Fighting a war over a war memorial
Initially, the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial sparked fierce opposition and racial insults against its creator, Maya Lin. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been so successful that one almost forgets the ugly storms of racism and misogyny with which opponents of the design fought the young architect more than 35 years ago. The contest over the memorial, which ultimately triumphed with the public, has become a convenient metaphor for healing whenever Vietnam is discussed. And Lin’s success has reinforced a popular but shopworn narrative about the lonely artist with a vision fighting and prevailing over philistinism. But it’s also a trope, a reflexive rhetorical off-ramp whenever the conversation about Vietnam, and the still-treacherous cultural fault lines exposed by our wars in Southeast Asia, becomes too uncomfortable. At the end of Ken Burns’s Vietnam War television documentary, the director made the obligatory reference to Lin’s masterpiece. Of course he did. The memorial is now connected to the war rather like “bless you” is connected to sneezing.
James Reston Jr.’s “A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial” recounts the bitter debate over Lin’s design and the contest between Lin and Frederick Hart, who was commissioned to make the memorial more appealing to traditionalists with the addition of a bronze statue known as “Three Soldiers.” Lin’s 1981 plan for a reticent form, in which the names of the fallen were inscribed on reflective stone panels set into a V-shaped wall, was misunderstood and mischaracterized by some veterans who felt their sacrifice should be honored with a more conventional memorial. Opportunistic political figures exploited the veterans’ grievance, vilified Lin in vile, racist terms, and called for scrapping her design, which had won first place in an open, anonymous and professionally administered public contest. In the end, supporters of Hart and traditionalism prevailed over good taste, and Hart’s statue has permanently disfigured the memorial since it was installed in 1984.
This transpired during the early years of the Reagan administration, which was morning in America for demagogues such as Interior Secretary James Watt (who resigned after referring to the members of a departmental panel as “a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple”). Watt threw himself into the middle of the controversy, backing what would have been a ridiculous “compromise”: Lin’s memorial walls would frame Hart’s statue, with a giant flagpole on the ground above the apex. In the end, a better but still bad solution was found. Hart, who had placed third in the initial competition, got his chance to muck up Lin’s design, but the statue was placed on the periphery of the memorial, as if his three realistically rendered soldiers were encountering Lin’s “rift in the earth” like an enemy squadron emerging from the forest.
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been so successful that one almost forgets the ugly storms of racism and misogyny with which opponents of the design fought the young architect more than 35 years ago. The contest over the memorial, which ultimately triumphed with the public, has become a convenient metaphor for healing whenever Vietnam is discussed. And Lin’s success has reinforced a popular but shopworn narrative about the lonely artist with a vision fighting and prevailing over philistinism. But it’s also a trope, a reflexive rhetorical off-ramp whenever the conversation about Vietnam, and the still-treacherous cultural fault lines exposed by our wars in Southeast Asia, becomes too uncomfortable. At the end of Ken Burns’s Vietnam War television documentary, the director made the obligatory reference to Lin’s masterpiece. Of course he did. The memorial is now connected to the war rather like “bless you” is connected to sneezing.
James Reston Jr.’s “A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial” recounts the bitter debate over Lin’s design and the contest between Lin and Frederick Hart, who was commissioned to make the memorial more appealing to traditionalists with the addition of a bronze statue known as “Three Soldiers.” Lin’s 1981 plan for a reticent form, in which the names of the fallen were inscribed on reflective stone panels set into a V-shaped wall, was misunderstood and mischaracterized by some veterans who felt their sacrifice should be honored with a more conventional memorial. Opportunistic political figures exploited the veterans’ grievance, vilified Lin in vile, racist terms, and called for scrapping her design, which had won first place in an open, anonymous and professionally administered public contest. In the end, supporters of Hart and traditionalism prevailed over good taste, and Hart’s statue has permanently disfigured the memorial since it was installed in 1984.
This transpired during the early years of the Reagan administration, which was morning in America for demagogues such as Interior Secretary James Watt (who resigned after referring to the members of a departmental panel as “a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple”). Watt threw himself into the middle of the controversy, backing what would have been a ridiculous “compromise”: Lin’s memorial walls would frame Hart’s statue, with a giant flagpole on the ground above the apex. In the end, a better but still bad solution was found. Hart, who had placed third in the initial competition, got his chance to muck up Lin’s design, but the statue was placed on the periphery of the memorial, as if his three realistically rendered soldiers were encountering Lin’s “rift in the earth” like an enemy squadron emerging from the forest.
