On Veterans Day, November 11, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt will appear on the Mall at a spot between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial to break ground for the long-delayed World War II Memorial. The grandiose, triumphal design of the memorial has been criticized widely on aesthetic grounds–it reminds many of the work of Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect. But there’s a bigger problem: The memorial will break up the country’s most important site for protest demonstrations.
This is where 250,000 people gathered to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. This is where half a million people gathered for the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in 1969 to sing “Give Peace a Chance.” This is where the AIDS quilt–the 40,000-plus panels covering the equivalent of sixteen football fields that commemorates people who have died from AIDS–has been displayed regularly since 1987. This is where the Million Man March met in 1995, the Promise Keepers gathered in 1997 and the Million Mom March against gun violence rallied this past May.
The memorial will occupy 7.4 acres. In that space a private organization headed by Bob Dole plans to build a granite plaza that will include two triumphal arches, each as high as a four-story building, and fifty-six marble columns, each seventeen feet tall and decorated with bronze funeral wreaths and huge eagle sculptures.
Stopping the plan now won’t be easy. Originally, the American Battle Monuments Commission selected a site near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But J. Carter Brown, the chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, objected that it was “unacceptable” to “tuck [the memorial] away in the woods.” The commission approved the Mall plan in late September, in a 7-to-5 vote.
Defenders of the plan argue that the site and design selection process have taken longer than World War II itself and that the memorial should be built now, before all the veterans are dead. But memorials like this are not built for the participants in the events that are commemorated. Memorials are supposed to help posterity remember and honor its forebears. The Lincoln Memorial wasn’t even begun until 1914, half a century after Lincoln’s death.
Babbitt has the power to overrule the commission, but that’s unlikely, given the Clinton Administration’s eagerness to please veterans. An organization called the National Coalition to Save Our Mall (www.savethemall.org) mounted a legal challenge in early October based on a historic-preservation argument. The suit refers to a 1986 law establishing criteria for decisions made by the Secretary of the Interior and other agencies, among them the requirement that plans for new historical monuments must “protect, to the maximum extent practicable, open space and existing public use.” Open space for public use–where Americans can gather by the hundreds of thousands to address their government–is precisely what this monstrosity will destroy.
