never officially scrapped, a walk through the memorial with a map of these designations in hand makes clear the extent to which race dropped out of the design in the design process. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the final designations are “12 Caucasians, 3 African Americans, 2 Hispanic, 1 Oriental, 1 Indian (Native American),” as Table 1 illustrates.88 The first three figures are white, while the last is American Indian, but none of this is entirely clear in looking at the figures.89 Some of the responsibility for representing “diversity” fell to the photo engravings on the wall. Lecky assured the commissions that “we have been working hard with the client to make sure that we are politically correct and that all the necessary people are being shown.”90 But this effort did not resolve the problem of how to represent the soldiers.
TABLE 1 ABMC Chart
The figures have rough, exaggerated facial features; it is tricky to identify any particular racial type. This is problematic because of the expectations that people bring to memorials. Because nearly all war memorials in the United States have represented soldiers as white, it is possible that these figures all become white by default. Kent Cooper claims that the figures are brushed with “traces of race.” He says this quite plainly, as if it was a category of representation or experience of race that would make sense to people in the United States and be commonly understood. But “traces of race,” in the history of race and racialization, has often meant whiteness. Just enough race heightens the masculinity of the figures in this logic, while too much race would make them too specifically not-white. Cooper was trying to say that race did not disappear in the memorial process, but his language tripped him up, and he ended up speaking a perhaps unintentional truth. The impressionistic stylistics return the memorial to its original white-by-default iteration—a rough, exaggerated, familiarly borrowing whiteness. Which is not to say that the figures are intended to be seen as white, but rather that incorporating “traces of race” avoids representing the heroic armed soldiers as absolutely African American, Mexican American, Asian American, or Indian. Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has written, partly as a push back against whiteness studies, “Either race is an essence or there is no such thing as race.” He claims that “our actual racial practice can be understood only as the expression of our commitment to the idea that race is not a social construction.”91 Traces of race in the figures express this tension; they give the figures the luxury of racial mobility that the soldiers themselves did not have. This approach avoids the problem of either too much or too little race on the Mall, but even this avoidance was not easy to achieve.
The fight over the details of these representations was so intense that both the ABMC and the CFA were involved in a level of review that sculptor Frank Gaylord thought extremely unusual.92 In 1992, new constraints were established: “The troopers are to be treated as a unit, on an undefined mission, caught in a moment in time; all figures are wearing ponchos which are blown from behind with increasing velocity at the apex; the figures are alert, wary, and are in various kinds of communication with each other. . . . [A]ny articulation of the figures for purposes of portraying communication should not interfere with the general forward movement of the unit; the figures will be treated as a single composition.”93
As the figures developed, the CFA, the ABMC, and Cooper-Lecky kept close watch. In 1994, an ad hoc committee they had formed made regular reviews. In July and November, members of the committee went to see the figures in progress in Gaylord’s Vermont studio. A November 15, 1994, Lecky memo on one of these visits conveys the level of involvement with the design details. A statement of the committee specifies, “The ad hoc design committee has always described these statues as young gallant warriors having embarked on a successful mission. Emphasis on young, gallant, and successful . . . [G]enerally speaking the committee felt that the faces were older than our directions. If mention is made in the remarks below, about mouth adjustments, it means that the mouth should be either, a) closed, or b) open, but doing something—talking, breathing heavily, in any case determined and focused, as opposed to being open and unfocused.”94
This statement is followed by a list of changes