“A Rift in the Earth,” by James Reston Jr. (Arcade )
Reston retells the story dramatically, dredging up material that many of the players in this drama might wish to remain forgotten. Lin’s design emerged from classwork at Yale, and an early iteration included a series of large stone slabs, toppled over on one another like a line of dominoes terminating at the intersection of the two walls. Classroom critique led to the elimination of that rather clumsy element, which was, perhaps, a metaphor for the war and the “domino theory” that compelled U.S. engagement and escalation. But the professor who led Lin’s class “would resent her ingratitude for all he and his class had done for her.” During the contentious political process of getting the memorial approved, Lin emerges as admirably tough but sometimes her own worst enemy.
But Lin was young and new to the ways of Washington. Her sins were minor compared with the machinations and ugliness of Hart. A fast-rising artist who had been commissioned at a young age to design the tympanum over the central doors of the National Cathedral, Hart was working in a long, historical tradition of realistic representation. At a time when most of the rest of the art world considered that kind of work retardataire, Hart had built a solid reputation, good connections and formidable champions, and he was a favorite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund founder, Jan Scruggs, even before the decision to hold an open contest was made. Hart may well have felt cheated when he lost to Lin, and he certainly conducted himself like a sore loser.
“Lin’s memorial is intentionally not meaningful,” he said, calling it “elitist.” That word in aesthetic debates is simply mudslinging. But Hart was slinging with gusto. “People say you can bring what you want to Lin’s memorial. But I call that brown bag aesthetics. I mean you better bring something because there ain’t nothing being served.”
His allies were even more despicable. Tom Carhart, a lawyer, veteran and author, said the memorial should bear the inscription “designed by a gook.” Ross Perot, who had contributed generously to the funding of the memorial, called her an “egg roll.” The novelist Mark Helprin, in a letter to Hart, called Lin “that little fluffball” and said that Hart’s statue had “pulled her chestnuts out of the fire and gave meaning to her otherwise cynical gravestone.” The National Review deemed Lin’s work “Orwellian glop.”
Lin was forced to compromise, and the memorial has been weaker ever since, and will be further weakened if plans to build a superfluous high-tech visitor’s center nearby proceed. Reston has no comment on that, which is unfortunate, given how destructive the new building will be to the Mall and the memorial. Still, much of Lin’s vision was finally realized, a small miracle given the forces arrayed against it. When it opened, no senior member of the Reagan administration attended. When Hart’s statue was installed a few years later, the president himself came and addressed the crowd. Lin received $20,000 for winning the competition; Hart demanded $330,000 for his statue.
Reston’s own view of all this isn’t entirely clear. He is evenhanded in laying out the history of the debate, but he also positions himself as an outsider to what he deems an insider’s art discourse. He opens one chapter with what seems a snide slap at professional design review, including the respected and venerable Fine Arts Commission: “The art world was not about to lie down and accept a political invasion into its sacrosanct dominion. What did politicians and veterans know about high art anyway?” About the placement of the memorial, always a contentious decision, he writes: “The guardians of Washington’s public spaces were stingy in ceding ground in central Washington.” Indeed, they are. The creation of open space on the Mall, essential to the symbolism of modern Washington, cost too much pain and expense to clutter it up anytime someone proposes a new monument or memorial.
The book concludes with an extended “Author’s Reflection” in which Reston tells the gripping and tragic story of a friend’s death in Vietnam. The emotional power of this pendant chapter gives the book a strange hybrid character, as if it were two books in one. But it also serves as an elliptical take on the ugliness of the memorial debate. Reston concludes with a conversation he had with a prominent Vietnamese professor and former government official. The author asks why the Vietnamese today don’t resent the Americans more, because they fought only to get the Americans out. “Our patriotism is like a lump of charcoal,” he writes, paraphrasing his interlocutor: “If you light it, it burns very hot. . . . But when it is over, it is over, and we focus on peace and development and rebuilding.”
