Kirk Savage

I’m sympathetic to a recent piece by Sam Roche on the HuffPost blog which argues against the “closed competition” process used by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission to select architect Frank Gehry.  After all, if not for the open, blind-juried design competition organized for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1980, Maya Lin wouldn’t have created her design and the most important public monument of the late twentieth century would never have been conceived.

But it turns out that the issue is not as simple as it appears.  I had a few misconceptions about design competitions before I started to examine how they actually work.

First, we tend to think of the winning design as a final product when in practice it is only the beginning of the design process.  Usually the winning design is a just a concept, with many important details still left to be decided.  There are the inscriptions, for example, which are crucial to the overall message of the memorial.  Most of the time the winning designers have nothing to do with the choice of texts inscribed on the monument’s surfaces.  Even the indomitable Maya Lin, who wanted no text on her walls other than the names, was overruled and had to accept a pair of didactic inscriptions where the two walls meet. Typically, also, sculptural and landscape elements are added later, often by a new set of artists and architects.  The winning design for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, by the design firm ROMA, did not include a portrait statue of King.  This was commissioned later from a Chinese sculptor, without a competition, and the 30-foot mega-statue has become the most dominating element of the entire design.

The second misconception flows from the first.  While we like to think of open design competitions as a fair and democratic way of choosing a design, when the rubber hits the road many of the most important design decisions are actually made by committee, without public input. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the rare case in which the winning design was actually executed faithfully according to the original plan (despite great pressure to alter it significantly).  More often the final monument is so changed that it is unrecognizable, even antithetical to the winning design. The most notorious example is the Korean War Veterans Memorial, where the winning architects became so fed up with the changes made by the advisory board that they sued in federal court, and after losing the suit disavowed the final design.  It’s not unusual for crucial design decisions to be made without the winning designers’ input or approval, much less the involvement of the public.  The design process that follows a design competition is hardy transparent or fair.

Ironically, in high-profile monuments where the designer was hand-picked without competition (as in the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials), he ended up having more control over his design.  With some notable exceptions, design competitions tend to yield to design by committee.

In the end there’s no easy solution.  Designers should be allowed to take the lead, but other stakeholders in the process must have their say too.  How do we balance good design and public involvement?  One way is to hold multi-stage competitions (whether open or closed) in which the public is invited to respond and comment at every stage.  This is time-consuming but it has the advantage of opening the process to public debate while important design decisions are being made.  The recent “ideas competition” and design competitions for the National Mall exemplify this approach. But even with an exemplary process there’s no guarantee that powerful stakeholders won’t hijack it in the end.  That’s democracy in our times.

A century and a half ago, the great conservative critic Thomas Carlyle railed against the statue-monuments going up all over Britain – “black and dismal” he called them, “like a set of grisly undertakers come to bury the dead spiritualisms of mankind.”  But despite their ugliness the statues for him were not the real problem. They were nothing more than symptoms of an underlying anarchy in the modern world. Mankind had so lost sight of the truth that “Supreme Hero and Supreme Scoundrel are, perhaps as nearly as is possible to human creatures, indistinguishable.”

In his latest column, David Brooks tries to channel Carlyle for the 21^st century. We build lousy monuments, he argues, because we have lost the ability to follow “just authority.”  The cancer of rebelliousness started among intellectuals and has since spread to the masses.  Now we don’t honor any authority because we all think we’re better than everyone else. In our vanity we can no longer conceive of heroes or build convincing monuments.

Brooks has probably been spending too much time around his fellow pundits, who, after all, are paid to be vain and to pretend that they’re smarter than everyone else.  I’ve spent a lot time around public monuments over the past thirty years, and I think it’s fair to say that most people actually want to honor them, even when the monuments don’t deserve it.  For better or worse we still crave monuments and the myths that support them.

Not only are public monuments going up as often as ever, but they are getting bigger and bigger.  No longer is a mere statue sufficient as it was in Carlyle’s time.  Now we give our heroes several acres. Were we to take up Brooks’ suggestion and follow Eisenhower’s example, we might start by building more modest monuments, attuned to the original spirit of our democratic experiment.

