I got a jump on the crowd gathering in Washington for this weekend's dedication of the World War II Memorial. I took my girlfriend to see the Memorial a fortnight ago after work and before dinner. It was one of those evenings in Washington where the ending of a beautiful day is punctuated with storm clouds from the east and north in a prelude to the deluge. The temperature dropped pleasantly and we felt the coming of the storm.
I had doubts about the Memorial before ever I saw it. I am a believer in symbolism and symmetry, and I object to any war memorial- with the possible exception of a civil war memorial- being placed in the central axis of the Mall. What was a tale told about the founding and preservation of our nation becomes now a tale of brave men. To be sure, brave men were at the center of our nation's founding and brave men preserved our nation when brothers fought to tear her apart, but their brave cause was our nation. Those who fought in the Second World War, while equally brave, were engaged in a cause much more about the world than about America.
Many were opposed to this location for the Memorial and as a consequence, it was promised that the Memorial would not distract from the axis formed by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. In this it succeeds to its own detriment. As Catesby Leigh wrote in today's Weekly Standard, "It's a bad sign when a memorial needs a big inscription to let you know that it is, in fact, a memorial. Uninformed visitors looking at the World War II Memorial from a distance might not realize what they are looking at.”
The inscription to which she referred is a poor attempt to rationalize the placement of the Memorial: “Here in the presence of Washington and Lincoln, one the eighteenth century father and the other the nineteenth century preserver of our nation, we honor those twentieth century Americans who took up the struggle during the Second World War and made the sacrifices to perpetuate the gift our forefathers entrusted to us: a nation conceived in liberty and justice.” It doesn’t quite work.
On that evening, in the calm before the storm, the Memorial struck me as objectively beautiful, as contributing wonderfully to an underutilized part of the Mall without being at all intrusive. Where previously an often-drained symmetrical pool with fountains that rarely worked served only as an obstacle between the Smithsonian Metro exit and the Lincoln Memorial, a lovely sunken plaza with a central fountain and beautiful stone facades now provides a landscaped transition, and a resting point, between the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool and Lincoln Memorial.
Memorials are not constructed for landscaping purposes, however, and this fact underlies what is wrong with the Memorial. In Leigh’s words, “A memorial to World War II should be very intrusive.” Precisely! She attributes success in securing the Memorial site to the lobbying power of veterans of the Second World War who wanted to trump the location of other war memorials on the Mall. The Memorial's unobtrusive design, the political price paid to secure the site, undermines their objective. In this instance, the "greatest generation" won a battle but lost the war.
Posted by publius at May 27, 2004 09:23 PM