Not the Americans. We keep fighting, including bitter wars over aesthetics that are, in the end, merely proxies for the same old thing: Do white men run the world and write its history? Or can a rift in the earth open up new possibilities?
Reston retells the story dramatically, dredging up material that many of the players in this drama might wish to remain forgotten. Lin’s design emerged from classwork at Yale, and an early iteration included a series of large stone slabs, toppled over on one another like a line of dominoes terminating at the intersection of the two walls. Classroom critique led to the elimination of that rather clumsy element, which was, perhaps, a metaphor for the war and the “domino theory” that compelled U.S. engagement and escalation. But the professor who led Lin’s class “would resent her ingratitude for all he and his class had done for her.” During the contentious political process of getting the memorial approved, Lin emerges as admirably tough but sometimes her own worst enemy.
But Lin was young and new to the ways of Washington. Her sins were minor compared with the machinations and ugliness of Hart. A fast-rising artist who had been commissioned at a young age to design the tympanum over the central doors of the National Cathedral, Hart was working in a long, historical tradition of realistic representation. At a time when most of the rest of the art world considered that kind of work retardataire, Hart had built a solid reputation, good connections and formidable champions, and he was a favorite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund founder, Jan Scruggs, even before the decision to hold an open contest was made. Hart may well have felt cheated when he lost to Lin, and he certainly conducted himself like a sore loser.
“Lin’s memorial is intentionally not meaningful,” he said, calling it “elitist.” That word in aesthetic debates is simply mudslinging. But Hart was slinging with gusto. “People say you can bring what you want to Lin’s memorial. But I call that brown bag aesthetics. I mean you better bring something because there ain’t nothing being served.”
His allies were even more despicable. Tom Carhart, a lawyer, veteran and author, said the memorial should bear the inscription “designed by a gook.” Ross Perot, who had contributed generously to the funding of the memorial, called her an “egg roll.” The novelist Mark Helprin, in a letter to Hart, called Lin “that little fluffball” and said that Hart’s statue had “pulled her chestnuts out of the fire and gave meaning to her otherwise cynical gravestone.” The National Review deemed Lin’s work “Orwellian glop.”
Lin was forced to compromise, and the memorial has been weaker ever since, and will be further weakened if plans to build a superfluous high-tech visitor’s center nearby proceed. Reston has no comment on that, which is unfortunate, given how destructive the new building will be to the Mall and the memorial. Still, much of Lin’s vision was finally realized, a small miracle given the forces arrayed against it. When it opened, no senior member of the Reagan administration attended. When Hart’s statue was installed a few years later, the president himself came and addressed the crowd. Lin received $20,000 for winning the competition; Hart demanded $330,000 for his statue.
Reston’s own view of all this isn’t entirely clear. He is evenhanded in laying out the history of the debate, but he also positions himself as an outsider to what he deems an insider’s art discourse. He opens one chapter with what seems a snide slap at professional design review, including the respected and venerable Fine Arts Commission: “The art world was not about to lie down and accept a political invasion into its sacrosanct dominion. What did politicians and veterans know about high art anyway?” About the placement of the memorial, always a contentious decision, he writes: “The guardians of Washington’s public spaces were stingy in ceding ground in central Washington.” Indeed, they are. The creation of open space on the Mall, essential to the symbolism of modern Washington, cost too much pain and expense to clutter it up anytime someone proposes a new monument or memorial.
The book concludes with an extended “Author’s Reflection” in which Reston tells the gripping and tragic story of a friend’s death in Vietnam. The emotional power of this pendant chapter gives the book a strange hybrid character, as if it were two books in one. But it also serves as an elliptical take on the ugliness of the memorial debate. Reston concludes with a conversation he had with a prominent Vietnamese professor and former government official. The author asks why the Vietnamese today don’t resent the Americans more, because they fought only to get the Americans out. “Our patriotism is like a lump of charcoal,” he writes, paraphrasing his interlocutor: “If you light it, it burns very hot. . . . But when it is over, it is over, and we focus on peace and development and rebuilding.”
Not the Americans. We keep fighting, including bitter wars over aesthetics that are, in the end, merely proxies for the same old thing: Do white men run the world and write its history? Or can a rift in the earth open up new possibilities?
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