If there is a vanity in our built memorials, it is the vanity of American exceptionalism, the vanity that says our authority is just simply because it is our authority.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of our few war memorials that isn’t vain in this way.  It is indeed tragic, as Brooks laments, but for good reason: in our hubris we thought we knew better than the Vietnamese themselves what kind of leadership they should have.  We showed the same conceit in the Phillipines in 1903 and in Iraq in 2003.  Brooks is right that our institutions weren’t markedly better a century ago. When it comes to war, our national vanity has been remarkably consistent.

Carlyle understood something about authority and vanity. He believed that “just authority” had to be demonstrated and earned, not merely asserted.  But we live in an age, like his, in which civic discourse has become so debased by marketing and mendacity that even legitimate authority is thrown open to question.  In an age of manipulation it’s hard to tell the difference between a hero and a scoundrel.  And in such an era, ironically, we crave monuments more than ever.

Yesterday my daughter and I ended up in Frankfort Springs, Pa., in Beaver County, a mostly rural and working-class county in western Pennsylvania that voted for McCain in 2008. In the nineteenth century Frankfort Springs was a thriving resort town known for its mineral waters and its prep school. Today it’s a mostly forgotten place, its grand old architecture faded but still surviving.

On the side of the road was a small but immensely moving Union monument, erected in 1888 in the town’s heyday.  Just a short stone obelisk, marked with sixteen names and an inscription that reads, IN MEMORY OF OUR HEROIC DEAD WHO SLEEP IN UNKNOWN GRAVES. The obelisk, it turns out, had been moved from its original location on the grounds of the school (now defunct), its base cut down from the original seven-foot pile, and the names re-chiseled. But like the rest of the town, it has hung on.

A Memorial Day document from 1911 explains that one of the local townsmen wanted particularly to erect “a suitable memorial to those patriots whose bodies lie far away from loved ones.” One of the most common, and poignant, tragedies of the Civil War was the disappearance of so many soldiers’ bodies.  Many of the soldier monuments erected in the first quarter century after the war served as markers for the dead in the absence of graves that family could visit.

Most of the men listed on this little shaft had volunteered in the 140^th Pennsylvania, a famous regiment that saw action at Gettysburg and almost every major battle in Virginia. They fought Lee’s army countless times, sometimes more than once over the same ground.  Six of the men on the monument died in one battle, on May 12, 1864, near Spottsylvania Courthouse in the horrific Battle of the Wilderness.  First-hand accounts of the carnage there still shock.  The men had to march into position in the middle of the night, in “thick darkness and pelting rain,” and then at 4:30AM, a little before daybreak, they launched a surprise attack against the dug-in Confederates, who were just waking up behind their fortifications of earthworks and wooden spikes.  The 140^th Pennsylvania, along with several thousand other men on the front line of the charge, were ordered not to stop and shoot but instead to fix their bayonets and charge right through the Confederate entrenchments.  To get there they had to survive three volleys each of rifle and artillery fire which “took effect in the heads and shoulders of the advancing men.” Those who made it through the fire and the wooden spikes found themselves face to face with the enemy. The commanding officer who personally led the charge wrote that “it was the first time during the war that I had actually seen bayonets crossed in mortal combat; it was a crash and a terrible scene…” He went on:

“The ground was fought over by the troops charging back and forth for ten hours of that day, and presented a spectacle of horror without a parallel. Probably on no other one field of like area of the great Civil War did as desperate fighting and heavy loss occur. During that time the infantry fire was so terrific that standing trees were cut down by musket balls alone, and one solid oak, twenty-two inches in diameter, was cut down entirely by the infantry fire during the engagement… [Artillery] Batteries attempting to go into action were completely disabled and thrown into a disordered mass by the drivers and horses being killed, and the bodies of men who fell, killed or wounded on the ramparts were riddled by scores of bullets. It was the only ground that I ever saw during the war that was so completely covered with dead and wounded that it was impossible to walk over it without stepping on dead bodies.”

