WORLD WAR I MEMORIAL FINALLY REALIZED
Pershing Park home to site to honor millions who served
The nation’s capital does not want for monuments, but a new one to an old war opened with a flag-raising ceremony Friday.
The National World War I Memorial in Pershing Park is the first monument in the nation’s capital to all the 4.7 million Americans who served in the Great War and the 116,512 who would never come home.
In remarks during the virtual ceremony, President Joe Biden paid tribute to those Americans.
“Let us remember all that was sacrificed, all that was sanctified by the proud brave Americans who served in World War 1,” Biden said in taped remarks. “More than 100 years have passed, but the legacy and courage of those Doughboys sailing off to war and the values they fought to defend still live in our nation today.”
There were also recorded comments from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, plus a military band, WWI doughboy and sailor re-enactors, and a military flyover by two F-22s.
No one who fought in the war is left — the last living American doughboy died in 2011 at the age of 110. Most of their children are also gone. Edwin Fountain’s grandfathers served in the Great War, but that’s not why he ended up leading the memorial’s construction effort.
Fountain started small, working on a monument to D.C. locals who fought. “The D.C. war memorial was in a sad, sad state of repair, and somebody needed to help get it restored, and so I took that on,” said the former vice chair of the World War I Centennial Commission.
A lawyer by trade, Fountain developed an interest in historic preservation over his years living in a city that can often feel like one big sprawling museum. The successful effort to restore that memorial led to the campaign to create another, more ecumenical one, starting in 2008.
To Fountain and others who would go on to form the Centennial Commission, it just seemed wrong that America’s other major wars — World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War — had national memorials in the capital, but not the First World War. Fountain pressed for a task force to create a memorial.
In December 2014, President Barack Obama signed legislation authorizing the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission to establish the memorial. And it re-designated Pershing Park, an existing memorial to Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of American forces in World War I, as the national World War I Memorial.
The memorial features fountains and sculptures, and is just a short distance from the White House. The new memorial’s main attraction — a 58-foot bronze frieze by sculptor Sabin Howard — is still being forged and cast. It won’t be installed until 2024.
The sculpture, “A Soldier’s Journey,” tells the story of one American’s path from reluctant service member to returned war hero through a series of scenes featuring 38 figures. They are meant to convey the story of the country’s transformation from isolationist to a leader on the world stage, with a final visual reference to the next big war. The piece has had its own journey from New York to New Zealand to the Cotswolds in England, one involving live models in period dress and thousands of iPhone photographs and other technology to capture the models in movement.
The design, restoration of the original park and construction of the new memorial will cost $42 million. The commission has $1.4 million left to raise.
At Friday’s grand opening, a flag that was flown over the Capitol on April 6, 2017 — the centennial of the United States’ entry into the war — and then flown over American battlefield cemeteries in Europe was raised up a flagpole in the park.
In a notable coincidence, the memorial is opening to visitors during a pandemic not unlike the flu outbreak that killed thousands of troops in the trenches during the war. “Flu was not on my mind,” Howard said. “What was on my mind was pro-human agency upliftment.”
The memorial is unlikely to quell long-standing criticism that too many monuments in Washington focus on war and death.
“There are stories that have been marginalized that could have been celebrated and sobering stories of the reality of the war experience that could more effectively honor sacrifice,” said Phoebe Lickwar, who was a landscape architect in the early stages of the project. “Instead, we’re presented with a trite narrative and a glorification of battle.”