One of the dead was William Purdy, who grew up on a farm outside Frankfort Springs. He was ill with measles at the time, being nursed by his brother John, but was ordered into the charge anyway. After the battle “no word was had of him.”  All that was left of him was “his Bible, knife, fork, and spoon,” which were found on the battlefield and returned to his family.

William Purdy. His name is the fifth listed on the front face of the obelisk. Without that simple inscription in stone, William Purdy’s name along with his remains would probably have been lost to us by now.  What does the name tell us? We don’t know how he died, or what happened to his body, or what he believed about the Union cause, if anything. If the measles story is true, we can guess that in his weakened state he must have fallen early in the battle, his body probably subjected to repeated depredations by both friend and foe as they battled back and forth over the same small stretch of ground. I wonder how long his parents on their farm back home held onto the dream that he might one day reappear.  How long after the Bible and the utensils came back to them did they give up the last remnants of hope?

Nothing on this modest monument explains his death, or glorifies it, or minimizes it. William Purdy was sick, but the nation needed his body anyway and he gave it, and then that body disappeared forever. All that remains of him is a simple cut stone, a profound testament to the irreducibility of each human tragedy that war exacts.

Yesterday Mike Ruane of the Washington Post published an excellent profile of Jan Scruggs, founder and director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and of his quixotic crusade for an $85 million underground visitors center near Maya Lin’s famous wall.  I was quoted briefly in the article, questioning why monuments should need visitors centers and objecting that the new center could not be entirely “unobtrusive.”

Now that I’m in Scruggs’ doghouse, I might as well come clean and say what I really think about this project.  The two points I’m quoted for in the article are the least of it.  Just to be crystal clear, though: I’ve never met Scruggs, and I have nothing against him personally. I admire the man and his will power.  Without it, and without Maya Lin’s equally strong and often opposing will power, we wouldn’t have this amazing memorial.

First, a little bit of history.  The VVM was funded not by the federal government but by private donations. Scruggs initiated the project, created the organization, and then became its chief spokesman, fundraiser, and lobbyist. Most public monuments in the U.S. have been created by organizations like this. Here’s the big difference though.  Almost always, the monument organization would disband once it achieved its goal and built the monument; the monument would be ceremonially transferred from the private organization to the public at the dedication ceremony.  As far as I know, the VVMF is the first such organization to stay in business after successfully completing the monument, and to keep a hand in its ongoing management even though the monument now belongs to the public. (Email me if you know of any precedents!)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Back in 1980 the VVMF declared in its design competition program that the fund would be “dissolved” once the monument was completed. In fact, the VVMF has gone on to become a powerful player in Washington, winning among other things a special exemption for its “education center” in the 2003 legislation banning new memorials on the Mall.

Another bit of history: the combination of outdoor monument and indoor museum (or center) is a recent phenomenon but it is rapidly becoming commonplace. As far as I know, the Oklahoma City National Memorial (authorized 1997, completed 2000) was the pioneer, with an outdoor monument listing names of the dead on bronze chairs and an indoor museum telling their stories.  The September 11 memorial and museum project in New York has followed this precedent. In Berlin the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (final design authorized 1999, completed 2005) also fits the pattern. Even more striking, though, preexisting monuments are now adding museums (or centers) at an increasing pace.  Here is a suggestive list:

• Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL (another Maya Lin design), dedicated 1989, visitors center added 2005

• Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, ded. 1921, reopened 2006 as the National WWI Museum

• Virginia War Memorial, ded. 1956, $10 million education center added 2010

• National Law Enforcement Memorial in D.C., ded. 1984, ground broken in 2010 for underground visitors center.

It is no wonder that opponents of Scruggs’ “education center” are worried that sooner or later every other major monument in D.C. is going to clamor for a visitors center.

Truth be told, though, I’m not really against visitors centers at public monuments. Monuments aren’t sacred.  They should be allowed to change, and visitors centers are one way to make them speak anew.

Maya Lin’s beautiful, spare wall gives us the names of the American war dead but tells us nothing about the Vietnamese dead (whether allies or enemies, combatants or not), nothing about Vietnam as a country with its own unique history, nothing about the human and environmental destruction experienced by the Vietnamese, nothing about the antiwar movement in this country and the tremendous upheavals that took place on the homefront, some of them within a stone’s throw of her wall’s site.  In theory an “education center” might open up some of these difficult, largely buried issues.

Instead the proposed “education center” moves in the opposite direction, indeed in the opposite direction of the original memorial concept.

The original rationale for the memorial was that the war in Vietnam was different from past American wars.  It was uniquely traumatic for its soldiers, both on the ground in Vietnam and later when the soldiers returned and faced scapegoating by both left and right.  The memorial was meant to heal their trauma, not by defending the war or the part they played in the war, but simply by giving them public recognition for the sacrifices they made.  After all, it wasn’t their idea to intervene in Vietnam.  The nation’s leaders asked them to, or forced them to, and they went, many reluctantly.

Ever since the memorial was originally conceived, there has been some mission creep.  Critics of Maya Lin’s design wanted a defense of America’s military intervention, and they got a flagpole added in 1984 with an inscription saying that “the flag affirms the principles of freedom for which they fought.” (Freedom is in the eye of the beholder; the Confederacy said it was fighting for freedom too.) Official speakers at the wall have used it as a platform to defend the war and the military more generally.

The “education center” is the culmination of this mission creep.  One of the major aims of the center is to put the war in Vietnam in a narrative honoring the U.S. military from the Revolutionary War to Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of singling out the war as exceptional – a rupture in the American story – the center will make it representative of American ideals. “As currently planned,” a press release proclaims, “visits will begin with a walk through a history of Americaʼs conflicts, from Bunker Hill to Baghdad. The price of freedom will be honored in the Education Center and patriotism will be shown to be timeless.”

This sounds pretty political to me. Defending the inclusion of Iraq in the center, Scruggs himself says, “Much like the heroes who served in Vietnam, they [veterans of the war in Iraq] have done their best for their country, for each other and for the people of Iraq.”  To put it mildly, all that’s debatable, as Scruggs knows better than I do. Many American soldiers in Vietnam didn’t think they were heroes.  Many of them were disgusted by the war and became critics of it; many hated what they were doing to the people of Vietnam. Will they be honored by the new center? A lot of Americans, like Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that it was patriotic to oppose the war. Will their patriotism be honored there?

But there is another way in which the “education center” will run counter to the original memorial. One of the reasons Lin’s minimalist design worked so well is that it banished all imagery.  Images were a major problem for the American war effort: images of women and children about to be killed at My Lai; the naked girl burned by napalm, running down the road and crying in pain; American soldiers setting fire to villagers’ homes; the Viet Cong prisoner being summarily executed on a street in Saigon.  Human suffering was on display there, etched in the faces of a people we barely knew but could still understand on a primal level.  Now the center intends to restore images, but a very different kind of image – specifically the faces of the men named on the wall.  The center is meant to personalize the war, by telling the stories of the American soldiers who served and died.  But which stories and which images will appear there?  What if they aren’t heroic?  What if they disturb the preconceived narrative of freedom and patriotism, “from Bunker Hill to Baghdad”?

In the end, it’s simple.  The “education center” hopes to turn the war in Vietnam into a war like any other, and the VVM into a war memorial like any other.  War memorials everywhere turn soldiers into martyrs sacrificing themselves for the noble cause of the nation.  It doesn’t matter whether they are fighting for or against slavery, for or against fascism, for or against communism, or for or against poor countries halfway across the globe struggling for their national independence. In the end it’s only the willingness to wage war that matters.  As the Union commander Dan Sickles said with commendable honesty, “There is no better way to prepare for the next war than to show your appreciation of your defenders in the last war.”

And so it goes.  The “education center,” if it is ever built, will not only defend the war in Vietnam. It will defend the next war and the next after that, whatever they are, wherever they are.

None of the designs I singled out in my previous post ended up winning the design competition sponsored by the National Trust for the Mall and the National Park Service. I’m not surprised since I don’t usually pick the winners in any design competition.  My own tastes tend toward the extravagant and “Baroque,” whereas juries of professional designers, who tend to know better the obstacles involved in getting anything approved and built, often opt for simpler solutions.  Be that as it may, any one of the proposals chosen would be an enormous improvement over what exists today.

In a sense all of the entries are trying to fix problems left over from the landmark McMillan Plan of 1901, which guided the redevelopment of the Mall in the twentieth century.  It’s important to remember just how radical that plan was: it proposed destroying every single structure, tree, and plant in the central axis of the Mall except for the Washington Monument.  In place of the diverse, polyglot landscape of the Victorian era, the McMillan Plan would create a new formal vista organized around a grand narrative of the founding of the country and its reunification after the Civil War (under Republican rule!).  The McMillan Plan was a demonstration of the power of the federal government to create order and unity where local fragmentation (aka diversity) had ruled, a demonstration that was at once immediately visible in the landscape itself and more gradually experienced in the great monuments to Grant and Lincoln that created the bookends of the new space.

If we examine the winning designs for the recent competition we will look in vain for a Big Idea comparable to the McMillan Plan’s.  By comparison, these new proposals at first glance might appear to be technical fixes, ways to provide amenities and manage stormwater and accommodate intensive tourist use.  As I wrote in my previous post, none of the designs rethinks the commemorative content of the Mall or gives us a new “memory landscape” as the McMillan Plan did.

But is this failure really a failure?  The McMillan Plan was a top-down affair, basically the product of three designers who happened to be white men, Republican in their own thinking and their client network.  They imagined the visitors to their new space to be genteel tourists like them, not speechmakers and certainly not protesters.

Today it is impossible to imagine a Big Idea like theirs even being conceived, much less surviving through the hurdles of regulatory review that have been created since then.  This is not because of “over-regulation” or because we have lost some mythical consensus that we once had.  The real reason is that despite all the problems and apparent fragmentation of the public sphere today, it has been opened up to more voices and points of view.  More cooks in the broth, in other words.  And when that happens, no one faction of cooks can easily foist its own broth on the rest of us.  Even in the old days when a McMillan Plan was still possible, the designers ultimately lost control of their vision.  The Mall was taken over by demonstrators and marchers, and the planners’ grand national narrative was transformed and shattered.

The popular historian Bruce Catton wrote in 1959, “Whatever we are looking for, we come to Washington in millions to stand in silence and try to find it.” Odd how dated this statement would quickly become.  A mere four years later Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Washington to find justice, and he didn’t stand in silence before Lincoln’s statue.  He stood and spoke, and galvanized a social movement.  Millions more came after him to make their voices heard.

We live in different times now.  It is hard to know what future remains for democratic discourse in public space, as political speech is increasingly corrupted by big money and genuine debate is driven into cyberspace.

Where these new designs for the Mall do reflect a consensus, it is not about free speech but about a new ecology of public space. What would the visitors of tomorrow take away from any of these new landscapes?  More than anything they would probably come to understand the ecological lesson these designs hold: that even the most “monumental” spaces are environments subject to the forces of nature.  In contrast to the topiary mentality of the McMillan Plan, these plans give new voice to natural processes – democratic discourse of a different kind.

One of the more popular metaphors for the Mall is our nation’s “front lawn.” Few people think about how hard the National Park Service has to fight both the forces of nature and the forces of tourism to keep this lawn alive.  In the new landscape, visitors would see a new ideal – a living demonstration of biodiversity, green infrastructure, and sustainable design.  In one sense this would be a return to the horticultural ideal of the picturesque park that held sway in the nineteenth century, but of course with a twenty-first century twist.  If today’s war memorials on the Mall were eventually de-commissioned, as Philip Kennicott has suggested, and we all focused instead on the peaceful pursuit of ecological interdependence, the Mall would become a very different sort of metaphor.  And that would be a Big Idea.